I was sick of talking about my problems, so I paid to trash a “rage room”

SPorcelain shards bounce off the walls. People scream. Teacups fly. I’m energized. Drenched in sweat. Clear-headed. And alarmingly excited to smash the terracotta cat that lingers in my peripheral vision.

Rage rooms are a relatively new phenomenon. Basically, the idea is to vent anger by paying to be in a windowless room and smash things with a variety of weapons while wearing protective goggles. There is roughly one in every major US city and a handful in the UK, mostly outside London. Their popularity is also growing, due in part to swathes of women on TikTok who claim they would rather hit crockery with a hammer than talk to a man about their feelings again.

“Block his number and smash a printer,” content creator @vickaboox advises her 800,000 followers. “Book a rage room because doing this to his car is illegal,” repeats @shoukkapr, alongside a video of herself hitting a red Volkswagen Golf with a sledgehammer.

At Rage Out in Maidstone, where a 30-minute sex session costs £60 and the motto is “cheaper than therapy”, its clients are more than 60 per cent women. “I was surprised, in all honesty,” says owner Paul Fisher. “As sexist as it may sound, I always assumed it would be a men’s activity. I can’t pinpoint exactly what. We’ve never targeted women.”

I discovered rage rooms the same way you encounter most emerging trends in 2024: by scrolling through TikTok. Like many of the “zillennial” generation, I’ve been encouraged to verbalize my feelings using buzzwords like “boundaries” and “toxic.” But, after two rounds of talk therapy and a lifetime of being told by my dad not to “scream” if my voice went over 50 decibels, there was something refreshing about the unapologetic violence depicted in these videos. I got tired of talking. And, really, the easiest way to promote something to anyone under 30 is to make it Instagrammable.

The angry women on social media who sold me rage rooms invariably had one complaint in common: the modern dating scene, which Jennifer Cox, a psychotherapist and author of Women are crazy It's like the “wild west.” In essence, our love life is so frustrating that it has driven many of us to destruction.

The situation is bleak. Casual relationships (where “they like you but can’t commit to you”) require saint-like levels of patience to convince a partner to be emotionally available. Meanwhile, the early “conversation stages” we experience on dating apps are often so stunted that they feel like a conversation on ChatGPT. And if you’ve finally found someone you like? They’ll probably stop talking to you within a week. “It’s an eternal cycle of disappointment, confusion, and madness,” says Cox, who suggests there’s a jarring difference between the romantic expectations we put on apps and the reality of the “total charlatans” we end up meeting.

Political views (Gen Z women are becoming more liberal while men lag behind, conservative) and differences in spending habits between genders have often been pointed to as the biggest affronts to modern romance. However, Cox believes there's something simpler at play: ghostings and the boring conversations that lead to them are due to our generational inability to communicate properly with each other. There's a reason Sally Rooney Ordinary people and by David Nicholls One daywhere couples spend years struggling to express what they feel, have become the most resonant romances of the decade.

“From a very early age, girls are taught to be excellent at expressing emotions verbally,” Cox explains. “Whereas boys don’t have that practice at all. They’re not expected to do it. It’s like two different species coming into the world.”

Not only can this make many men feel lonelier (and less willing to talk about their feelings with their friends in adulthood), but girls who have been taught to verbalize their anger rather than take it out on the playground may end up harboring anger so deep that we don't even realize we're feeling it. Instead, when we feel angry, we cry.

“Women have been muzzled in terms of the emotional spectrum,” Cox says. “Almost anything negative is off-limits for women because there’s so much shame around looking ‘crazy.’ So, we sublimate anger to such a deep level that we don’t even know we’re feeling it. We’re not allowed to be angry, but we’re allowed to be depressed. We’re allowed to be anxious. It’s not that we don’t have these feelings. There’s just no space to put them in.”

Fisher was inspired to open her own rage room in Maidstone in 2023 after her 15-year-old daughter, Daniella, asked to visit one for her birthday. “When she walked in there, she went completely nuts,” Fisher recalls. “She was in her own little space. It just gave her the freedom to let it all out, without being ashamed.”

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I get it. After a breakup, you experience a special serenity. Dopamine is high and cortisol is low. You feel like you're floating on air from the destruction you've just unleashed. Cox says this feeling is also far from something we should experience only after a bad breakup. In fact, she believes we should let out our anger every day.

“Not expressing these things can [have] “It has dire consequences,” he warns. “Disease. Our organs suffer. There’s a lot of inflammation in our body when we don’t metabolize cortisol quickly and it’s allowed to build up. It doesn’t have to be a rage room. Go for a really fast run. Do kickboxing or other martial arts. Smash a mattress with a tennis racket or punch a pile of coats or cushions. Any explosive, high-impact movement is really good. Just make an impact with a surface so that energy is converted.”

That said, if your partner's communication style is frustrating enough to lead you to set up a date with an irate person, take a broader look at your options, Cox warns: Even if you've found new ways to de-stress, destruction won't replace mutual understanding.

“Basically, relationships in the early stages should be easy,” she says. “If you find it difficult and painful, let it go. Think about your energy levels and what you deserve. You can try to communicate as much as you want, but if it’s one-sided, you’re not going to get anywhere. There are men who want something better, too. They want that connection. Find them.”

But until you do, remember not to waste your time: it's much more exciting to smash plates against a brick wall than to try to talk to one.