Americans and dating? It’s complicated. – Deseret News

In my 20s, I met several long-term boyfriends at work and through get-togethers hosted by friends.

In my early 30s, I briefly tried online dating and met a string of potential partners at my neighborhood café. None lasted past the first date.

Then, in a stroke of once-in-a-lifetime luck, while at a music festival in Denver, I spotted the man who would become my husband. I was struck by his green eyes and kind smile, but I didn’t have the courage to approach him and say anything.

As fate would have it, I found myself sitting next to the same man at a mutual friend’s open mic event a few weeks later, although I didn’t recognize him because I was in a bit of a rush.

When I had to leave the venue early, I handed him my raffle ticket — which won him concert tickets. He invited me to the show.

We met for tacos beforehand, and the conversation flowed so easily that I felt like I could just be myself. It wasn’t until our third date that I realized he was the man I saw at the music festival.

By then, I really liked him. He knew how to listen. He had swagger but wasn’t arrogant. He was thoughtful but didn’t overthink things. His smile, especially when he laughed, was the world I wanted to live in, and lucky for me, he made me laugh, too — until my ribs hurt.

We laughed our way through concert halls, ski gondolas and grocery stores. After our third date, he began bringing me small gifts related to our inside jokes. I was surprised to find the cards filled with cursive penmanship rivaling my grandmother’s (and that he learned from his own).

Because we had both been through enough breakups to fill a bad novel, we took it slow at first, but within two years were married and expecting our first child.

That was all before 2020. With everything that has happened in the past five years — a pandemic, the rise of new technology, the shuttering of brick-and-mortar places where couples traditionally might meet — it’s hard to know if there even would have been a music festival or open mic night to meet at, much less if we both would have been there, open and hoping to find love.

In a recent study, Stanford University sociology professor Michael Rosenfeld found that there are an extra 10 million single Americans right now than at any other given time. Most are under 35, and their efforts to find romance have been stymied not only by the pandemic and the resulting isolation, but also by the acceleration of interactions moving online and dwindling third places (the places you go that aren’t home or work, where, historically, you could meet people). Fewer single people are even interested in dating to begin with, according to Pew Research Center. Nearly 60 percent of singles interviewed are not looking for any type of relationship, and another 7 percent said they are only looking for casual dates. Many members of Gen Z say they’d like to meet someone, but think it would be “cringe” to ask someone out in person or be asked out “in real life.” Finding love online is also fraught. Complaints about dating apps have risen to a fever pitch, with droves of Americans leaving the apps in the past two years. Match Group, which owns Tinder, Hinge, Match.com and others, has reported a decline in its total number of paying users for seven straight quarters. Nearly half of all online daters and more than half of women who date online say their experiences have been negative. On top of all that, widening political and gender divides have become even more daunting.

Americans have developed a complicated relationship with finding relationships. I asked Rosenfeld why that matters. I didn’t want to blithely impose my coupled ideal as the ideal. I didn’t want to assume that it was a bad thing that there are more single people or that many say they’re no longer trying to date because they prefer flying solo, prioritizing other aspects of life or struggling to meet people. Our conversation directed me to research that consistently highlights how companionship and romantic relationships play a crucial role in promoting health and longevity.

Studies have shown that strong social and romantic connections can lower stress levels, reduce the risk of chronic disease and improve mental well-being. Partnered individuals tend to live longer, healthier lives compared to those who are single, while loneliness has been linked to increased risks of heart disease, depression and even early mortality. Our breakup with dating has economic impacts, too, including fewer people buying homes as they put off marrying and having children and an aging population failing to replace itself (and its tax base) through falling birth rates.

My friends joke that men would rather date “a dog walker” than a woman with an enterprising career.

The central role of relationship formation in human life has preoccupied Rosenfeld for years. He was not surprised to discover the share of single people in the U.S. rose markedly during the pandemic, from 18.9 to 24.3 percent between 2017 and 2022. It’s hardly shocking that it hampered efforts to find love. But what surprises Rosenfeld is that dating hasn’t bounced back. Making up for lost time, it seems, is not so easy.

“Young people lost a few years of social experience and that lost experience made all their interactions harder,” he says. “Dating requires a lot of skills. Being in a relationship does too. There are a bunch of skills associated with that that atrophied that people just didn’t pick back up.”

While a few years might not seem like much to a middle-aged married person like me, to a single 21-year-old, it may as well be a developmental eternity.

Kevin Lewis, a sociology professor at the University of California, San Diego, says he sees his students struggling to socialize. “They’re not good at conversation; they’re stuck on devices,” he says. “Approaching someone in person is just not a skill they’re learning.”

This could be why Americans are currently more likely than previous generations to date friends as opposed to starting a romance with a stranger as so many of our forebears did (my parents met in a singles line skiing, and my grandfather spotted my grandmother at a 1930s nightclub as she swam around in a tank dressed as “the mermaid in the fishbowl” after the usual performer failed to show). At a time when meeting strangers is harder than ever and asking someone out in person isn’t likely to lead anywhere, many of today’s young people feel more comfortable dating someone they already know and don’t have to charm with a first impression.

“I think flirting is dying,” a 24-year-old in Los Angeles named Nikki recently told NBC News. “If someone thinks you’re cute, they just ask for your Instagram these days and then DM you or swipe up on your story to show they’re interested.” Shanae, a 23-year-old in New York, recently told The Guardian that she yearns to be asked out in person like Carrie Bradshaw on “Sex and the City.” Yet if she were approached that way, Shanae said she would also be “weirded out.”

So despite the challenges of online dating, some singles are still on the apps. Thirty percent of adults, and over half of adults under 30, use dating apps, according to the Pew Research survey. Rosenfeld says the online approach — now bolstered with AI-driven algorithms to provide better matches — offers an expanded pool of potential partners and the ability to find someone based on shared values and interests. “If you’re looking for someone who has a passion for mountain climbing or practices the same law as you, the bigger search set has advantages,” he says.

Researchers have also found that online dating leads to more racially diverse partnerships. “These platforms,” says Lewis, “are projecting us out of our own social network — which tends to be very segregated — and they’re untethered to physical space, which is also segregated.”

Yet despite these positives, more people seem to be complaining about dating apps than singing their praises. The reasons to stay off them are plentiful: falsified job histories, “catfishing” and a constant barrage of potential partners and conversations. “Women are flooded with messages — this thing that’s supposed to be fun feels like a chore,” Lewis says. He also pointed out that women, more than men, face safety risks when meeting someone they don’t know.

I nodded along as I listened, thinking of a longtime friend who had recently regaled me with stories of her own dating app travails. She met a seemingly “normal” man for tea, only to discover he was wearing an ankle bracelet. When she asked about it, he admitted that after violating a stay-away order granted to his ex-wife and being charged with a DWI, he had served nine months in prison and was released shortly before their date.

It’s logical that “app fatigue” would set in after that.

There are an extra 10 million Americans who are single right now. And half of those singles are not interested in meeting someone.

In addition to atrophied social skills and fickle dating apps, today’s singles face other hurdles, too. People who do manage to find a good local pub or café to meet people at must contend with $7 lattes and $25 meals.

“Dating is expensive,” one user wrote in an online dating forum. “If you’re heterosexual and old school (like me), the onus is usually on the man to pay for the dates. Prices are already high and now you’re paying double. … Of course, there are free things the two of you can do together, but when you’re first starting out you don’t want to come off as some deadbeat or cheapskate.”

Then, chances are, when you do meet someone over a wallet-bruising latte, you may not like the conversation. Political differences came up in Rosenfeld’s research on the country’s dating recession. While it used to be easier to overlook political differences on a first date, it’s not so much so now. “I talked to people who wouldn’t talk to someone with opposing views,” Rosenfeld says.

A recent report by the American Enterprise Institute called “From Swiping to Sexting: The Enduring Gender Divide in American Dating and Relationships” explores this political rift further. Author Daniel Cox found that roughly equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans say they would be less inclined to date someone of the opposite party. Support for Donald Trump was a particularly strong dating liability for men, Cox found. Nearly 75 percent of college-educated women said support for Trump was a deal-breaker.

The gender divide extends beyond politics, too. Today’s pools of single men and single women show some notable mismatches. Women, Cox writes, are far more likely to have been in a relationship with someone who was unfaithful, to have had negative experiences dating online, and to be on the receiving end of unsolicited explicit images. Additionally, while girls and women have progressed in academics and income, boys and men have fallen behind. Male college attendance and graduation rates, as well as income (when accounting for inflation), have decreased in the past five decades.

Meanwhile, women, especially the

college-educated, are seeking partners who have similar or greater education and income levels — something that’s increasingly harder to come by. Cox says that women are more likely than men to say that they’re unable to find someone who meets their expectations.

I noticed this among my own friends a decade ago. While skiing expert terrain with a group of single women who worked as airline pilots, modeled professionally and were as well-read as they were well-traveled, the difficulty of finding a well-matched man was a lynchpin in our conversation. Interestingly, when these women did encounter a man of similar societal stature, they joked that he would rather date “a dog walker” than a woman with an enterprising career. “Fragile male egos,” was my husband’s explanation. Funny enough, research corroborates that.

A study published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin found that while many men say they’re attracted to women who outperform them in areas like intelligence and success, this attraction often diminishes in face-to-face interactions. Men were less likely to pursue a woman as a romantic partner when her achievements were perceived as superior to their own, especially in close proximity. The researchers theorized that this reaction could stem from a blow to men’s self-esteem or perceived threats to traditional gender roles.

So, are we breaking up with dating? Rosenfeld doesn’t think so. Even though he expects the age of first marriage to keep rising, his outlook on Americans’ search for love is optimistic.

“People do need companionship,” he says. That need has persisted throughout ice ages, depressions and wars. “We used to have even tougher dating environments, so I think people will find a way.”

This story appears in the March 2025 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.