It’s Not You. There’s a Dating Recession Happening Right Now

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Just like bursting my own bubble of like just being on my phone and like trying to meet people through an online setting.

I tried dating apps first. It was not the smartest decision I ever made.

If you talk to single people in their late twenties or thirties right now, you might hear variations on this theme. It's rough out there.

I think the moment I downloaded the apps, I was tired of the apps.

I think the whole swiping community is a little stale at this point.

But on a recent Wednesday night in New York City, these young singles decided to get off their phones and try meeting people a different way.

Oh gosh, just want everyone's attention, everyone's attention.

They went speed dating. Every time I ring this bill, you guys are just going to go over to the table to your righte sniff one up. Speed Dating is an old idea, but according to Amber Soletti, the founder of Single and the City, a group that organized the meetup events that bring people together to meet and mingle the old fashioned way, are enjoying a new search in popularity.

We finished the year one hundred and fifty percent over a year ago.

As far as attendance goes for our events, so it really skyrocketed.

It's easier just to have a genuine conversation and see if you're connecting with someone.

I definitely have a more open mind if I'm in person than on a dating app.

I think I'm trying to approach it like just as a reminder that there are other ways to meet people.

At least you have some good laughs in person, that's all you need.

These events are responding to a new reality. Millions of people stop dating during the COVID pandemic, and even years after lockdown's lifted, americans romantic lives haven't fully recovered.

COVID hit At a time, I guess I was twenty six, twenty seven, and so it was like prime time to like date and I was just alone and I.

Was like, well, this sucks.

And then coming back, everyone's so comfy being home, and there's data to prove it.

Stanford did a survey and tried to capture what actually happened to dating during the pandemic.

Bloomberg reporter Ben Steverman has been tracking these trends in the US.

Of course, people were dating less in twenty twenty, but then when they looked again in twenty twenty two, even less people were dating. More people are single.

Ben says America's quote unquote dating recession has implications not only for the single and looking. It's having an impact on the entire economy. Today on the show, why Americans aren't dating at the rate they used to and what it means for everything from restaurants to homebuilders to people trying to meet their match. This is the big take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder.

I'm going to be just started.

Okay, you get.

Image. Ben.

I want to ask you a question that might be a little sensitive to some people. What do Americans dating lives look like right now?

They're pretty bleak. Millions more people single than would have been single before the pandemic. Millions of relationships that were never formed or that are at earlier stages than they would have been, with huge effects on Americans financial lives, economic lives, and especially their sense of well being and happiness.

Millions. What does the data say about how many people dropped out of the dating game.

The Stanford professor is estimated that about thirteen million more people were single in twenty twenty two than before the pandemic. It's like one in twenty adults. That's a lot of.

People, even though the number of married and cohabitating couples stayed largely unchanged. The Stanford study found that informal relationship chips dropped off. People were doing less casual dating, and Ben says that's an important milestone to measure.

That kind of gray area at the beginning of a relationship. That's what ends up leading to moving in together, having kids, getting married, at buying home, all the sort of the sequence of things that happen, all that starts with those casual relationships. And it's really kind of interesting and a little disturbing that so many of those that kind of casual behavior just stopped and doesn't seem to have started again in the way that you would have hoped.

What's causing this? Who or what can we really blame for why dating is so hard right now or why we haven't recovered those casual relationships.

It's become a cliche to say that the pandemic accelerated trends that were already underway, and it's happened in so many areas, but this is definitely the case here. You look at any kind of objective measures of how much time people are spending with each other or leaving the house, you go back to two thousand and three, and that's where the decline begins. Even before that's as far as the data goes.

It was certainly being talked about back in the nineteen nineties when a political scientist named Robert Putnam first published the research that would become his best selling book, Bowling Alone. The idea was that Americans weren't joining bowling leagues like they used to, even though they were going bowling at similar rates, they just weren't doing it socially.

He was talking about a decline in community and connection that really began in the middle of the twentieth century. So we're talking about a really long term trend here of people just not connecting in the same way they

In terms of why this is happening, I feel like a lot of people love to blame technology. Are phones driving the social isolation? How big of a factor has technology played in these trends you're talking about.

This is a big controversy in sociology, actually, because the US Surgeon General in twenty twenty three declared a loneliness epidemic, and so this is a topic we've been talking about a while lately. And there is some evidence, especially with kids, that the phones have had a major effect on how they socialize. But again, a lot of these trends predate the smartphone. The other thing is that, Okay, you're spending a lot more time on a group chat, you're spending

Are there groups who are disproportionately feeling this?

Young people, people under forty, people under thirty really bore the brunt of this. There's a sense among some researchers that especially teenagers and young adults who went through the pandemic, they miss some very crucial years where you kind of learn how to relate to people in person, and they really dove into their phones, and they're probably way better than you or I are at like communicating and managing

And maybe some people don't want those things ever.

Yeah, exactly, but it is definitely this is a trend and it's continuing. So where does that leave us in ten years or for twenty years. It's really changing society in ways that are really profound.

After the break, how that societal change is having economic consequences, and how people are trying to turn this dating recession around. Call it a loneliness crisis, an isolation epidemic, or a dating recession. Fewer people meeting and forming relationships can be tough on everyone, but Bloomberg's Ben Steverman says there are also these wider economic ripple effects.

The one that I think is really interesting is the restaurant industry and nightlife industry. If you're a restaurant, there's a good chance your takeout business is doing really well right now. People are ordering and bringing stuff home, but your dine in business is just not back to twenty nineteen levels. And if you look at fast casual and

Economic factors could also be driving some of this social decline, though there's inflation to consider and rising costs of living that's introduced some chicken or egg questions. Are people not buying houses because they have smaller families, or because they can't afford to Are people eating in because they don't have a reason to go out, or because it's just so expensive to leave the house.

There are towns where they just don't have that kind of ecosystem of nightlife and restaurants and businesses that they did in twenty nineteen, and that just takes a long time to build that kind of culture. Just to use alcoholic beverages as an example, the retail cost of buying booze at a store has basically fallen pretty significantly compared

I wondered if these trends could be creating a sort of vicious cycle where the social infrastructure of cities erodes alongside the appetite to socialize.

I wonder about this too. How much is it that we don't have a reason to leave our house? Is it that prestige TV and Netflix and stuff is so captivating that we just want to stay home and our phone is so interesting that we want to stare at it. Or is it not like a countervailing force in society pushing people to get out because you have a live music show in your town, or you have a cool bar that you go to that has drag night, or you go dancing, or there's just an amazing restaurant that

You know.

Well, we've been talking about a lot of the negatives here, but what about the positives? Is there any silver lining here about how people are responding to the moment and emerging from the years of COVID, I.

See a glimmer of hope in some of the data that people are at least trying to get out there again. The Bureau of Labor Statistics ask people about how much time they spend on various activities, and attending and hosting social events is a category, and there actually was like a pretty big increase in the number of people or the amount of time people spend doing that from twenty twenty two to twenty twenty three, which is the latest

More intentional socializing like that speed dating event we attended in Manhattan. What brought you out here tonight? My therapist, that's Haley, a thirty one year old. She brought her single friend Sam along with her.

So we signed up within fifteen minutes of her being like, oh, like, maybe we actually should do it.

We all debriefed after the speed dates were done, and even though both Haley and Sam said they would never have done something like this before the pandemic, they were pleasantly surprised about how it went.

I don't know a better way of saying this other than I really do just like talking same so right, so it's like, oh, you have to sit right here and listen to me for five minutes, Like okay.

My first thing, I'm like, I look like such a loser coming to an event to like purposely go on a date. And then it's like, no, like a lot of people do this. This is actually very normal and it makes sure you like step out of your comfort zone.

Ben says, that's what's nice about these structured gatherings.

Those kinds of experiences, as well as sports teams, volunteering, they're all part of the solution. They're sort of an individual solution, like if you want to revive your social life, there are tools that are available to you. What we don't have is a society wide solution where we don't seem to have a strategy for how we're going to actually make a change. More broadly, especially for the people

Is a national speed dating initiative? The answer probably not. But it's clear that this Valentine season, many motivated singles are taking matters into their own hands, and they're finding it's not as painful as they expected.

So Hayley, can I ask you, oh God, what will you go to another one with me?

I think I would do another one. Do I think I found any kind of love connection here?

Not at all?

But what I do it again? Probably?

It was?

It was fine, It was fine.

Yeah, this is the big take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder. This episode was produced by Julia Press and Jessica Beck. It was edited by Aaron Edwards and Christina Linn Blatt. It was mixed by Amar Sultan, sound designed by Jessica and fact checked by Adrianna Tapia. Our senior producer is Naomi Shavin. Our senior editor is Elizabeth Ponso. Our executive producer isn Whole Beamster Board. Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's head of Podcasts. If you liked this episode, make