Ethan Van Valkenburg stopped dating after high school.
Van Valkenburg wasn’t making a deliberate choice to avoid dates or taking a break from the dating scene. He just stopped.
He’d enjoyed a number of high school dance dates — he’s always loved to dance — but none of these ever led to a lasting relationship or established a regular pattern of dating. After graduation, he never went on another date; the dances became the extent of his relationship experience.
On occasion he would peruse dating apps, but quickly burned out from the platforms. Sometimes he would meet an interesting woman organically, but never felt compelled to take the emotional leap required to get a date.
“I never really thought too much about it,” Van Valkenburg said. “My biggest problem was I would never actually take a chance on anything.”
Every so often, Van Valkenburg would “think about maybe asking (someone) out,” he said, “but then I never would. The time just kind of got away.”
And then a decade had passed.
Now Van Valkenburg is 28 years old. A Utah native, he has an associate’s degree in theater from Salt Lake City Community College. He works as a direct care staffer for special needs people in a group home, though he is an aspiring actor.
Dating has never been a priority. But at 28, whatever dating experience he had as a teenager had nearly a decade to go unused.
Van Valkenburg’s dating experience is not atypical in the modern dating landscape, an era which has been aptly dubbed the “dating recession.”
According to the Wheatley Institute at Brigham Young University’s 2026 “State of Our Unions” report, only 30% of young adults reported that they are dating, either casually or exclusively.
Nearly three-quarters of women (74%) and nearly two-thirds of men (64%) in the survey reported they had not dated or dated only a few times in the last year.
These findings are based on the nationally representative 2025 National Dating Landscape Survey, which includes 5,275 unmarried young U.S. adults ages 22 to 35.
Like many young singles, a radical move was needed to shove Van Valkenburg out of his decade-long dating rut.
Bypassing the apps or waiting around for a serendipitous meet-cute, he took a leap and agreed to be the face of a dating campaign. He would be marketed like a brand, using traditional methods such as billboards, flyers and a website, all in an effort to get him a girlfriend.
Agreeing to join the campaign was “nerve-wracking,” Van Valkenburg said. But, “I needed a push.”
A $10,000 dating campaign
The push came unexpectedly.
In an effort to break back into the acting scene, Van Valkenburg followed a lead from his talent agency: a role for a man with a guy-next-door type of look, who was willing to talk about his dating experiences.
Assuming the dating campaign was part of an elaborate scripted dating-type series, Van Valkenburg submitted an audition tape sharing his “lack” of dating experience.
The marketing campaign was put on by Atlas:Earth — a company that has begun experimenting with content that challenges social norms —as a social experiment to see whether traditional marketing techniques could help someone like Van Valkenburg find a girlfriend more effectively than dating apps.
Amid the “dating recession,” people have turned to equally unconventional methods to spark relationships, such as posting a dating résumé on TikTok, joining one of many reality dating shows, partaking in livestreamed speed dating and even dating AI companions.
But becoming the genuine face of the campaign made Van Valkenburg uneasy.
“The first thing he said to us was, ‘I would be more comfortable if this was actually acting,’” recalled Sami Khan, the CEO and founder of Atlas:Earth and the brains behind Van Valkenburg’s campaign.
Still, Van Valkenburg went all in. “I haven’t been putting myself out there,” he said. “I decided to take a chance on this.”
Roughly $10,000 was put toward the weeklong campaign. Van Valkenburg’s face was put on a billboard in Provo, Utah. Khan and his team posted ads on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. They handed stacks of paper flyers out at office buildings and street corners and to cars stopped at red lights. A website for applications to date Van Valkenburg was launched.
Seeing his face on a billboard, flyers and a website felt “strange,” Van Valkenburg said. “It felt like I shouldn’t be the person getting this much attention. I’m just some guy.”
The campaign generated almost immediate results. At one point, about 75 women visited the site every 30 minutes. In just a few days, between 20 and 30 women applied to go on a date with Van Valkenburg.
The team used a “multiphase approach of filtering out” applicants, which included a Zoom call with each one. They ultimately landed on four women for Van Valkenburg — one of whom was willing to drive 2½ hours each way to meet him.
“The most unexpected thing was how genuine the whole thing ended up being,” said Khan. “We talk about the loneliness epidemic ... it’s not just men.”
“Think about what it would take for a women to apply,” he continued. “They want to meet people.”
Lessons in confidence
In the weeks since the campaign wrapped, for the first time in a decade, Van Valkenburg has been going on dates.
He wouldn’t recommend anyone else to launch a similar type of dating campaign — it’s not the right way to meet people, he said. But Van Valkenburg still considers the experiment a success.
“What this succeeded in doing was building my confidence. And that’s kind of the only thing it needed to do,” he said. “So I think it has already been a success. I feel successful after doing it.”
Van Valkenburg’s lack of confidence in dating is not unique. Dating confidence in the U.S. is low. About 1 in 3 young adults expressed a lack of faith in their dating skills, per the 2026 “State of Our Unions” report.
Only about 1 in 3 young adult men and 1 in 5 young adult women expressed confidence in the fundamental skill of being able to approach someone they were romantically interested in.
Respondents also shared that personal factors have hindered their dating, such as a lack of confidence (49%) and bad dating experiences in the past (48%).
While watching Van Valkenburg go on dates, Khan said he could see his confidence building.
“The biggest (lesson) is that there is someone for everyone,” he said.
“People just need to take chances,” Khan said. “People just need to get out of their comfort zone. I think in this era of where we live as humans, it’s so easy to sit behind your phone. ... What we’ve proven in this (campaign) is so many men and women, they don’t want to take that shot. But if they do, it’s just crazy how many people are out there willing to also take a chance.”