It’s a moral panic but perhaps one that’s wholly justified. In recent weeks, more data has emerged on how young people are struggling to find love and don’t know where to find it in the first place. Over two-thirds of young adults have either not dated at all or only gone on a few dates in the last year. One of the main reasons? They lack confidence and don’t know how to approach the opposite sex, according to a report on America’s “dating recession” from the Wheatley Institute and the Institute for Family Studies.
If trends continue, one-third of young adults will not get married and one-fourth won’t have kids. Some cities are worse than others. In San Francisco, half of all men remain unmarried by age 40. As sociologist Brad Wilcox told me, “We’ve never been in a cultural moment where so many young adults are headed toward a life without immediate kin.” The implications are staggering: a generation of permanent bachelors – and bachelorettes – untethered from the bonds that have given life its deepest meaning.
This dire situation is the backdrop against which Stanford graduate student Henry Weng created Date Drop, a matchmaking platform that has swept through elite campuses. The premise is simple: answer a lengthy questionnaire about your values, preferences and political views, and the algorithm assigns you a single match weekly. No swiping, no infinite menu of options. Just one name.
As the Wall Street Journal recently reported, roughly two-thirds of Stanford’s undergraduate population signed up. The platform has expanded to nearly a dozen other schools and attracted over $2 million in venture funding. But I’m drawn less to the start-up success story than to the underlying confession embedded in it. Simply put, the most accomplished young people in the country – students who have optimized every dimension of their academic lives – can’t quite figure out how to ask someone out for coffee.
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This isn’t just a Stanford problem, though it might be a particularly Stanford-ish version of a universal one. Again, the numbers are striking. Only 1 in 3 young men say they feel comfortable approaching someone they’re attracted to, according to the dating recession report. And barely more than one-third of young adults say they can pick up on social cues during a date. This is a generation that has been told that relationships are among the most important things in life but has never been taught how to build one.
Part of this is the obvious, almost banal point about how American life is organized. We have constructed an elaborate conveyor belt – degree, internship, graduate school, first job, promotion – that demands total devotion during precisely the years when people are biologically and emotionally primed to form lasting attachments. The implicit message is: be impressive first, be human and figure out the love part later. It’s not that anyone decided this consciously. It’s more that we drifted into it.
There’s something else going on though, something harder to quantify. I’ve written before about what French theorist René Girard called “mimetic” desire – the idea that we want what the people around us want. If the people around you are oriented toward marriage then you absorb that orientation almost without thinking. You date because dating is what people do. You commit because commitment is what’s expected.
The dating recession is a crisis of mimetic desire in reverse. We have stopped socializing young people toward marriage and family so fewer of them pursue it – not because they’ve arrived at some principled rejection of the institution but because few people around them are modeling it. The culture says: focus on yourself, build your brand, keep your options open. And so they do, until they look up at 35 or 40 and realize they’ve optimized everything except the thing that might actually make them happy. I know this because I’ve lived it.
This is where Date Drop becomes interesting as a cultural document of the weird times we live in. The platform works because it imposes structure on chaos. It is largely the opposite of Tinder’s infinite scroll, which flatters the illusion of limitless choice while producing paralysis and disappointment. Date Drop succeeds precisely because it constrains. It decides for you – and in doing so, it frees you from the tyranny of deciding for yourself.
You don’t have to squint too hard to see the analog to what religious communities once provided. The church, the mosque, the synagogue: These were never just houses of worship. They were matchmaking institutions, places where young people met amid communal structure and accountability. You didn’t have to be particularly confident. The community did much of the work for you, pairing families, creating occasions, organizing awkward dinners and applying gentle (and sometimes not-so-gentle) pressure. I don’t want to romanticize this. The old system had real costs, especially for women. But it also had a benefit that we’re now beginning to appreciate: It made courtship and marriage the default.
As Hoda Abrahim, a matchmaker who founded the service Love, Inshallah for Muslim singles told me, “When community and family networks naturally brought people together, you didn’t need us. But those structures have thinned out.” Or, as Maria Avgitidis, chief executive of Agape Matchmaking, put it to me, “We were never meant to date alone.” In the pre-online dating era, other people were always “constantly meddling” in our love lives. The meddling, it turns out, might have been a good thing.
Date Drop is a very secular, Silicon Valley version of this communal function – an algorithm doing what grandmothers used to do. I admire it. But I also find something melancholy in the enterprise, because the fact that a computer science student had to code his way to a solution suggests the depth of what’s been lost.
There is a detail from the Journal’s story that I keep returning to. One student who helped bring Date Drop to Stanford admitted the platform hadn’t produced romantic connections for him – but it had generated a few LinkedIn ones. He then listed the relationships he feared missing out on: his soulmate, his co-founder, his business partner, the chairman of his future board.
Soulmate and co-founder in the same sentence struck me as odd. I don’t blame him. He is a product of a culture that has taught him to see every relationship through the lens of optimization.
I’ve been writing about the dating recession for a while. The data on marriage and happiness is clearer than many of us think. Married mothers are about three times as likely to say they’re “very happy” as single, childless women. The pattern holds for men too. Yet when I cite these numbers, the most common response isn’t disagreement with the data. It’s something more like annoyance – as though pointing out the benefits of marriage is itself a kind of aggression against those who haven’t found it.
I understand the annoyance, because I feel it, too. I reached age 40 without getting married or having children. The data indicts me as much as anyone. But I’d rather be honest about what the evidence shows than pretend the question doesn’t matter.
Not all problems have solutions. But while there may not be an obvious fix, some influential voices have advocated matchmaking as a replacement for dating apps. Meanwhile, Wilcox makes a case that I find both compelling and unsettling: just get married young. The conventional wisdom says there’s time to hold out for the “perfect” person. But Wilcox argues that this is a risky bet. The pool of eligible partners is bigger in college and your early 20s. After that, it shrinks – and the culture of dating only gets harder to navigate. “Drifting through your 20s without a thought for your family future,” he told me, “is its own kind of loss.”
I can relate to this because I’m one of those people who drifted. And I’m not sure I was wrong to do so – life is complicated, and not everyone meets the right person at 23. But I also can’t pretend the assumption was costless.
This is where matchmaking comes in as a potential corrective. Murray Hill Guy, a controversial dating influencer who’s become a must-read for New York singles, told me that matchmaking appeals to people now because it addresses the thing apps are worst at: intentionality. “When both people show up knowing the introduction was made on purpose,” he said, “they tend to take the date more seriously. That alone makes the experience feel more human and less transactional.”
Matchmakers aren’t algorithms. They ask about values, about life vision – the things a profile photo will never capture. And they hold people accountable. That word – accountable – matters. Accountability is what community used to provide free. Now we pay for it, because the community isn’t there anymore.
There’s an irony here worth sitting with. The most modern solution to the dating crisis turns out to be one of the oldest: a person who knows you knows the other person and thinks the meeting is worth both of your time.
I know how it sounds when a columnist suggests that marrying younger or hiring a matchmaker might be the way to go. And the idea of marrying so young still makes me more than a bit uncomfortable. Knowing even what I know now, I probably still wouldn’t have done it. But the alternative – the thing we have been doing, which is drifting and hoping and swiping and burning out – simply isn’t working. The return to matchmaking, whether algorithmic or personal, reflects something I find genuinely hopeful. The same goes for marrying young. Rather than a regression, it’s about refusing to let the most important decision of your life be the one you keep postponing.
The dating recession won’t be solved by any single app or matchmaker or cultural sermon. But it might begin to ease when we stop treating marriage as something that happens to you after you’ve finished becoming yourself – and start treating it as one of the ways you become yourself in the first place.