Many single, divorced, or widowed people find dating today disagreeable. Some say we currently have a crisis in dating because finding suitable people to date is fraught with difficulty, confusion, and disappointment.
Marriage, too, seems to be in a bit of a slump. Rates of marriage are down for young people. The U.S. Census Bureau and the Pew Research Center document that today 25 percent of 40-year-old Americans have never married. Compare this to 1980, when only 6 percent of Americans had never married by age 40. Also, the divorce rate is up for people over age 65, rising from 5.2 percent in 1990 to 15.2 percent in 2022, according to the National Center for Family and Marriage Research.
Let’s examine why dating is difficult and what can be done to improve the situation.
Issues in the Present Dating Culture
Forty-five percent of single people have used online dating or apps in the past year (Pew Research Center). Both online dating and the use of apps are growing. While online dating companies promise fulfilling contact with romantic mates, many find that the people they’re meeting are, paradoxically, dedicated to remaining single.
Participants in online dating culture may be cruising online in search of multiple dating partners, and some are currently married. Women, particularly, find the online dating process disagreeable. Men use dating sites more than women, and sometimes participants exhibit aggressive, violent, or sadistic behaviors.
In a recent study, Joana Jaureguizar et al. found that offline dating violence is related to online dating violence. The two share similarities in psychological violence perpetuated: “control, humiliation, jealousy, isolating the other person from his/her close environment, and threats.” The researchers found that 51.6 percent of the sample reported online dating violence victimization. Offline perpetuation was reported at 80.4 percent, and offline victimization at 73.7 percent. Verbal-emotional violence was the most prevalent form.
In this study, neither gender nor age was associated with increased violence, either offline or online. The researchers conclude that “violence is frequently a way of solving problems in dating relationships,” both for victims and perpetrators.
They also found a low ability to self-regulate emotionally among online dating victims compared with offline dating victims. Online aggressors score lower in emotional intelligence.
Only 10 percent of adults of all ages, married or in serious relationships, found each other online (Pew Research Center).
Pickiness
Online dating promotes choosing possible mates by their external characteristics––physical looks, type of job, residence, and educational attainments. This external focus often feeds into dating mates’ pickiness and perfectionism and the notion that one can pick a mate satisfactorily based on external, fixed, and often visual characteristics.
Reasons Online Dating May Not Work
Online dating reduces the likelihood that young adults, especially, will meet in person. This is partly due to youths’ increasing familiarity with and favoring of online and app activities and their diminishing practice in meeting people face to face. Many young people now lack skills for conversing with others in a live setting where both are physically present. They also lack skills for discriminating wholesome, kind people from exploitive, unsatisfactory potential mates.
Scott, Stuart, and Barber examined young adults’ perceptions of offline and online relationships with friends. They found a key distinction between socially anxious and less anxious people: Socially anxious young people felt increased comfort and confidence in online interactions when these were compared with offline encounters with friends. This was more the case for females than males.
Unfamiliarity With Assessing Prospective Dates
Many singles lack the ability to assess the emotional interior of both themselves and their dating prospects. How does he/she make you feel when you are with them? How does he/she think about things in the world or in relationships? What opinions does he/she share and why? How does the dating prospect treat you? Does he/she listen to you and ask questions? Are you or he/she looking for romantic fireworks right off the bat? Expecting immediate fireworks can be a serious red flag to having a sustained and fulfilling romantic relationship.
In a 2024 study, Schroeder and Fishbach found that romantic attraction may spring from “feeling known” rather than from knowing their partner. This means online dating partners are looking for people who they think will be supportive of them, more than they are seeking to give support to the other person. Feeling known predicts greater feelings of satisfaction in the relationship.
This does not, however, explain what attracts the person who does not feel known in the relationship. In our clinical practices, Homer Martin, MD, and I discovered that only one person in a relationship may be attracted by feeling known or supported. The other is attracted by what they can give to their relationship partner to make them feel supported. This dynamic is consistent with giver and taker roles in dating partners.
A study by Joel and MacDonald found that people in romantic relationships are biased toward any and all decisions that promote “initiation, advancement, and maintenance of romantic relationships.” The researchers say that this phenomenon, which they term “progression bias,” may explain why being in any committed relationship is preferable to being without a relationship. In general, it seems that people who date are not discerning when it comes to evaluating possible mates. People go down dating roads without thinking about who they are becoming romantically involved with.
How to Have a Better Dating Experience
To improve your dating expertise and prospects, you might want to do something different than the same old thing you’ve been doing. If you find that online and app dating are disagreeable and don’t work well for you, “go live.” Meet other single people face-to-face, the way people did before technology came along and lured people into thinking it was a panacea for relationship problems.
In my clinical psychiatric practice, I’ve discovered that successful dating often happens when people join others in doing what they enjoy—sports activities, music events, museum visits, arts events and classes, continuing education, religious groups, or cooking classes, to name a few.
Evaluating People to Date
Another thing that helps is discovering how to evaluate people in person for serious long-term or marriage relationships. You need to know how to size up the other person to ascertain if you’re looking for potential mates in a helpful way.
A study by Jehan Sparks et al. found that people do not evaluate dating prospects well. Especially when using online dating, people do not wind up dating potential mates based on their ideal preferences. Instead, other emotional factors in attraction come into play beyond intellectual likes and dislikes.
Davenport, McCabe, and Winter found the dating partner selection process to be “a complex psychological phenomenon” that is not having its complexity adequately addressed in research or theory. They suggest we move beyond the psychology of dating choice outcomes and focus instead on the why and how in the process of choosing mates.
You might be in a rut, looking for the wrong attributes in possible mates. Correct your course by reading, attending classes, or engaging in your own psychotherapy to discover more clearly what attracts you to a romantic mate. Along the way, you may learn why you are attracted to people who are not good for you. These steps may improve your dating experiences and make your dating life more fulfilling. And in the end, closely examining yourself may help you find a suitable mate.
