Young people today are experiencing a dating crisis. According to a February report by the Institute for Family Studies (IFS), only 31% of young adults are active daters (defined as going on at least one date per month). Three-quarters of women and two-thirds of men in the survey have dated only a few times or not at all in the last year. Survey respondents also reported low levels of confidence in themselves and their dating abilities.
What is going on? IFS suggests that desire isn’t the problem. Contrary to popular belief, lots of young people want more than casual dating – they want to form serious long-term relationships, marriages, and families. The problem has to do with getting there. IFS argues that young people need more training in dating skills to boost their confidence and their ability to form connections and relationships.
It’s not surprising that young people today are suffering from a dating skills deficit considering they’re among the first generations to be raised on a heavy diet of screens, social media, and other de-socializing technologies. Is it any wonder that children who grew up in largely virtual environments now struggle to connect with others (including potential romantic interests) in the real world?
Not only have these technologies possibly damaged young people’s social and dating skills; they’ve also undercut confidence. Growing up with the curated self-images found on social media often makes young people insecure. Online, all they see are (often doctored) images of how attractive, successful, and wealthy others are. Of course, the real hardships of people’s lives – their real physical, financial, and emotional flaws – are hidden. But when a teenager compares his or her real self to the falsified images of others online, they often feel like they just don’t stack up.
There’s a third way that technology could be undermining the dating world, too. It’s called the “paradox of choice.” The concept originated in a psychological study conducted in the early 2000s by Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper. In their paper, “When choice is demotivating: can one desire too much of a good thing,” they described a study where having a greater number of options made consumers less likely to purchase something.
The idea was developed by Barry Schwartz, professor of social theory at Swarthmore College, in his book “The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less.” In the book, he explains the counterintuitive truth that having a wider range of choices can make us less satisfied and happy with what we do choose.
As The Decision Lab explains, “He identified that the range of choices that we have available to us these days is far greater than people had in the past; however, consumer satisfaction has not increased as much as traditional economics theories might expect.” Even though we highly value freedom in our culture, too many choices can overwhelm us, making us assume that, no matter our choice, something else was probably better.
How does this apply to dating? Modern online dating apps make daters’ pools of potential matches almost infinitely larger than in pre-internet dating days. In the past, your pool of potential mates consisted mainly of those in your town or nearby – people you met at church, school, or work. Today, your pool can include practically any single person anywhere in the world.
Since the person seeking to date is aware of this huge variety of options, it’s easy to assume that, regardless of who one is dating at present, there’s probably someone better out there. It’s easy to compare the flaws of the current partner to the seeming perfection of that vast number of people “available” online.
So how can you commit when you know something “better” is out there? As Schwartz and co-author Andrew Ward explain, “unconstrained freedom leads to paralysis.”
In our global, internet-dominated world, the cute girl from down the street must compete with (potentially) every other girl in the world, whereas in the past she only had to compete with the other girls in the neighborhood.
While Grandpa would have just asked out the girl across the street and quite possibly married her, since she was clearly the best of his limited options, things are more complicated for his grandson. The young man today can’t help comparing the girl across the street to the girl across the country (and comparing her to the girl across the ocean). This can easily cause paralysis, indecision, and inaction.
Ironically, then, part of the solution for young people struggling to find a match may be to restrict their dating pool, rather than expand it. Dating apps can work great, and I know many happy marriages that resulted from them. But at the same time, if that isn’t working for a particular young person, maybe they should take a page out of Grandpa and Grandma’s book and intentionally restrict themselves to a narrower field, namely, those they actually know in their neighborhood and community. Suddenly, the options become a lot clearer.
Of course, part of the problem is that the local institutions that fostered community on a small scale (churches, clubs, fraternities, dances, amateur sports teams or theaters, neighborhoods) have been damaged over the past century and don’t always offer the same healthy means of meeting people face-to-face as in the past. The modern city is often a paradox of an unprecedented number of people living in close proximity yet feeling more alone and isolated than ever.
Still, those opportunities are out there, and worth pursuing for the young person feeling burned out by online dating.
Before becoming a writer, Walker Larson taught literature and history at a private academy. His writing has appeared in over a dozen outlets, including The Hemingway Review, The Epoch Times, and his Substack, The Hazelnut. He is also the author of two novels, Hologram and Song of Spheres.
This culture article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal, a project of 1819 News. To comment on this article, please email [email protected]. The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of 1819 News.
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