The Great Romance Slump

About 90 seconds into a three-minute hug with a stranger, I began to think that dying alone might not be so bad after all. I’d come to a candlelit loft in Manhattan for a “mindful singles event” called The Feels, which was designed to be the opposite of the disembodied experience of dating apps. Participants, phones tucked away, paired up and attempted a series of “somatic awareness” exercises, including staring into each other’s eyes, hugging, and holding a hand over each other’s heart.

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We’d been warned that discomfort is part of the process. A facilitator had reminded us that, as long as consent and respect are involved, a little uneasiness opens the door to vulnerability. Having paid $100 for a process advertised as “better relating”—informed by Carl Jung and the Buddha and the body’s “infinite wisdom”—participants were motivated to agree. And many of us, more by circumstance than by choice, were already experts in exiting our comfort zone. We’d spent years meeting strangers, opening ourselves to judgment, scrounging for conversation topics, worrying about our outfits, gargling mouthwash in the office—but we still hadn’t found what, or whom, we wanted. We came ready to get to work.

The mere existence of The Feels, which hosts events in cities across the United States, suggests that we are living in a time of romantic plenty. In New York City, I could go to a dating event every night of the week. I could use a matchmaking service, or talk with a dating coach, or sign up for one of the many newsletters trying to bring back personal ads. Even if I didn’t live in a major city, I’d have dating apps to choose from: not only Tinder and Hinge but a zillion others—platforms for farmers, gamers, single parents, cannabis enthusiasts, and members of the gluten-free community. I have four apps in my current rotation; as I write this, one of them has 317 message threads and 455 “likes” that I need to evaluate.

And yet, despite the bounty of possibility, we are living through a great romance slump. Romance is a broad term, of course. Traditionally, it manifests in the thrill of sex, the devotion of long-term partnership, or the ritual of courtship, including the act of hope that is a first date. But all of those manifestations are becoming less common in the U.S., especially among young people.

The proportion of 25-to-34-year-olds in marriages or cohabiting partnerships dropped steeply from 1980 to 2022—by almost 10 percentage points for college graduates and more than 20 percentage points for people without a degree, according to an analysis by the Financial Times data reporter John Burn-Murdoch. A shrinking share of young adults have a steady partner, and in 2019, 42 percent of single adults younger than 40 told Pew Research Center that they’d never been in a committed relationship. In a 2025 YouGov poll, 69 percent of single respondents said they “rarely” or “never” go on dates. And people are having less sex. From 2000 to 2018, the share of 25-to-34-year-olds who said they hadn’t had sex in the previous year almost doubled.

It’s not that people have lost interest in love. A majority of single young adults say they want lifelong partnership. But for a variety of reasons, fewer of them are finding it. Allie Hoffman, a former CEO of a digital-media company who launched The Feels in 2022, has observed “a collective this sucks” among romance seekers. She has expanded her offerings accordingly. At a “Level 2” Feels event, which costs up to $215, you can be paired with people “at a similar stage in their awareness journey.” A spot at a singles’ weekend retreat starts at $1,300; three matches based on a questionnaire and a phone call, plus six coaching sessions over three months, total $4,750. In a romance recession, some people give up and some double down.

So here I was, doubling down, sweating in a strange man’s arms. My neck hurt. I couldn’t figure out how close to him I should stand. (Too near and you lose breathing room; too far and the whole enterprise falls apart.) For years I’d been in the same group chat with pretty much the same single friends. We’d labeled it the “Lonely Hearts Club,” and it became a sanctuary for dishing about weird dates, complaining about getting ghosted, sharing links to TikTokers dishing about weird dates and complaining about getting ghosted. I’d received variations of the same “I’m not feeling a spark” text so many times that I started replying with a single emoji:🫡. But at The Feels, I was trying to be open and optimistic. I’d stared into someone’s eyes for three languid minutes, wondering if I was blinking a normal amount. I’d been moved, feeling another person’s heartbeat beneath my palm, as anyone with a pulse would be.

The hug was the last round, though, and then real life resumed. We mingled, but the intimacy had disappeared. One man told me that he had high emotional intelligence and could tell that I did too—then he suggested that we travel together someday, handed me his business card, and walked away. I gave a few people my phone number, including one man who sent me a picture of his face the very next morning and another who texted me so much (even after a polite rebuff) that I had to block him. One date with another guy resulted, but I wasn’t interested in a second. The perception of abundance had, once again, evaporated into nothing.

I don’t mean to suggest that people need romance to be fulfilled. In truth, I don’t believe that partnership is inherently better than singlehood. As a society, we’ve been moving toward this point for decades: where marriage is not a prerequisite for social and financial survival, where we have other sources of purpose and community, where there are many different ways to live a good life.

Yet now that we’re here, the reality doesn’t feel quite so triumphant. If the dream was more equal partnerships—born from love rather than necessity, freedom rather than convention—what many of us got was no partnership at all, and a feeling that it was eternally out of reach. Those getting ever closer to 40, especially, tend to feel a particular sense of impending loss. Those are the years when the average unpartnered person struggles most with singlehood, Geoff MacDonald, a University of Toronto psychologist, told me. (“It’s like—Everybody find a lifeboat,” he said.) It’s a period of acute open-endedness, when people are trying to figure out what to prioritize, how to plan for the future, which dreams are worth pursuing and which have to be sacrificed. For women who want to have biological children, it’s also when time is running out.

One 39-year-old I talked with, a woman who works in film, told me she felt like she was on a “precipice.” She was weighing having kids and knew the clock was ticking. She’d had a great time on a Feels weekend getaway, and although she hadn’t formed a lasting romantic connection, she’d made friends; they chat in a WhatsApp group about their dating highs and lows. Her life is full. Still, she said, “the world is burning. I would really like to be able to go through that with someone.”

I wanted that for her, and for myself. Or, at least, I wanted to understand why we weren’t finding what we wanted. So I did what I know how to do: I reported. I interviewed dozens of researchers and single people across the country, endured a series of curious but fruitless dating events, and bravely subjected myself to some actual dates. The romance slump, I found, is a product of broader trends: souring gender relations, a transformed economy, the unevenness of social progress, and technology that both connects and isolates us. Millions of individual heartaches are rewriting the love story we’ve told ourselves for centuries.

Just to be clear: I’m not nostalgic for how things used to be. For much of human history, romance was incidental. Marriage was typically a practical arrangement: a way to unite families and consolidate resources. In the Industrial Age, young people began relocating to cities for work and enjoyed newfound independence and leisure time; courtship moved from the family parlor to the dance hall. But women still didn’t have many pathways, other than marriage, to financial independence—or to sex. The fact that my great-grandmother got pregnant before she was married, at the beginning of the 20th century, was such a source of family shame, never freely discussed, that my mother felt its dark shadow when she was growing up in the 1950s and ’60s.

That was the peak-marriage era, when almost 90 percent of women in the U.S. were married before they turned 25. Even as second-wave feminism boomed, banks could still require a woman to obtain permission from her husband or a male relative to get a home loan or apply for a credit card. In 1965, birth control was legalized, but only for married couples. A few years later, my mother, who was living with her boyfriend at the time, wore a fake wedding ring—a plastic one from a gumball machine—to her doctor appointment to request the pill.

Beginning in the ’70s, though, wider access to contraception and abortion began to curb shotgun weddings, and more women entered college and the workforce. Stigmas around singlehood and queer relationships loosened. The nuclear-family model, once such a source of gravity, lost some of its pull. The decline of marriage could also be called the rise of choice—especially for women, Philip N. Cohen, a University of Maryland sociologist, told me. “The 1950s family could not even reproduce itself for one generation,” he said. “They couldn’t even convince their children that this was the right way to arrange their lives. So it failed immediately.”

I came along in 1995: a lucky moment, in many ways. Growing up in the 21st century, I daydreamed not about whom I’d marry but about what fabulous career path I’d choose. (In elementary school I made business cards that said PSYCHOLIGIST: GOT A PROBLEM? CALL ME! and distributed them on the playground.) When my grandmother was widowed in her 50s, her friends—all couples—stopped calling her; it wasn’t proper for them to socialize with a single woman. When my mother got divorced in her 50s, she wasn’t abandoned by her friends, but she was always aware of her single status in a social snow globe of married people. I’m 31 now, and most of the people in my circle are single; quite a few of them have never been in a relationship. I spent this past Valentine’s Day on a beach in Mexico with two of my best friends.

And yet, for many people, singlehood is at once eminently normal and entirely unwanted. Even an unhappily single person, Cohen said, is a sign of progress; at least they haven’t been forced to partner with someone they don’t want to be with. But that’s like telling someone with a cavity to be grateful for modern dentistry: completely correct and a little annoying.

In interviews, people kept saying they knew they ought to make time for romance, but then when would they see their friends or travel or exercise or get ahead at work? Dating has always entailed some hardship, but it used to be the norm to find love in everyday life—at the office, at church, at a party. People didn’t need to choose what to step away from. Now many of the quirks of modern life have made meeting organically in person less likely. More people are tucked away at home, working remotely, streaming TV, and having food delivered to their door; approaching strangers feels fraught when so many of us are used to flirting via text with people who have already “liked” us. So we depend on the apps even as we resent them. Dating becomes another responsibility to squeeze in, “like you’re scheduling a job interview,” Sarah Boyle, a 29-year-old public defender in Chicago, told me. “Oh, let me pencil in this date for three weeks from now with this stranger from the internet.”

Modern romance requires a toll, in other words, paid in energy, in sanity, in cash, in hours—and not everyone can afford it. One 2025 study—which, I feel obliged to report, is called “Making (Enough for) Love”—found that the higher someone’s income, the more likely they were to enter into a relationship, or simply to feel ready for one. You might protest that coupling is actually a savvy financial move; indeed, it was once common for partners to marry first, then pool resources and work toward stability together. But sociologists today say that marriage is seen by many as a capstone—a trophy that people feel prepared for only after they’ve paid off debts, settled into a steady job, or saved enough to buy a house or have kids. Over the past 50 years, job security and stable hours have become scarcer, said Kristen Harknett, a UC Berkeley sociologist. That means traditional milestones are harder to reach—and tying your livelihood to someone else’s can feel like a liability rather than an advantage.

On top of all this, COVID-19 triggered a “pandemic dating recession,” according to the Stanford sociologist Michael J. Rosenfeld. From 2017 to 2022, the number of single adults in the U.S. rose by about 5 percent (more than 13 million people), mostly because young people weren’t meeting as frequently as before. Americans, mired in uncertainty, have lost faith that the old sources of stability—the economy, marriage, one another—will deliver them to solid ground. And mistrust and instability are bad for romance.

I talked with plenty of researchers about numbers and theories, but I wanted to hear how this really feels—and not just for my Lonely Hearts Club. So I created an informal survey to pass around to single people, asking how they approached dating (or didn’t), how set they were on finding a partner, how that fit in with other life goals, and whether they were hopeful about finding love. I heard back from men, women, and nonbinary people, queer and straight, ages 23 to 49, living in places such as Oklahoma City; Atlanta; Pittsburgh; Bowling Green, Ohio; and Portland, Oregon. I talked with people from different race and class backgrounds. And what I heard was that a lot of them are tired.

Dating is “just a series of constant blows to whatever self-confidence I had,” said Keith Causin, a 42-year-old straight man from Queens. “It’s low-key soul destroying.”

“People are very commitment-resistant and it’s contagious,” a queer 27-year-old from New Jersey said. “Being alone and lonely and wanting is safer than risking being put through emotional distress. I think romancing myself, treating myself kindly, doing nice things alone like taking myself on a date and treating myself, has yielded better results.”

“I’m a part of the generation of Disney girls who were groomed from birth that our Prince Charming was coming, and unfortunately, I still believe that,” wrote one 26-year-old woman in Los Angeles who’d been single her whole adult life, though she’d been diligently dating for years.

Olivia Medina, another 26-year-old in Los Angeles, said that, at the beginning of 2020, she’d been excited about a budding relationship with one of her college classmates. Then she had to spend her entire senior year online. By the time the world returned to relative normality, her priorities had shifted. “I had basically created a whole new hierarchy of what’s important,” Medina said. “And dating was so low because I had gotten so used to just spending time with my friends and doing things that I like, for me.”

When the need for romance is low and the toll is steep, some give up. Others hold out for a partnership dreamy enough to justify the search. Again and again, people explained that their lives weren’t lacking, and they would only carve out space in their days for someone who made them giddy. Having expectations this high is a magnificent historical novelty. The hard part is finding someone who can meet them.

Joanna Davidson, a Boston University anthropologist, was living in a village in Guinea-Bissau when she began to notice a particular kind of run-down house. Kungomaku, she learned, were the structures women moved into after their husbands died and their homes were torn down—a custom among the Jola ethnic group predominant in the region. The widows either borrowed rice paddies or begged for food. Yet fewer and fewer of them were willing to remarry, she determined, and the number of kungomaku kept growing. “You sit and suffer under the punishment of your husband,” one woman told her. “When he dies, why would you go get punished by another man?”

When Davidson relayed all of this at an American Anthropological Association conference in Washington, D.C., the air felt charged with recognition. A room full of researchers could chart, from their own fieldwork, the depth of women’s dissatisfaction. So Davidson and Dinah Hannaford, a University of Houston anthropologist, sent out a call for contributions for what would become their 2022 book, Opting Out: Women Messing With Marriage Around the World. Their inboxes flooded with case studies from countries rich and poor.

In Botswana, they heard, many children are raised within networks of single women and their kin. (Only about 4,500 Botswanans married in 2024, out of a population of 2.5 million.) They learned about women in South Korea who had delayed marriage to take care of aging family members—then realized, looking around at the men in their lives, that they had no regrets. Hannaford wrote about women in Senegal marrying men who live abroad, or becoming a man’s third or fourth wife, in the hopes of evading both the public disgrace of singlehood and the practical, emotional, and sexual labor of a typical union. Nine out of 10 people worldwide, the anthropologists pointed out, live in a country with falling marriage rates. The specific challenges varied by location, but all over the globe, women were fed up. “Embedded throughout this volume,” Davidson and Hannaford wrote in their introduction, “is the seeming ubiquity of generally disappointing men.”

Call it a supply problem. Some researchers think that the great romance slump has been caused largely by a shortage of “marriageable men.” But, to be fair to men, the old standards of success have become harder to achieve. In the United States, steady, well-paying blue-collar jobs have been all but decimated, and fewer men than women are earning the college degrees that have become almost a prerequisite for financial stability. The percentage of 25-to-54-year-old American men who are neither working nor seeking employment quadrupled over the past 70 years. A vanishing portion can single-handedly support a family, or offer a partner any sense of security. More college-educated women have begun marrying men without a degree, picking off the high earners among them. This means that women without a degree are, in turn, left with fewer prospects—and their marriage rates are plummeting, especially in areas where men face higher rates of joblessness and incarceration.

Meanwhile, a lot of men are feeling painfully inadequate. It’s not that money is the only thing a man can offer; after all, fewer women need a breadwinner now. But researchers told me that the qualities women now value more than ever—sensitivity, openness, communication skills—are not typically ingrained in men from childhood. And although men strive to meet those modern expectations, the old standards haven’t disappeared. Men are supposed to pay for dinner but also treat women as equals; to initiate flirty banter but never be creepy or aggressive; to be sturdy and masculine but also empathetic and thoughtful. Arthur, a 46-year-old in New Jersey who responded to my survey, said that he’s dated women who think he’s too nice. One explained that she broke up with him because he has “dad energy.” (“I’m not 100 percent sure what that means,” Arthur told me, “but I’m guessing it’s not very sexy.”) Another said she liked how sweet and supportive he was, yet also wanted him to be more decisive—to be “the man” in the relationship, as Arthur saw it. He wasn’t sure how to exhibit both traits at once.

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Other men I spoke with felt like the romantic odds were stacked against them, especially on dating apps. They had the sense that women were drowning in matches, while they were sending “likes” into the void. “I feel like I’m being rejected by 4 million women at once,” Causin, the man from Queens, told me. The guys I talked with described men as demoralized schmucks and women as thriving girlbosses—the rule-setters, the winners, and the prize. The ones who want romance but do not need it.

But that idea makes women sound a lot more powerful and liberated than they really are, as a whole. Women may be going to college at higher rates, but they still make less, on average, than men with a comparable education in the same field of study. In the typical married or cohabiting straight couple, women still do much more of the domestic labor—even when the woman is the breadwinner.

Kris Swiatocho, who ministers to single Christians, hears from many young women who are so exasperated by their search for romance that they are losing hope. They tell her versions of “I’m meeting a lot of guys who still live at home at 27. And they’re gamers. And that’s all they’re interested in doing.” Allie Hoffman has noticed that many of the younger men at The Feels events seem “relationally underdeveloped”—particularly Gen Z men, who have grown up in front of screens. They want connection but, when confronted with women’s expectations, they can feel underequipped and overwhelmed.

The women I interviewed didn’t seem picky so much as pessimistic, and burned out on bad behavior. One had flown to visit a guy who was drunk for most of her stay, brushed off his neighbor calling her a “piece of ass,” and then, soon after she returned home, texted her that they were “never going to be together long-term.” Another woman had fallen for a co-worker with whom she was getting dinner two to four times a week—and who turned out to be seriously dating someone else. A lot of stories were less dramatic: tales of confusion and quiet disappointment, featuring men who couldn’t seem to express or even decide what they wanted.

Most women, I think, know that good men are out there. But I don’t blame them for growing cynical about the chances of finding one. The feminist progress of the past half century has been met with a virulent backlash of misogyny. Nearly 60 percent of Gen Z men say that their country has “gone so far in promoting women’s equality that we are discriminating against men,” according to a 2025 Ipsos poll of 30 countries, including the United States. Jessica Calarco, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, said that many of her students’ brothers watch videos of the manosphere influencer Andrew Tate, who has argued that women are the property of their husband, and who has been accused of rape, assault, and human trafficking (allegations he denies). If that’s what they’re seeing within their own family, why should they trust a stranger from an app?

Hannah Tessler, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan, has studied the factors that influence whether singles value romantic partnership. In interviews, she found that most young male participants hadn’t considered in much detail how they’d split household labor if they married or had kids with a partner; they weren’t really expecting to make sacrifices. Young women, meanwhile, were weighing their choices accordingly. Some wanted a partnership only if it was truly equal. “I don’t want to sign up to be somebody else’s, you know, caregiver, mom, maid, sex robot, nanny, therapist, etc.,” Tessler summarized. Other women were willing to do just that, if it meant they could have a family.

Gigi Gayle, a 44-year-old in Chicago, has been considering these sorts of trade-offs. She’s not someone you’d expect to be looking for a more traditional arrangement. She’s a college graduate who owns a marketing company in the nightclub industry and co-owns a counseling center. But she got tired of relationships in which she worked full-time and split the bills—and the men wanted her to cook, clean, and generally act like a “counselor,” as she put it, “giving them advice, building them back up.” So now, she’s decided to try leaning into being “more submissive.” She wants a provider, someone who’ll make her feel cared for. First, she’ll have to find him—and she’s not having any luck.

Gayle’s story reminded me of something else I’d heard. Carrie Rappaport-Zaken, a Manhattan therapist, said that many of her single female clients have been reading The Rules, a dating guide that was published in 1995 (and was seen as retrograde even back then), because romance influencers are recommending it. “Don’t overwhelm him with your career triumphs,” the book advises. “Try to let him shine.” Rappaport-Zaken finds it unnerving: all these smart, successful clients waiting for men to pursue them, trying to appear soft and undemanding—all in deference to a book so old that it warns women not to call a man’s landline. But she understands why a blueprint like this is appealing. Plenty of her clients have tried going boldly after what they want, only to find that this turns men away.

I kept encountering the same weary nostalgia: for setups and meet-cutes, for steady jobs and gender norms. Some people I interviewed wished openly for more rules and fewer choices. When the present feels hostile to romance, and the future is frightening or unknowable, can you blame people for looking to the past?

In the months following The Feels, I attended five other dating events across Brooklyn and Manhattan. I met countless jaded veterans of the New York singles’ circuit—who regularly showed up to similar affairs, or frequented the same one. I chatted with a man who said he’d been to so many that he’d had to institute a rule for himself: five months between each, so as not to lose his mind. Later, when I recounted my observations to a friend, he said it reminded him of when he’d been looking for an apartment and kept seeing the same people on tours.

One event, at a dimly lit Tribeca bar, was smushed next to a happy hour for real-estate and land-use experts. Attendees were given glowing colored wristbands. “Purple talk to purple! Red talk to yellow!” the emcee called out, and then she spoon-fed us icebreaker questions such as “Who is your celebrity crush?” and “What’s your dream date?” I went to two events—a straight one in the Financial District and a (better-dressed) queer one in Bushwick—where presenters used PowerPoint to pitch their single friends to the crowd. At yet another, in Williamsburg, people much braver than me pitched themselves to the room. One guitarist crooned a song she’d written about herself; another did a stand-up routine about how she’s “American ugly,” meaning only men from other countries find her attractive. The host joked that we were all too hot to need an event like this, so our personalities must be terrible.

At the self-presentation event, I sat with a man who shared a sprawling list of deal-breakers (pixie cuts and lack of physical fitness among them) and then proudly described himself as nonjudgmental. During a speed-dating night at a diner-like bar in Bushwick, I held court at my assigned booth while men rotated through the spot opposite me. I had only three minutes with each—but as I’d learned at The Feels, three minutes can last a long time. When I gently pushed back against one man’s theory about the romance slump—The problem is that when women talk to one another about men, they start to hate them—he changed the subject: “What’s your favorite animal?”

It’s hard to know when to get off the dating merry-go-round. Some people view the romance toll as an investment in their future self. On dating apps, you can always keep putting in the work, swiping and messaging and grabbing drinks and swiping again. The volume of potential matches is enormous, and so is the amount of time required to investigate each one, with no guarantees of success. The more you try, the more you want things to work out, and the less sure you become that they will.

Others refuse to pay the toll; they delete the apps and hope love will find them. Margot Bracke, a doctoral student in sociology at the University of Antwerp, said she no longer asks study participants if they are “actively” looking for a partner; the question that resonates more is whether they are “open” to a relationship. And many have simply made peace with not being in one, her colleague Elise ’t Hoen told me.

In this last category is Treasure Saunders, a 39-year-old who spent years in a string of serious relationships, during which she worked full-time, handled the housework, and took care of her three kids. She always seemed to lose her sense of self. When she decided she was done, she needed “husband money,” but without the husband. So she trained to become a technical engineer working on transportation infrastructure (“Lots of concrete and steel”). Then she used that salary to achieve a long-standing goal: purchasing a four-unit property, most of which she rents out. At first, without a partner, she was lonely. But she started spending time at a nearby union hall for construction tradespeople and getting close to her fellow UA Local 130 members—almost all men. “I have the big sweaters and the dirty jeans and the boots, and my hair is always a mess,” she said. “I kinda just settled right on in.” And her girlfriends are so precious to her that she is, in a certain way, in love with them. They take one another out to sushi dinners. They travel together. “I’m romantically involved with my friends,” she said, adding with a hoot of laughter: “And I use men for sex.”

In a perfect world, Saunders said, she wouldn’t be single. But this is her reality. I heard similar sentiments in other interviews. Arthur, not beating the dad-energy allegations, has decided to focus on being a good guy, a good employee, and a good uncle. Dating kept getting harder and harder, he said. After so much rejection, opening up to new people feels like asking to get hurt. So he’s said goodbye to the partner he’d once imagined. “It was like I lost a parent,” he told me. “But it’s like anything else, you know—you move on.” He’s been getting back in shape, learning new languages, and spending time with relatives in their 80s and 90s. He thinks—hopes—he’s becoming a better person.

Hoffman, the Feels founder, also once had a specific vision for her future: a soulmate, a brownstone, two kids. “I had it all figured out,” she said, “and then it didn’t happen.” In her late 30s, she realized that her dream life was just a dream; she could only know what was right in front of her. As she said this over Zoom, she started naming things around her—an orange, a water bottle—to indicate how literally she meant this. Her goal now is “total devotion to reality.” The Feels asks participants to be in the moment together, paying attention to their bodies and their breathing. If romance follows, great. But she’s often said that the events aren’t just about partnership—they’re about connection, “embodiment,” the chance to “emote.”

Hoffman acknowledges that this philosophy is a tough sell for women who want kids—especially those in their late 30s to early 40s. At Feels events, that’s the population that arrives with the most palpable anxiety. Because so many men date down in age, she said, women in that bracket are left with a “portion of the portion” of male prospects that is “excruciatingly small.” In my interviews, too, baby-longing was the great dividing line. The aspiring parents tended to feel most stressed.

I will confess, now, that I am among the ones with no chill. After searching for nearly a decade, I met someone at a wedding almost two years ago who made romance feel unexpectedly easy. We’re a nine-hour train ride apart, but I grew accustomed to the Amtrak caprese sandwich. We said “I love you” eight months in, which felt positively retro compared with my previous interminable, communication-free situationships. But he doesn’t want kids, and I’m pretty sure I do. So here I am in my 30s, in a long-distance open relationship with him and somehow also back on the merry-go-round: running straight from work to meet strangers in bars across Brooklyn, prepared for another perfectly nice evening that will ultimately lead nowhere.

Of course, people have kids without a partner all the time. In 2024, 40 percent of all babies in the U.S. were born to unmarried women—eight times the share in 1960. A growing number of men are deciding to become single dads. Batya Novick, a therapist who works with people facing reproductive challenges, is seeing more single clients who want to discuss egg freezing or IVF; she hears so much about their romantic lives, or lack thereof, that she’s become a de facto dating coach. Solo parenting, though, is rarely Plan A. Raising a kid without a teammate is difficult, expensive, and sometimes lonely.

So some people are looking for creative Plan Bs. In 2011, Ivan Fatovic created a website called Modamily for people in search of a partner—not necessarily a romantic one—to have a child with. Fatovic was 35 when he realized that there might be demand for such a service; his female friends were starting to worry about their biological clocks, and their dating lives weren’t going anywhere. “Maybe the person that you have children with,” he said, “is not the person that you grow old with.” Modamily now has more than 120,000 users, and it’s led to more than 1,000 babies being born, according to Fatovic.

Through Fatovic, I got in touch with Zachary Sahuque and Amanda Lohse, who have two children together from IVF, and are considering using their frozen embryos for a third. When they met on Modamily in 2019, they were both single and antsy to have kids. Lohse was 40 and preparing to have a child on her own, but figured she’d give the site a shot. After vetting each other for a few months, talking about God and ethics and parenting styles, they decided they could work well as co-parents. They’d both been through some painful romantic experiences and thought this way might be cleaner—avoiding the great rush of feelings and the disappointment when they fade. Sahuque hoped for what many of us consider a second-best-case scenario: “We’ll be like a happily divorced couple.”

In that sense, their dream came true. They’ve become close friends. With their two boys, they go on vacations, spend holidays together, and have the occasional family dinner. Sahuque is grateful for how dedicated Lohse is to the kids; Lohse is happy to have a co-parent at all, but especially someone so warm, who has never made their situation feel awkward. Listening to them, I started imagining that I, too, might find someone on Modamily.

But then I realized, with a sinking feeling, that as unconventional as Sahuque and Lohse’s setup is, they still follow traditional gender roles. They reside on his 55-acre ranch in Price, Texas, but she and the kids live in a mobile home on the property. He travels constantly for work, and she balances child care and a full-time teaching job. He’s dated since they had kids, but she rarely has the time. And although the women Sahuque has dated seem charmed by their unusual parenting arrangement, she told me, the men she’s met seem threatened by it. “There’s just something that draws women to men who are actively involved in their kids’ lives,” she said. But “a woman with two little kids is more of a burden than a benefit.” I felt like I’d burst through a new door only to find myself in the same room.

We’re living in a strange in-between time. Women have gained enough agency to work outside the home, but many still lack equality within it. Men could benefit from a new set of gender norms, but much of American culture embraces the old ones. People can do without romance, but what are they replacing it with? The anthropologist Dinah Hannaford’s concern, after seeing women around the globe “opt out” in different ways, is that single Americans are encouraged to find meaning in professional gain, wellness, and self-actualization—individual pursuits rather than collective ones. In the past decade or so, happiness rates have declined precipitously for unmarried adults—regardless of education level—much more so than for those who are married, Yifeng Wan, a researcher at the University of Virginia, has found. In that sense, singlehood is getting harder, even as it’s less stigmatized. Perhaps that’s because faith groups, civic organizations, and other communities play a less central role in American life than they once did. These networks used to buffer against isolation and economic displacement—the thorns of modern life that make partnership more valuable yet love more difficult to find.

One of the things that makes us human, the anthropologist Joanna Davidson told me, is that we can envision alternative futures. But first, we must look frankly at the present. The women she and Hannaford featured in Opting Out weren’t part of an orchestrated revolution against marriage. Most of them still valued romance; they didn’t experience singlehood as “unequivocally liberating,” the authors wrote. They simply made choices within their given constraints. This was Allie Hoffman’s credo, in a way: “total devotion to reality.” Yet when enough people veer from tradition—if only to inch their own life forward—a social movement begins.

I’m not sure where this one is leading us. But I feel hopeful when I think back to my first interview with Kris Swiatocho, the singles minister. (“Jesus was single,” she likes to remind congregants.) In her 20s, she said, she’d hopped from boyfriend to boyfriend; she was in debt, drinking and partying to try to fill “the well”—the empty place within her. Her parents’ church didn’t have any single members around her age. But then she learned about a group called Singles Offering Life to Others, or SOLO, and that’s where she found her sense of purpose. Now she tours the country teaching church leaders, who are mostly married fathers, how to engage the growing number of single people they need to fill their pews. “I do this,” she said, “because I see me everywhere out there.”

I found it curious, though, that despite living such a rich, full life as a single person, she urges congregants not to give up on romance. So I asked about the discrepancy. Swiatocho still believes in the beauty of partnership, she said. But she doesn’t think that she’ll find it anytime soon, and she’s content with what’s in front of her. She talks with single friends sometimes—half joking, half serious—about buying tiny homes, parking them somewhere, and making a DIY retirement village. Each night they would gather around a firepit, cook dinner, and talk about their day. It’s a tribute to reality and also an exercise in imagination. Sounds pretty romantic to me.

This article appears in the September 2026 print edition with the headline “The Great Romance Slump.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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