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Dating culture today: what changed and what to do about it

5 min read

The biggest change in dating over the last few decades isn't a slang word or a trend. It's where couples meet. Friends, family, church and the neighborhood used to do most of the introducing. For heterosexual couples in the U.S., the internet overtook all of them. That one shift touches most of what people say feels different now.

Everything below is U.S. research published from 2012 to 2023 (the surveys themselves run through 2022), the newest figures verified for this post, so newer surveys may read differently. Each number comes with its sample and its limits.

How people meet has changed

Sociologists Michael Rosenfeld, Reuben Thomas and Sonia Hausen analyzed a nationally representative 2017 survey of American adults (the How Couples Meet and Stay Together study) and published it in PNAS in 2019. Among heterosexual couples who met in 2017, about 39% met online, up from about 22% in 2009. Online meeting overtook meeting through friends around 2013. Among same-sex couples who met in 2017, about 65% met online. Meeting through family, church, the neighborhood and school had all been falling sharply since 1940.

The authors argue the internet is displacing the matchmaking role friends and family used to play. Their explanations include discretion, since dating a stranger from online is more private than dating a friend's friend. Limits: the survey asks people who ended up in couples, so it can't count people who used apps and didn't partner, and respondents recalled how they met.

What apps look like in numbers

Pew Research Center's July 2022 survey, published February 2023, found that 30% of U.S. adults had ever used a dating site or app, the same share as in 2019. Use differed by age: 53% of adults 18 to 29, 37% of 30 to 49, 20% of 50 to 64 and 13% of those 65 and older. About 10% of partnered adults said they met their current partner on a site or app.

Experiences were split. Among people who had used them, 53% called their experience very or somewhat positive and 46% very or somewhat negative. Among people who had used one in the past year, 36% said they had at least sometimes felt overwhelmed by the number of messages. Pew reports women were far more likely than men to feel this way, with about one in five women who used apps in the past year saying they often did. And 48% of people who had ever used a dating app reported at least one of four unwanted behaviors, including sexually explicit messages or images they didn't ask for (38% overall, 56% of women under 50) and contact after saying they weren't interested (30%).

Being single, and not looking

In the same survey, about 3 in 10 adults were single, defined as not married, living with a partner or in a committed relationship. The share is highest for adults under 30 (47%), and the gap between sexes there was wide: 63% of men under 30 versus 34% of women under 30. Among all singles, 57% said they weren't looking for a relationship or casual dates. The share who were looking fell from 49% in 2019 to 42% in 2022, with the drop concentrated among men (61% to 50%) while women's share stayed roughly flat.

Pew's data doesn't say why. Being single and not looking can mean many things, including being content. And it's a snapshot from the summer of 2022.

Fewer people, fewer places

A 2021 survey by the Survey Center on American Life (2,019 adults, margin of error plus or minus 2.4 points) found 12% of Americans reporting no close friends, versus 3% in a 1990 Gallup poll. The report notes that phone and online surveys can produce different answers, which could affect that comparison. It isn't about dating, but meeting people usually runs through a social circle, and a smaller one means fewer introductions.

Two readings, attributed

The optimistic reading. Online dating widens the pool, helps people in small or niche groups find each other (the same-sex figures above are one example), and offers discretion. Finkel and colleagues' 2012 review for the Association for Psychological Science credited online dating with greater and more convenient access to potential partners.

The worried reading. The same review raised concerns: browsing many profiles can encourage a shopping mindset, and long message exchanges can build expectations that in-person meetings don't match. It also found the sites' claims about "science-based" matching unsubstantiated, based on data available then. Pew's numbers on message overload and unwanted contact measure related experiences.

Both readings can be true at once. The data show a big change in how people meet, and mixed experiences with the biggest channel. They don't show that dating is "harder" than it was before, since that's not something these surveys measured.

What you can do about it

You can use apps, skip them, or run both. Apps give reach and filters, and cost time on profiles and messaging. Meeting in person gives instant information and no profile, and costs more nerves and takes more tries. Online dating versus cold approach lays out the tradeoffs, and should you delete dating apps describes a 30-day test. For the advice side of what changed, see how TikTok changed dating advice, and for the vocabulary, modern dating terms. Numbers with more detail are in dating trends: what verifiable data shows.

What to do next

  1. Pick your channels deliberately. Write down where you currently meet people (apps, work, friends, events) and how many dates each produced in the last three months.
  2. Add one recurring in-person thing. A weekly class, club or run group gives you the same faces repeatedly, which is the kind of meeting that has declined. Meeting people through hobbies has specifics.
  3. If apps drain you, set a limit. Try 15 minutes a day or three evenings a week for a month, then check whether the dates changed.
  4. Move from message to meetup quickly. Suggest a coffee or a walk within a few days of matching, so expectations don't build on text alone.
  5. Rebuild your circle on purpose. Message one old friend a week and invite two people to something this month.
  6. Review monthly. Count messages sent, dates held and how you felt. Adjust the channel mix, not your self-worth.

If you like the in-person route, Run Game lets you log each approach as a Success or Rejected with a note, so a month of data replaces guessing about what's working.

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