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Mating
Why Is the Dating Scene So Bleak?
The problems that lead to unsatisfactory dating experiences, and some solutions.
Posted March 18, 2025 Reviewed by Hara Estroff Marano
Key points
- Many find the dating scene today a nightmare of confusion and poor outcomes.
- Current dating approaches encourage people to look for concrete visual characteristics in a possible mate.
- The characteristics people choose in a dating partner do not necessarily align with those they claim to want.
Dating is difficult under the best of circumstances. Many people have anxiety meeting potential mates. What will he be like? What will she think of me? Many find dating a nightmare.
Some say we have a crisis in dating because finding suitable people is fraught with difficulty, confusion, and disappointment. The Pew Research Center finds that 47% of people say dating is more difficult now than 10 years ago.
Marriage rates are down for young people. The U.S. Census Bureau and Pew document that 25% of 40-year-old Americans have never married. In 1980 the figure was 6% who were never married by age 40. The divorce rate is up for people over age 65. It was 5.2% in 1990 and rose to 15.2% in 2022, according to the National Center for Family and Marriage Research. Why is dating so difficult?
Online Dating Pitfalls
Forty-five percent of single people have used online dating or dating apps in the past year (Pew). Online dating and use of apps is growing, especially among youth. Online dating companies promise fulfilling contact with romantic mates. Yet many people find that meetups are with people who are dedicated to remaining single.
Only 10% of adults, married or in serious relationships, found each other online (Pew). More than 44 million adults in the U.S. engage in online dating (Statista.com). Cruz et al. found that 65% of people using dating apps are not single but married or in long-term relationships. Online dating is convenient and growing rapidly. There is some concern that use of dating apps can be addictive; Coduto, Lee-Won and Black found compulsive use of dating apps among those scoring high in social anxiety and loneliness.
Promoting a Focus on External Characteristics
Online dating puts the focus on external characteristics of possible mates––physical looks, job, residence, and educational attainments. Such focus feeds partner pickiness and the notion one can pick a mate satisfactorily based on external, fixed, and often visual characteristics.
The problem is that people do not choose mates based on their stated ideal preferences (Jehan Sparks et a). Emotional factors in attraction come into play beyond professed intellectual likes and dislikes in possible mates.
Aggressive, Violent Behaviors
Sometimes aggressive and violent, sadistic behaviors show up as cyberviolence, often perpetuated by men. Joana Jaureguizar et al. cite psychological violence: “control, humiliation, jealousy, isolating the other person from his/her close environment, and threats.” Verbal emotional violence is common online.
The Pew Research Center identifies cyber dating abuse in the posting of embarrassing photos/videos without consent, harassment, name-calling, the spread of false information, threats of physical harmj, and cyberstalking.
Youth Prefer Online Encounters...
Youth have increasing familiarity with online and app activities and diminishing familiarity with meeting people face to face. Many young people lack skills for conversing with others in a live setting where both are physically present.
Scott, Stuart and Barber examined young adults’ perceptions of offline and online relationships with friends. They found a key distinction for socially anxious and less-anxious people. Socially anxious young people—and their numbers are increasing, says social psychologist Jonathan Haidt—feel increased comfort and confidence in online interactions compared with offline encounters. Young people gravitate to online contact, preferring it to face to face contact.
...but Lack Familiarity with Assessing Prospective Dates
Many singles lack the ability to assess their own emotional interior to say nothing of assessing that of dating prospects. How does he/she make you feel when you are with them? How does he/she think about things in the world, 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? Expecting immediate fireworks can be a red flag to having a sustained and fulfilling romantic relationship.
Schroeder and Fishbach find that people are romantically attracted to one another on the basis of “feeling known, rather than of knowing their partner. Online dating partners are looking for people they think will be supportive of them, more than thinking about having to give support to the other person.
Faulty decision-making in relationships may also be fostered by what Joel and MacDonald call "progression bias". They find that people in romantic relationships are biased toward any and all decisions that promote “initiation, advancement, and maintenance of romantic relationships.” They say this may explain why being in any committed relationship is preferable to being without a relationship. Someone may continue dating a person without thinking about who they are becoming romantically involved with and whether that person is good for them.
Davenport, McCabe and Winter find the dating partner selection process to be “a complex psychological phenomenon” the complexity of which is not adequately addressed in research or theory. They suggest moving beyond the psychology of dating choice outcomes and instead focus on the why and how in the process of choosing mates. This means we should discover how to scrutinize the interior emotional components of ourselves and others as well as our own unconscious reasons for being attracted to or repelled by possible mates.
How To Have a Better Dating Experience
To improve dating expertise and prospects, you might do something different than the same old thing. If online and app dating are disagreeable and don’t work well, go live. Meet single people face-to-face, the way people did before technology arrived and lured people into thinking it was a panacea for relationship problems. Have face-to-face conversations with people, especially strangers, before dating.
In clinical psychiatric practice, I 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 endeavors, religions 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.
You might be in a rut, looking for the wrong attributes in possible mates. Correct course by reading, attending classes, or by engaging in your own psychotherapy to discover more clearly what attracts you to a romantic mate. You may learn why you are attracted to people who are not good for you. Taking such steps may improve your dating experience and make it more fulfilling.
References
Davenport, S, McCabe, C, Winter, S. (2023). A critical review of the literature regarding the selection of long-term romantic partners, Arch Sex Behav, 52 (7): 3025-3042.
Jaureguizar, J. et al. (2024). Online and offline dating violence: Same same, but different? Psicologia: Reflexaoe Critica, (37):13, 11 April.
Joel, S. MacDonald, G. (2021). We’re not that choosy: Emerging evidence of a progression bias in romantic relationships, Personality and Social Psychology Review, vol. 25, Issue 4, November.
Martin, HB and Adams, CBL., Living on Automatic: How Emotional Conditioning Shapes Our Lives and Relationships, (Praeger) Bloomsbury, 2018.
Schroeder, J. Fishbach, A. (2024). Feeling known predicts relationship satisfaction, J. of Experimental Social Psychology, (111): 104559.
Scott, RA, Stuart, J, Barber, BL. (2024). Young adults’ perceptions of their online versus offline interactions with close friends: An exploration of individual differences. Computers in Human Behavior Reports; 100399.
Sparks, J. et al. (2020). Negligible evidence that people desire partners who uniquely fit their ideals, J of Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 90: 103968, September.
Haidt, J. (2024). The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, New York, Penguin Press.
Coduto, KD, Lee-Won, RJ, Baek, YM (2019). Swiping for trouble: Problematic dating application use among psychosocially distraught individuals and the paths to negative outcomes, Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, vol.37, Issue 1, 3 July.
Cruz, GV, et al. (2023). Finding intimacy online: A machine learning analysis of predictors of success, Cyberpsychol Behav Soc Netw, 26(8):604-612, August.
