Lost in the Dating Wasteland
Singles have never had more ways to meet: apps for every niche, singles events every night in big cities, matchmakers and dating coaches. Online dating is now the most common way couples meet. Yet as Faith Hill reported in an August 3 Atlantic article, America is in a “great romance slump.” The apps generate plenty of matching and messaging but not many relationships.
Hill, who is 31, interviewed dozens of researchers and singles and attended a string of New York singles events—including a bizarre one built around three-minute hugs with strangers. She found a lot of people who are burned out. Dating, one man told her, is a constant assault on his self-confidence. Many have quietly given up, ranking romance below friends, travel, fitness and career. One woman told Hill that her girlfriends meet her emotional needs and she uses men only for sex.
The Kinsey Institute’s 2026 Singles in America study asked singles what they would do if their perfect match showed up tomorrow. Only 46 percent said they would want to date that person. Twenty-nine percent weren’t sure—and 25 percent said they would rather stay single. No wonder marriage and birthrates are falling so steeply. People are too absorbed in themselves to bother with family.
What is filling the void? Often, it is technology. Americans’ average weekly time socializing with others fell from nearly 13 hours in 2010 to about 5 in 2024. Now artificial intelligence offers an even easier substitute: A 2025 Brigham Young University survey found that nearly 1 in 5 American adults have chatted with an AI designed to simulate a romantic partner—including 31 percent of young men.
Hill sees much of this as the price of “progress.” Marriage is no longer necessary for social or financial survival; contraception, careers and the fading stigma of singlehood have given women freedoms their grandmothers never had; and she insists she is not nostalgic for the old days. Yet she admits the result does not feel like a triumph. The dream was more equal partnerships. What many got was no partnership at all.
The old guideposts have vanished—and people are lost without them. Men are told to be sensitive and supportive, yet women still want them to be decisive and to lead. One man was dropped by a woman for having “dad energy” (“I’m not 100 percent sure what that means,” he said) and was told by another that she wished he would take charge. Two anthropologists who gathered studies from around the world noted “the seeming ubiquity of generally disappointing men.” A 44-year-old business owner in Chicago told Hill she is tired of splitting the bills while also mothering her boyfriends; she wants a provider. Several of the people Hill interviewed openly wished for more rules.
The ones feeling the most urgency are women in their late 30s and early 40s who want children and see the window closing. Hill is one of them. After nearly a decade of searching, she found a man she loves—but he lives a nine-hour train ride away and does not want children. So she is in a long-distance open relationship with him while meeting strangers in Brooklyn bars, hoping to find someone to have a baby with. She even considered a website that matches strangers who want to raise a child together but without romance. One such couple she profiled lives on the same Texas ranch—he in his house, she and the children in a mobile home—while he travels for work and dates around, and she juggles child care and a teaching job. Hill lamented the fact that even in this unconventional arrangement, “they still follow traditional gender roles.”
This is what happens when a society rejects male and female, marriage and God-given roles. People are left confused, frustrated and alone. Many grow self-absorbed and set in their ways, unwilling to have anyone depend on them. And many women realize too late that the promise of career fulfillment is illusory.
The answer is achingly plain. God designed men to lead and provide, women to build their homes, and husbands and wives to commit for life and raise children together. “Whoso findeth a wife findeth a good thing, and obtaineth favour of the Lord. … Lo, children are an heritage of the Lord …” (Proverbs 18:22; Psalm 127:3). Yet Hill, like so many, wants no part of the old ways. What a tragedy to stand so close to the answer and turn away from it. And what a blessing God’s truth is to anyone willing to receive it. Joel Hilliker