A startling share of young single adults have little interest in dating — and those who do have definite preferences based on their politics, gender, education level and even generation.
And those who do choose to date may select potential partners based on their own “echo chambers.”
A new survey, produced by the American Enterprise Institute’s Survey Center on American Life, finds singles have strong ideas about who they will or won’t date, if they’re interested in dating at all. Among the won’ts: Most single adults — especially the women — say they are less likely to date someone who’s still living at home, who has no job or who smokes.
Dating is the subject of the 2023 January American Perspectives Survey, which polled more than 5,000 adults, including close to 800 who are single, to find what they look for when they date, why they date — or choose not to — and differences based on gender, politics, education level and even generation.
The report says most single Americans say they’re not currently dating and a lot of them are not looking to date. The number not dating anyone, but “open to the possibility” is 42%, while a near-identical 41% say they are not interested in dating at the moment. Single men are more apt to say they’re open to dating than single women are, at 47% vs. 36%. Only 1 in 10 single Americans say they’re dating just one person and 1 in 50 say they’re dating more than one.
Asked why they don’t date, the most common answers are they have other priorities at the moment and they find it difficult to meet people, according to the survey report by Daniel A. Cox, senior fellow at the institute and director of the survey center.
Women are more apt than men to say they can’t find someone who meets their expectations (38%, compared to 23% of single men.) College-educated women especially say that, at 45% compared to 28% of women with less education.
More than a quarter of those who are not dating, though, say they simply like being single (27%). Another fifth of the non-daters say that “people not being interested in them is a major factor,” the report said.
Political differences
A lot of American adults overall (52%) see being a supporter of former President Donald Trump as a negative for dating. And they’re also not generally interested in dating someone with different political ideas if they have strong political ideas of their own.
During a discussion of the report in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, Ipsos Vice President Mallory Newall, who conducted a series of in-depth interviews as part of the report, noted that people are “self-sorting into these echo chambers.”
Per the report, “Republicans and Democrats report being similarly averse to dating across the political aisle. But for many Americans, especially those on the left, being a Trump supporter is a major dating liability.” The report said that among Democrats, 84% said they would be less likely to date someone who supports Donald Trump; 14% percent of Republicans said the same.
During the discussion, Christine Emba, Washington Post columnist and author of “Rethinking Sex: A Provocation,” said that “Trump” has become to some degree “a stand-in for a whole set of political opinions and beliefs and even policy positions. So when people are saying that they wouldn’t date a Trump supporter ... it’s probably also their views on reproductive rights, how they feel about religious questions, how they feel about patriotism, just a state of our polarized politics generally.”
On the other hand, 42% said they would be less likely to date someone who claimed to be a feminist. Another 40% said that wouldn’t matter and for 15% that would be a plus. Cox told the Deseret News no definition of feminist was provided.
Nearly half say they are less likely to date someone who doesn’t trust vaccines or who doesn’t believe in God (49% in each case).
However, being “very religious” was a “net negative for Americans,” Cox said during the discussion. “In fact, the only group for whom a majority said they'd be more likely to date someone who's very religious were white evangelical Protestants.”
Still, a lot goes into dating decisions, Cox said. “We really can’t make sense of a lot of our dating behavior without taking account of broader social economic inequality, cultural norms and societal expectations. They’re in the room when we’re making these kinds of decisions.”
Finding dates
Roughly 1 in 4 adults has used a dating app — and of those, the results are pretty evenly mixed, with half reporting a good experience and half a negative one. A majority of college graduates — 64% of men and 52% of women — say they’ve had a positive experience using dating apps or online dating sites.
Young men disproportionately rely on online dating to find a partner, Cox said. That fact was true before the pandemic and true after, as well, he said.
A significant gender difference among young adults — those 18 to 29 — “is that young women are much more likely to leverage their social network, their friendship group in order to find potential partners,” Cox said.
Although dating apps open the door to meeting new potential dates, younger people in the survey seemed more interested in dating someone they know, rather than a stranger. “Young adults are more than twice as likely as seniors to report that they were friends with their partner or spouse before they started dating. Most older Americans say their spouse or partner was once a stranger,” Cox wrote.
In the 21 in-depth interviews Newall conducted for the report, the young women suggested that “dating expectations refer less to a laundry list of must-have qualities and more to basic standards of how they wish to be treated,” the report said.
That many single adults say they’re just too busy and focused on other things to date isn’t a surprise, said Pew Research Center’s Juliana Horowitz, associate director of research, during the discussion. Pew found the same thing in its survey of parents. “When we asked parents about their hopes and goals and aspirations for their children, being financially independent and having a job or career that they enjoy were much higher on parents’ priority list for their kids than getting married and having children.”
And a teen survey they did in 2018 had the same finding, she said. Other things took priority to create a “fulfilling life.”
Proximity matters, too. Two-thirds don’t want a long-distance romance with someone who lives in a different state, and would be less likely to date in that circumstance.
After dating
The report said that the number of Americans who live with but are not married to their partner has more than doubled over the last 30 years. Cohabiting is now common, especially among young adults — a group where nearly 6 in 10 report having cohabited with a romantic partner.
More than 1 in 3 Americans have never been married but just 1 in 5 are currently single. And the survey said that over half of the never-marrieds who are living with their romantic partners have been together for at least five years, while one-third living with their partner outside of marriage have been together 10 years or more.
The survey finds that infidelity is something that a lot of adults have experienced — including roughly half of the women. Sexting and ghosting, though, are pretty uncommon. Gen Z, by the way, is less likely to sext than millennials — who sext more than other generations.
Among other survey findings:
- 43% say they would be less likely to date someone with children from a previous relationship, though more than half would not care.
- Whether someone wants to have children or not is “not a major stumbling block” to dating.
- Almost half (49%) say they would be “less inclined to date someone who is skeptical of vaccines,” while for 10% that would be a plus. And 39% say that would not matter in terms of who they date.
- Republican men are the most satisfied in their relationships in the survey, while women who are Democrats express the least satisfaction.
- A majority of women said they’d be less likely to date someone shorter than them.