Many modern daters seem to have the same complaint: water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink. Possible mates abound—on dating apps, in the databases of professional matchmakers—but none of them appeal.
As one woman quoted in a recent New York magazine article put it, “The odds are good, but the goods are odd.” Another article, in The New York Times, featured a 38-year-old man who had been on 40 first dates but had yet to find a keeper. He said that he’d gone out with one woman who’d seemed good “on paper” but that he’d nevertheless felt that “there was something that was … off.” My colleague Faith Hill has reported that more and more Americans are having a hard time finding love, no matter which app they’re on or which service they’re using.
Researchers have offered various explanations for this problem, but an underappreciated one, several academics told me, is that people don’t hang out as much as they once did in mixed-gender, non-dating contexts. The modern form of dating, in which two strangers who were set up by a matchmaker or an algorithm sit down at a restaurant, conduct 90 minutes of small talk, and try to determine if there’s a “spark,” is not a very good way to find love.
For much of American history, most people met their partner through family, friends, church, or—as coed universities and offices became more common—college and work. They got to know each other before becoming romantic. “You hung out with folks, and sometimes the sparks started to grow slowly from that,” the UC Davis psychology professor Paul Eastwick told me. In 1970, for example, about a third of heterosexual couples met through friends, but by 2020, the number was 20 percent. The percentage of people who met through family, school, college, or work also fell during that period.
When people become acquainted through social or professional networks, they can get to know each other gradually, through casual, repeated socializing. This allows inside jokes to bloom and first impressions to correct themselves—or not. Most people are more of an acquired taste than an immediate yes. After chatting informally four or five times in the dining hall or break room, some people will realize that they don’t care for each other at all, but others will like each other much more than they did initially. Opportunities for these kinds of interactions have become more limited. Americans today spend much less time with friends than they did 20 years ago, and many people—young men in particular—have few or no friends of the opposite sex. Starting a relationship with a co-worker has also become thornier in recent years as awareness of sexual harassment and unhealthy power dynamics has grown.
When people pay for apps or matchmaking services, meanwhile, they may approach dates thinking, “I should be able to find exactly what I’m looking for,” Liesel Sharabi, a communication professor at Arizona State University who has studied dating, told me. She said that this is “the wrong attitude to have.” Instead of assuming that the perfect partner is out there waiting to be found, daters should try to understand that people generally build compatibility over time. They should aim for the mindset that “I’m gonna make something work with somebody,” and “I’m going to build the type of relationship I want,” Sharabi said. In a recent study, she and two colleagues followed hundreds of dating-app users for three months. Many of the daters said that they experienced “emotional exhaustion and inefficacy.” Sharabi said that their burnout was caused in part by the sheer number of possible matches that her subjects were scrolling through, and the fact that dating had started to feel an awful lot like a part-time job.
[Read: Most people don’t have a ‘type’]
Another reason people have trouble finding partners they like is that apps and matchmaking services allow people to screen for qualities such as height, education, and age. But these are shallow criteria, Sharabi and others say, and they do not actually help people predict who they will like as a long-term partner. If someone is two inches shorter than your preferred height, Sharabi said, “six months into a relationship, other qualities usually matter a lot more.” Pamela Torres, the founder of the Offline Social, an Austin-based company that organizes events for single people including golf and pickleball, told me that “chemistry happens when you meet someone and then you make an exception” to your usual dating checklist.
Group settings can also reveal more about a person than a one-on-one first date. A potential mate’s humor under pressure, or kindness toward others, may be on display during a volunteer activity but can be harder to pick up on when they’re auditioning for the role of boyfriend. “What really counts in a relationship developing into love is how that person interacts with other people as well as you,” Stephanie Coontz, an emeritus family-studies professor at Evergreen State College and the author of For Better and Worse, told me. Coontz met her husband when they worked together on political projects. “I didn’t even think of him as attractive,” she said, “the first two or three times I met him, until suddenly he seemed very handsome to me.”
Eastwick and others say that people struggling with dating could consider focusing less energy on optimizing their app profiles and more on socializing in groups. For instance: Join a hiking club; throw parties; flirt—in a respectful and non-harassy way!—with your co-worker; and otherwise engage in activities you enjoy, and see whether someone else who enjoys doing them might be a good partner. Any given outing or interaction may not instantly produce Mr. Right. Torres said that her organization doesn’t promise to help people “find the love of your life in one night” but rather to simply “take people out of their houses.” People may not find their soulmate at the first hole of golf, but by the back nine, they may at least have found someone they’d like to see again.