Editor’s note: This story was originally published Dec 11, 2024.
There’s been a shift in the dating landscape this past year. It was partly driven by the 2024 election, but the cracks were beginning to show long before November.
It seems like there’s been a dip in dating morale. As Pew Research Center found in 2020, “Fully half of single adults say they are not currently looking for a relationship or dates.”
Fifteen percent of those polled said that “they are dissatisfied with their dating lives and that it has been difficult to find people to date,” Pew reported. Nearly half of U.S. adults said “that dating has become harder in the last 10 years.”
What happened? We can point to some obvious explanations — the rise of dating apps, for one, and maybe young people’s changing relationship to marriage — but there’s more nuance to the growth in dating dissatisfaction over the years.
Never has that dissatisfaction been more noticeable than in 2024. This year’s tense social and political climate further revealed the fissures in the dating scene — and between young men and women in general — and in that way created a dating landscape unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.
American men are struggling
For perhaps the first time ever, American men are at a disadvantage.
More women are college educated than men — 39.1% of women have a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared to 36.6% of men, according to NBC. Additionally, women make up 50.7% of the college-educated workforce, as Pew Research Center found in 2022.
And, as has been widely reported, men are significantly lonelier. In 2021, the Survey Center on American Life found that 15% of men polled said that they don’t have any close friends. Twenty-eight percent of men 30 or younger said they have “no close social connections.”
All this could be the result of a male identity crisis. As Christine Emba wrote for The Washington Post in 2023, women have made significant strides over the past five decades but “there hasn’t been a corresponding conversation about what role men should play in a changing world.”
How does these changes show up in the dating landscape? Women are struggling to find men that they see as their equals, as Faith Hill noted in a piece for The Atlantic.
“Many college-educated women look for partners who feel equal to them in terms of education or career ambitions — and simply can’t find them,” Hill wrote, citing Jon Birger’s book, “Date-onomics: How Dating Became a Lopsided Numbers Game.”
This issue is exacerbated by the fact that college-educated men don’t necessarily want college-educated women. Yale anthropologist Marcia C. Inhorn told Hill that while women lean towards hypergamy — marrying an older man who is likely more “more career advanced, makes more money” — men prefer hypogamy, or partnering with someone “younger, less well off, and less academically accomplished.”
As women are achieving more academically and professionally, Hill wrote, some men — both uneducated and educated — “have held it against them.”
The gap between young men and young women is getting wider
Because young men are struggling and young women are excelling, there’s a gap between them, which widened under the duress of 2024’s political climate.
As many men wrestled with their identity and struggled to find their place in society, some looked to President-elect Donald Trump for answers. As The New York Times reported — before the election —Gen Z men, in particular, “see former President Donald J. Trump as a champion of traditional manhood.”
“They’re drawn to his message, his persona, the unapologetic machismo he tries to exude,” said Daniel A. Cox, director of the Survey Center on American Life, to The New York Times.
According to The Associated Press, “more than half of men under 30 supported Trump” in the 2024 election.
Meanwhile, Gen Z women lean more left, having been “politically galvanized by gender bombshells” such as the #MeToo movement and the overturning of Roe v. Wade, The New York Times reported.
That puts men and women on different social and political trajectories.
Some young women have responded to Trump’s reelection with fear and anger. There’s been growing interest in the 4B movement, which started in South Korea in response to misogyny and violence against women, according to the Cut.
The movement calls for women to completely cut men out of their lives. According to the Cut, 4B stands for all words that start with the letter “B” in Korean: “The first no, bihon, is the refusal of heterosexual marriage. Bichulsan is the refusal of childbirth, biyeonae is saying no to dating, and bisekseu is the rejection of heterosexual sexual relationships.”
While it’s unclear if the movement will actually take off in the United States, the fact that some young American women are engaging with it is telling.
Cox told The Atlantic that he doesn’t foresee the political divide between young men and young women impacting long-term couples — “but he does think it will prevent a lot of new prospects from giving each other a chance.”
Because of the pandemic, we’re spending less time together — and delaying romantic milestones
While the events of the past year have complicated the dating scene, dating has seen slow and quiet decline for a while.
According to Bloomberg, a study conducted by Stanford sociology professor Michael Rosenfeld found that the COVID-19 pandemic left an additional 13.3 million Americans single by 2022. This is largely due to the social recession caused by the pandemic — that we still haven’t recovered from.
Per Bloomberg, “For millions, dating and other social activity never recovered, with effects that aren’t just personal and psychological but economic and perhaps even political.”
Unsurprisingly, our social lives suffered during the pandemic. But, as the data shows, “Americans’ social lives haven’t bounced back in a measurable way from 2022 or even 2021.”
This is, in part, due to the amount of time we spend socializing each week. In 2003, adults would socialize for an average of 5.5 hours each week. That figure dropped to 4.5 in 2019.
In 2021, which was “Covid’s deadliest year,” as Bloomberg noted, we spent an average of four hours a week socializing. According to the Stanford study, that number didn’t change in 2023.
It’s not surprising that this would impact dating. The less you go out, the less likely you are to meet someone.
As Rosenfeld noted in an interview with Bloomberg, the pandemic was “especially brutal on the social lives of young people.” And they’re still suffering for it.
“The ability to form and sustain romantic relationships requires muscle memory and experience that some of our young people don’t have,” Rosenfeld said. “The pandemic robbed them of crucial years of socialization.”
Single people are tired of dating apps
Dating apps have been around for over a decade — and single people are sick of them.
While dating apps remain fairly popular — 3 in 10 U.S. adults said that they’ve used a dating app or website, per the Pew Research Center — only 1 in 10 “partnered adults” met their current partner on a dating app or website.
That’s likely because, as dating apps have developed over the past decade, they focus more on engagement and less on helping their users find love.
As Natasha Dow Schüll, author of “Addiction by Design,” told the Evening Standard in 2022, dating apps have been gamified — which means they apply “game elements to other aspects of life, to capture attention, motivate engagement and drive revenue,” she explained.
“Ultimately, the app is more invested in its own revenue than in getting you to marry or have sex — so they’re trying to motivate your engagement,” Schüll continued.
As a result, dating apps might not be all that great at helping people find love. In fact, a study published in Telematics and Informatics found that it does the opposite.
Researchers wrote, “Excessive swiping seems by and large detrimental.”
Now, after years and years of endless swiping, single people are experiencing dating app fatigue. According to a Forbes Health survey, 78% of those polled reported feeling burnout from dating apps.
Rufus Tony Spann, a member of the Forbes Health Advisory Board, told Forbes Health, “Over time, the unfortunate misgivings of being on a dating app can cause someone to lose hope in the dating process and finding the right person.”
Is there any hope?
Despite all the romantic turmoil, people still want to find love.
As Cox told The Atlantic, “The sad part for me is that I don’t think there’s a fundamental shift in desire.”
Cox said that when he surveyed people, “the majority say they would like a long-term, stable relationship.”
Many single people are still trying. They’ve turned to unconventional dating methods, like sports clubs, speed dating and more, as the Deseret News previously reported.
Cox said that he’ll often hear single people say, “Ideally, this would not be my life.” But, for the majority, dating is just “too difficult. It’s too hard. And I’m having a lot of negative experiences that I just don’t want to have.”
While the desire for a relationship hasn’t changed, the dating landscape has — drastically. Dating seems to be slowly petering out and, due to the unique mishmash of circumstances we’ve found ourselves in during 2024, it looks like single people are resigned to it.