Navigating the Dating Recession – Episode 39

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Welcome to I Wish you could hear this, where we explore great stories and simple, proven steps to help you thrive in life, faith, and relationships.

In our research, we've heard hundreds of Hopefield strategies for marriage, parenting, leadership, and life that are grounded in science and consistent with biblical truth.

And now you can hear them too.

I'm Shanti Felton.

And I'm Jeff Felton.

If you are a single person under thirty five, or you love someone who is, you're not imagining it. A major news study shows it really has gotten harder to build a good dating relationship today. Researchers are calling it a dating recession. But here's the surprising part. The reasons behind this actually point to what can work and create solutions for any single adult who is interested. We're unpacking all of that in this two parts conversation.

So this is such a crucial topic.

We know tons of young people who are single and would love to be in a relationship, but they often just feel helpless in how to make that happen.

Yeah, So the reason we're doing this is that this major research report came out from the Institute of Family Studies, ifs. We're going to link to this in the show notes. And the researchers did this deep dive into a very big and fairly impressive survey.

And you know these research I.

Do, they're very good.

They're they are and women women, And this is Brad Willcox's others who have been around for a long time, and they did a really really helpful study of single young adults and they narrowed down the analysis that we're going to be talking about today of about four thy five hundred of these single adults who have never before been married and who expect to marry and want to marry at some point.

And they asked all these singles about what.

Their lives were like, like are they dating, what their perceptions are of dating, how often they're going out, how satisfied they are, and the conclusion of this all this research, the first sentence of the report actually has the conclusion, which is that young adults today are living in a depressed dating economy.

So depressed dating economy not a depressing.

R Oh, it might be depressing as well for them as well.

So think of it like a recession.

This is they call it the dating recession, just like a recession in the economy slows down the economy activity.

It makes it harder to find a good job.

Right, there's a lot of young people today who say it's very hard to find a good job because there just aren't a lot of good jobs out there. Well, a recession in the dating market slows down dating activity and makes it harder to find a good significant other.

It's very similar.

But the reasons that these researchers found for the dating recession also provide a lot of hope because there are things they found that these single young adults can do that will make a difference.

So it make a difference by like improving their.

Improving their odds, improving their ability to find that person that they're looking for, or just in general be out there dating.

Okay, so there's a gap right now between desire and actual dating activity. Can you give us some numbers on this.

Yeah, So the most important one, and then we're going to get into the solutions and everything in a minute, the reasons and the solutions.

But here's the setting the stage.

The most important data point for me that I saw is that only about thirty percent of singles who are in this key bracket of age twenty two to thirty five. These are singles who want say they want to be married at some point. They're not already in a committed relationship. Only thirty percent of those singles are actually dating, So seventy percent are not dating.

They're on the sidelines.

They're on the sidelines, to be correct.

They're not on the field.

So they're mostly not on the field.

Now, this doesn't just mean, by the way, that they don't have a significant other, like that they don't have a boyfriend or girlfriend. Okay, this is much more fundamental than that. About three quarters of women and two thirds of men said they had not dated at all or had only dated a few times in the last year. Basically the most single young adults in that age bracket twenty two to thirty five who want to be dating just aren't.

You know. This is really I love the numbers hearing the numbers on this because anecdotally, I bet you a lot of our listeners out there go, yeah, that seems to be what we're seeing. It's certainly what we're seeing in our kidsplody in our circle.

It totally is what we're saying we're we have Just as an example, just so everybody knows get on the same page. We have both sides of the equation in our own little family unit. We have a twenty twenty five, almost twenty six year old daughter who just got married and who was dating for the young man for five years.

Great guy.

We're so excited for them. That was just a few weeks back. And we have a son who is twenty three.

And who is a great guy.

Also a great guy, a senior in college. We might be slightly biased, but we think he's a great guy who has dated, has had a girlfriend before. You know, this is something he'd love to be stepping into. But it finds it challenging that he's he is definitely in his life and the life of his friends.

This is not just him.

This is a bunch of these young men who are all young Christian men where they see that dating recession very personally.

So they would fit into that two thirds, that sixty four percent of men who had not dated or dated only a few times correct last year correct.

Most of his friends now, a few of them he.

Talks about, like, you know, somebody at his school who's a good friend of his, you know, did go out on date with this young woman really liked her and now their boyfriend and girlfriend, and they had been dating more than a year. But that is in his view and the view of his friends, the exception rather than a rule. And we've so we before we did this podcast, we reached out not just to him, but to a few other people just to get their perceptions, and they tend to do.

This was not necessarily a scientific.

This was not a scientific poll, but we wanted to see anecdotally.

What people were saying and whether it.

Matched what the IFS report found on the dating recession, which it did.

So can I.

Talk maybe just just a moment to the actual address our listeners at you know, just personally, so you know, if you or you have a loved one who's single or dissatisfied with the dating market, just recognize it isn't just you. Yeah, it really is an issue all across our culture today. So let me say something to the parents. So this is why your son and daughter isn't just not trying. It might be easy to say to them, look, you just have to put yourself out there. You just have to do this.

I think we might have said that a couple of we might have.

So this hopefully will this this episode will give you a little bit more empathy in what is going on out there, but also to maybe encourage your kids that there are some things that they can that they can do proactively.

Yeah, and if you are in that dating market or want to be, if you're single, just know that even though this feels hard, you're really not alone. It's not something that's wrong with you.

You really are.

Seeing out there this recession in the dating market, and there are things that you can do.

Yeah. Now, now I will before we get into more of the information, I will just say on behalf of all of the folks out there who are insecure about this. I mean sure, Look, Shaunty and I have been talking about relations and chips for decades now and doing research on this. This for those of you who are watching, you're looking at perhaps the guy who was most scared of girls all throughout my teenage years and my twenties pretty much.

Now.

I tried to overcome it, but there was a deep insecurity in that part of my life. So just so you know, you're not alone in that. Now let's get back to the regular programming. So if people want relationships, why aren't they dating?

So we're going to cover in this podcast.

We have a part one and a part two because there's just too much for just one. There were five reasons that really stood out to me. We could have made this a five part podcast, to be honest, there's so much there.

But for the sake of time.

We're going to cover just five of the key reasons why people don't seem to be dating that Now, these reasons come directly from this massive study of forty five hundred singles in this who want to be you know, who want to be dating, but largely aren't. This this large group of people age twenty two to thirty five. For the sake of simplicity, we're just going to call them young adults because it's gen z and or you know, late millennials. But we're just gonna call them young adults.

Okay, So reason one a lack of satisfaction with dating options.

Yeah, unpack that.

So this is the dating recession at work, just like we said, just like an economic recession. So think what happens when you are out there looking for a job or you're out there looking for a date. If you don't see options coming, if you try, like in a dating world, if you put yourself out there on dating apps and you don't get any matches at all, you basically.

Go why bother? Like why am I doing this?

And it starts to feel so performative. It's like putting in your resume for two hundred jobs and knowing that AI is screening you out.

So when I was in high school, when I was a teen, when I was in my early twenties, and I would ask a girl out and I got the no, I don't think so that rejection felt really intense, but it was, you know, that was one time in.

That particular week.

Whereas in these dating apps, I'm sure you can feel rejection.

Every kind constantly.

There's a constant why aren't Why isn't I know that nobody's match. I know that people saw my profile, saw my picture, but they're not liking me or whatever they do in.

Those dating apps.

Yeah, exactly, and.

That's got to be really demotivating.

Well, the numbers actually show it is demotivating. And this is that lack of satisfaction with the options is essentially creating this vicious cycle because if you think why bother and then you don't there are, then you don't put yourself out there, so that means there's one less person out there, and then that happens times, you know, hundreds of thousands of people, and that reinforces the idea that there are no options because everybody's holding themselves back, and

Lack of satisfaction.

There just aren't I just don't see people wanting to match with me. I don't see people even in person, who want to connect. You start to think, you know what, it's just there's just there's just nobody out.

There, and so I'm just going to share it. I mean, our kids, you know, have talked about and use those dating apps at times.

And we should say that our daughter who just got married, they matched on Hinge right right, So it worked in their case.

Yeah, and neither of them actually went on another date with anyone else in they were both new on.

And just and they both connected and it just happened to work. And we hear from so many young people today. Yeah, they're the exception right now.

One of the other things is that you you see on these apps is the you know, the the profile, the image of the person who's they look perfect. And I remember something that because of the way social media was ordered and these platforms, I remember something that our pastor.

When we were living in New York, Tim.

Keller said, and he said something to the effect of, look, I know you all out there and when you're trying to meet other people and everything, and quite frank you put your best foot forward. I know that some of you have been on covers of magazines.

Yeah this is New York, this was New York.

I know that some of you are on these covers of magazines. And let me just say, I know you. You don't look like the person on the cover of that magazine. And it creates this artificial image that really isn't reality, but it could lead to a dissatisfaction with.

The option exactly with the real options. It used to be when Tim Keller was talking about it, the only

What's the hope here.

Is to recognize is that if you will continue to try to put yourself out there, even if you don't feel like it, you know, and we're going to talk about more how do you do that in a minute, But if people will continue to put themselves out there, be aware that unlike the myth that most people are just looking for hookups anyway, So again, why bother? The data actually found something very different in these young adults in this twenty two to thirty five year old Cohort.

So here's some real numbers.

Eighty three percent of women and seventy four percent of men actively wanted the point of dating to be focused on creating the serious relationships. Like the culture of dating that they were looking for was not just dating to date. Eighty three percent of women seventy four percent of men, so basically, you know, high seventies, like roughly eighty percent on average, really really wanted not to just date to date. They wanted the point of dating to be focused on

Yeah, so that's that. That is encouraging.

I hope that helps people get out there.

It's true.

So so although this cohort the singles aren't dating much and they wish they were, they're they're they're wanting real connection and real commitments.

So I agree that's that that is encouraging.

So let's let's bump to reason number two.

Can you absolutely because this is going to take sort of the book of our time? Reason reason number two That was to me, one of the most important findings of this entire study is that people just lack some important dating skills.

And that that shouldn't be surprising to any of us because I honestly don't ever remember anyone ever coaching me. And that's how to days on, you know, how to win friends and influence people, so to speak, So how to go about that? And I think I just I learned it, or I fumbled into it, or I got lucky.

Well, and we had the advantage of fumbling into it in an era where the only option for practicing was in person, where you learn those skills better. Today, a lot of people are trying to learn that skills in what is primarily a social media market where you're not necessarily real. And so what the researchers at the in the IFS report found is that there's some pretty foundational skills that you actually need when you're in the dating market,

Two thirds did not.

So here's a couple of numbers with a few specific skills, just because I'm a data nerd and I just want to share this because I thought it was interesting. So almost seventy percent of young adult men and almost eighty percent of the women said they didn't have confidence in that pretty basic skill of being able to approach somebody they were interested in.

I'm sorry I got to jump in.

Yeah, okay, this would have been you right back.

In the day.

Stuff.

And now I'm going to talk to if I can to the older guys out there or the older women out there. Percent of young men, eighty percent of young women said they didn't have confidence in those skills. Where could they get that confidence and perhaps those skills? I mean, it's the generation that went ahead of them. We are always thinking, how can we reach the next generation? Well, have something clearly, the gospel is what we ultimately want

A sticky lost people, maybe lost a few people.

But it is what he does and it makes these young men. They love this guy.

And he's learning and mentored.

Exactly, and they're in all stages of some have faith, some don't. But he's just pouring into them skills for life. And we can do that. And you want to draw people to have a relationship with you offer these skills well.

And it also strikes me that offer to bring together young people, men and women together, like how many churches today have a young.

Adults singles group?

Probably not as many as back when we were right single And okay, maybe there's a couple that feels led to help start something like that and be kind of the adults in the room, so I speak, and I don't mean to be offensive to those of you who are in you're probably thirties, are like, I'm the adult in the room, but for the sake of mentoring the singles to pull together those opportunities. There's so many different ways of doing that that we don't have time to

It is, and I gotta just tell you it comes from experience, It kind of comes from practice. Yeah, none of us know these things. Well, I don't want to say none, but very few know these things innately. Yeah, you just learn to practice practice you fail, and yeah you move.

And in part two, we're going to talk about the fact that people are holding back also because we're I'm worries about failure.

Now, this one was interesting.

Sixty four percent of the respondents said they worried about their ability to.

Pick up on social it's interesting on.

Dates, like literally, again, so much has been filtered through a screen that when you're sitting down in person, you just a lot of people just haven't had as much practice.

You know, it's interesting. I was listening to a podcast just yesterday with Arthur Brooks.

Arthur Brooks, who's you know, he's kind of the happiness guy.

You know, he used to be the head of the American Enterprise Institute. Now he's a professor at Harvard And Arthur Brooks was talking about a new book.

That he has coming out called The Meaning. I think it's the Meaning of Life.

But anyways, in that he talked about something and he said, you know, for because of our social media platforms, because of our screens, we many young people find themselves in a place of receiving information, of it coming to them, coming to you, and not necessarily interacting with that that information like you do in what you have to do in an in person setting. Yes you're receiving things, but you're also then responding to it in a way getting more.

It's interesting talking about you know what we do about this. One of the things that this brings up in my mind is that last weekend, not at the moment we're recording.

This, at the very very beginning of April.

I don't know when this is gonna actually drop, but last weekend, just a few days ago, you and I were up at Harvard, back up at Harvard the old stomping grounds for a conference for Christian alumni of Harvard called Faith and Veritime.

Which you spoke at, which which I spoke at.

You're on the board of this this group, and one of the other speakers on the one of the very first sessions, he made such an interesting point about the fact that you know, back in the day, the thing that brought everybody together, you know, if you think of like the Industrial Revolution, you know, it was techniclogy was

Yeah.

Can I talk just a little bit about the skills building stuff.

Well, yeah, it's all related.

Yeah, And I'm just going to talk from the young guys perspective because that's kind of where my heart is and that's what I see.

For sure, I'm exposed to.

So oftentimes there are folks out there who are on the social on the Internet who are trying to influence young.

Men, who are trying to help them how to navigate, how.

To navigate the dating world and whatsould look like.

And there's lots of lots of folks who are trying to do that, and they've kind of all been glump clumped into the manosphere or whatever, and you know, and there are a lot of things with that group that I find really objectionable with some of the influences.

Influencers in that group.

But some of the things, even the ones who I think are totally objectionable, some of the nuggets core truths. Now, I'm not going to tell someone to listen to these influencers because I think there's enough bad that can that can lead them into wrong decisions and wrong understandings of women or of themselves that it's it's not worth the game. But there are some things that I think are true interesting of some of the skills that they have that they're trying to build it and I'm just gonna paint

Attractive to a woman.

It feels somewhat transactional.

Which is, you know, okay, if they're getting a growth mindset exactly.

But it depends on what they're learning as part of the worth right.

But oftentimes these kind of influencer groups tend to have a pretty low opinion of women. Really, Yeah, they tend to think of I don't either, but I've read enough articles on it to kind of have an understanding, at least in broad strokes. But the other things that that we're probably talking about is that they say that, you know, what the women really want is the alpha male, the guy who's dominant, the guy who knows what he wants

Without being cogny.

It was that self confidence that I kind of know who I am, I know where I'm going, and I'm working toward that. That is appealing, but it can easily be twisted.

Yeah.

And and one other skill that you know, I don't hear the influencers talking about, but we found in that research was that women, young women loved the guy.

Who was funny.

Yeah, sense of humor. That was of humor that ended up being I think the top one. I think it was sense of confidence and sense of humor and thoughtfulness.

Now here's the thing that was shocking me in that research, and I'll just do a quick segue into it, was that I had taken the opinion I had thought that they would have chosen the young women on the survey would have chosen a buff body, handsome face, and rich.

Yes, we gave them a bunch of different.

We gave them and those were near the bottom of the list. The ones that were at the top were ones that someone wasn't necessarily born with. They were skills that could be developed. And so that's I guess my word to the young guys out there these your future isn't set because of what family you were born in or you know, your genetic makeup. None of that is settled on whether or not you are going to find a mate for life. There are skills that you can develop here.

And you know what, These things go together because if the skills are built, guess what, you'll be more confident, right, And that is something that is really at the heart I think of this dating recession is that with this lack of confidence, it lends itself to people just kind of pulling back. We see this so much not just in you know, the kids in our family over the years, but but also in their friends and in this younger generation in the numbers. And so that's the good news

You know.

One of the.

One of the statements that many coaches would make is like some girl would come in without any experience at all, but she was six foot tall, right, And the coach is like, I can coach skill. You can't coach height, but I can coach skill. And it's kind of that idea, like you may come in feeling like you are who you.

Are, I just don't know how to do this stuff.

Well, guess what you can learn that for example, And I'll just give a couple of examples. For example, one of the things that is a huge deal is learning how to listen, right, learning how to ask good questions of someone about them about their life, and then actively learning how to listen to them and absorb what they're

So much fun.

You mentioned the free young men Only study, So our studies fore young men only for young women only, of young women and young men, and these were all these were ages fifteen to twenty one. We weren't dealing with the age that we're talking about here in this podcast,

Heart with you.

So stuff like that that you just didn't know, Like you didn't know that on the inside, guys had such a tender heart and so much insecurity and self doubt. And if you speak to that person rather than the confident looking person standing in front of you, well, guess what, you have a lot more opportunity to actually have a heart opened to you. I can still remember the reactions of a group of young women that I was talking to.

Which we'll put in the show notes. As well.

So, Jeff, you and I as we kind of we have to wrap this up. We're you and I are actively pondering what to do about this because this shows this huge need need out there and what can we do to help singles build these dating skills.

Yeah, so we're brainstorming.

We are brainstorming it and you know, would love.

To We're open to ideas exactly.

You know, fortunately God has given us a plat form that we can speak into certain things to an audience. So and with some research, with some research, So for anyone out there, any of our listeners you know in the show notes will put email address.

Well they can just I'll just say it right now, web contact at Shaunty dot com. Yeah, that's that is the email that if you have ideas or if you'd be interested in hearing about what we eventually come up with and whatever we.

Create reach out there, will put you on our.

List email web contact at Shaunty dot com will put you on our list and you'll be notified once we figure it out. Like live events, virtual events, cohorts.

Where people can please ideas, yes, give us.

Your ideas, yes, exactly.

So this topic of a dating recession and what to do about it is so important. We didn't want to try to create this into one episode, So we're going to pause and we're going to come back next time to continue the conversation in part two. Please don't miss that, and we have three more reasons and things that you can do if you were yes, And.

I think we'll be able to share some of the feedback that we've gotten from people in their twenties or third correct who have already said here's what I'm experiencing.

Yes, exactly, So a little more of the on the ground application for if it's you, if it's your adult kids. So don't miss that Part two. If you are not a subscriber to the podcast, please subscribe now so you're notified when part two drops. And if you know someone who might be interested in this conversation, please share this episode and tag us on all your social media channels. Thanks for listening to I wish you could hear this.