How Modern Society Created A Dating Crisis

Nearly three out of four Gen Z singles say they want to get married, but 70% of them aren't actively dating. There's obviously some sort of disconnect here. I haven't been on the dating scene in more years than a lady will tell, but I'm looking around at the dating scene for my younger friends and my kids wondering, what is this hellscape? Marriage is one of life's greatest adventures, a source of the deepest insights. Suffering and joys. And it's heartbreaking when we see our friends and children give up on what, for the last few generations, has been the normal way of finding a spouse.

More disturbing, there's a growing resentment I hear among Gen Z, the feeling that they've been robbed of something their parents and grandparents enjoyed. If you don't form families, you don't have politics, you don't have a public square or any safety. But the government. It's just me and the warmth of collectivism. So, what happened to dating, mating, and marriage? Are we living in totally unprecedented times? Or could past generations still have something to say to today's loveless landscape?

The dating dearth is a crisis long in the making. In 2000, doctors Leon and Amy Cass edited a massive anthology on courtship, dating, and marriage in the West. It's called Wing to Wing, Ore to Ore, 10 out of 10. I highly recommend it. In their intro, they warned that in the postmodern world, image and opinion makers had interposed themselves between dating and real life. And what are those theories that keep the birds and the bees from doing their thing? Well, you can probably list a few.

The sexual revolution, a practical androgyny in public and private life, the normalization of divorce, infidelity, pornography, sodomy, masturbation, and abortion, the rise in geographic mobility, and the weakening of family ties, and the rise of youth worship and the myth of the soulmate. It is a perfect storm. But there's another factor that lurks behind the obvious. Americans are a people formed, for better or for worse, in ideals of rugged individualism and increasing secularism and personal judgment. Dr. Leon Kass observes, The courtship and marriage of people who see themselves as self-sufficient, rights-bearing individuals will be decisively different from the courtship and marriage of people who are not self-sufficient.

Understand themselves, say, unavoidably incomplete and dependent children of the Lord, who have been enjoined to be fruitful and multiply. In an increasingly atomized society, the traditional Christian pillars of marriage, permanence, exclusivity, indissolubility, and children no longer just go without saying. The end determines the means, and, having lost the purpose of dating, marriage, today's kids are increasingly adrift about how to date at all. The rise of no-fault divorce is one of the most obvious culprits. It's really hard to pursue a project as crazy, intense, and all-consuming as marriage, when your experience of it is that it didn't last, even for good people.

One study of older Gen Z adults found that roughly 42% had experienced their parents' divorce or separation during childhood. But broken homes aren't the only current that Gen Zers are swimming against when it comes to dating and mating.

Gen Z is profoundly asocial generally, not just when it comes to love. Just compare an 18-year-old today with an 18-year-old in the 1960s. Not only do they date significantly less, if at all, but they're less likely to attend church, to volunteer, hold a job, and much more likely to be very, very lonely. The human community that used to be the context for finding, wooing, and winning a wife is so fragmented that young people often find themselves alone in any context, and romance is another victim.

Technology has been a massive driver here. The smartphone social media era has commodified love to the extreme. Even kids who are online hoping to be found so they can date in real life are aware that every text, DM, and like is also being tracked, analyzed, and monetized. Social media posting infuses every coffee date with the same gravitas as a marriage proposal. We got a coffee. Could he be the one? Many young adults say they use Instagram or TikTok as an informal dating profile, but social media platforms don't want Jack and Jill to live happily ever after.

There is only so much market for ballerina farms. See our video on tradwives. The internet made dating a disembodied public spectacle, and it has really messed us up when it comes to one of the primary incentives To date and get married. Sex. The Freudian idea that sexual restraint is unhealthy, coupled with the smartphone, handed young people unlimited access to pornography. Now, porn is not an abstract theory. It enters real homes and real relationships. Real people create it for real customers. It's addictive, it damages brains, and it warps our sexual expectations.

In a survey of 2,000 American men ages 18 to 29, more than 4 in 10 said they watched pornography regularly. More than 25% watch it every day. And if a young woman or man refuses to date someone who is using porn, as they absolutely should, that considerably narrows the pool of candidates. So, if smartphones are part of the problem, could they also be part of the solution? Well, Gen Z is willing to try. In 2024, an SSRS study indicated that over half of Gen Zers have ever used a dating website or app to find love.

Tinder gets over 1.6 billion swipes every day. But ever used is very different from currently using. Only 16% of young adults report currently using apps like Tinder, Bumble, or, new one for me, Plenty of Fish. Hinge's tagline is designed to be deleted, and it seems to deliver on that. In 2024, 65% of all dating apps downloaded were deleted within a month. Now, at least some of that was because users, about 35% of them, had success, and they didn't need to keep them.

But if you talk to Gen Z, the apps also just give them the ick. And for good reason. That app requires you to come looking for a commodity. When you create an account, you are told that the most successful users have a type, and you should be specific. Faced with dozens of potential mates' faces, users report rejecting or accepting dates primarily based on physical appearance or a set of characteristics, without ever interacting with the real person face-to-face. This method directly contradicts the most beautiful testament to marriage.

Ever given on the internet, Peter Kreeft, who had just lost his wife, gave young people this advice. What advice do you have someone watching this who's newly married or who is about to be? Do you think that when you are very old, and your wife is very old and ugly and wrinkled, And fat, and not very bright, or even nasty, that you will still find her beautiful. If so, marry her.

The last view I had of my wife in the nursing home. About an hour after she died, I fell in love with her again. Here is a wasted, emaciated, wrinkled, suffering body. It's as beautiful as a crucifix. The dating apps do not condition you to become that kind of a husband. They condition you to swipe. Gen Zers report being overwhelmed by choices, frustrated by long distance, and hobbled by the thought that maybe the next girl will be cuter, though. Too many options in the sense that if you're looking superficially, you're saying, oh, that girl that I met last night was attractive, but this one that just showed up with my Instagram feed is more attractive.

So, I'm no longer going to be very interested in the one last night because there's something better, and then there's something better. While the guy's search for Mrs. looks right, though, women are looking at a very different sort of metric. In his 2026 book, Generation Uncoupled, Daniel Cox argues that modern dating also disadvantages men, especially those without college degrees, because women's economic gains have not changed their expectation. That a man should provide. Men struggling financially face both weaker romantic prospects and the expenses of dating.

More than one in five women will not date someone who earns less than them. We only marry up girls. In Cox's account, dating apps intensify financial inequality among men. Wealth buys visibility, bespoke profiles, and impressive travel logs. While expanded competition concentrates women's attention on a shrinking pool of successful men. High-status males are the hands-down winners. They can pursue casual relationships while postponing commitment. This further weakens a monogamy-focused dating culture. Meanwhile, working-class men often have fewer opportunities to meet women through work and weaker social networks.

Viewing marriage as a reward for financial success further sidelines them. Society, however, has always measured men's romantic worth by income and status. Have you ever read Pride and Prejudice? The difference today is the feminization of the workforce. The pool of men who have more to offer women has shrunk considerably, but the expectations have not. At this point, it is no wonder that millions of kids are just giving up. Some kids are ready for a matchmaker. Matchmaker, matchmaker, look through your book and make me a perfect match.

Our modern phenomena of marrying for love brings enormous benefits, but it also puts enormous pressure on young people to reinvent everything for themselves. And older generations, they feel, haven't got anything to say about the situation. We didn't have social media, or a digital footprint, or even texting. Even if our parents weren't together anymore, most of us had married grandparents to look up to. And I myself was beginning to despair of this episode until I came across a ladies' home journal from 1909 and discovered this is not the first generation to suffer a tech-inspired, culture-smashing romance revolution.

In fact, young people may be feeling bitter that the dating games their parents played seem so out of reach, but dating is actually a recent invention. Born out of urbanization and changing technology, namely the car. This means that for thousands of years, guys and gals found other ways to get hitched. In the early 1900s, dating was beginning to gradually replace America's original family-based calling system. The middle-class calling system, documented by Beth Bailey in 1988, followed a basic outline, although it did vary slightly from region to region.

When a girl reached the proper age, she became eligible to receive male callers. At first, her mother or guardian invited young men to call. Later, the young lady had more autonomy and could bestow an invitation to call on any unmarried man to whom she had been properly introduced at a private dance, dinner, or gathering. Any unmarried man invited owed his hostess, and thus her daughters, a duty call of thanks. Invited men were expected to call within two weeks, sit with the girl's family, and perhaps partake of a light refreshment, and talk with her mother or a sister.

Maybe, if things got really serious, he would even drive her home from church the next week in a buggy. Unwanted male attentions could in future be declined with a simple, she is not at home today. And the advent of the automobile and the urbanization of American life Drove the development of a new way of finding the one. Dating, or taking a girl out on the town, moved courtship out of the home and the family's implied supervision and into the anonymity of the public sphere.

As Bailey describes it, courtship among strangers offered couples more freedom, but access to the public world of the city required more money. Money, men's money, became the basis of the dating system. It fundamentally altered the balance of power between men and women who were pursuing marriage. And there are a few lessons to take away here. Dating in the car-based model had its benefits. It's fun. It can lead to really happy marriages based on passion and friendship. But it also was a system with some real drawbacks.

It required money, and like the dating apps, it favored alpha males. It's also isolating, and it leaves women more vulnerable to exploitation. But here's the thing. They figured it out then, and we will figure it out again. The world must be peopled! Gen Z may not feel like anyone understands them, but what we can do is rediscover the unchanging truths about a guy and a girl and forge new ways to get them together. First, we can bring back the yentas. Parents, married friends, churches, and parish communities should introduce young people to each other.

They should invite young adults over more, offer more regular third spaces where people can meet repeatedly. Without every encounter carrying the pressure of a romantic audition, a running club, a volunteer project, speed dating, dinner after mass, something that you actually have to show up for in your body. We can also encourage dating earlier. A high school coffee date does not need to be either a marriage discernment retreat or permission to play house. Guys, if you are on porn, get off porn.

And if you're out of shape, get in shape. Do the work. Read Ben Franklin's advice on dating. Watch Peter Kreeft. Sure, they didn't face the same challenges that you do today, but they shared the same vision of a good life. If you don't have a man in your life whose marriage inspires you, find a priest who will know a trustworthy married man. For the guys who have done all these things already, it's time to get in your reps. Just ask her out, and accept a no graciously.

You can survive an awkward conversation. Girls, if you are on social media, set your boundaries. The internet is forever, so cut out all the red flag activities like engaging with call-her-daddy man-haters. Drop the casual gossip and don't participate in female negativity orgies.

Spend time instead with married friends and their kids, and learn the ins and outs of real family life. Take advantage of the time of being single to volunteer, deepen your interior life, and grow your hobbies, interests, and personal faith. Discerning marriage means asking, do we share a worldview? Does this person have character? So, use this time to find your worldview. For the rest of us, we need to flip the script on marriage. Even good Christian kids from solid homes are swimming in a sea that prioritizes moving out, independence, career paths, wage earning, wealth building, travel, and years of fruitless serial dating.

Marriage today is seen as a capstone project at the end of a couple of decades of self-actualization. Not everyone finds a lifelong match early in life, but some do, and they should not feel like they have to figure out a mortgage first. What's missing for most kids is a lived experience of successful marriages that seem possible for them to achieve one day. Pairing up is intensely personal, so all the programming for singles in the world will not reverse the dating and mating crisis.

I am still convinced that this is the case. We all need to tap into our inner Yenta and introduce singles that we know, invite them over, and integrate them into our homes. Sure, we will make mistakes, and we will say the wrong things, but that is the messiness of human life, which is what getting the guys and girls together is all about.

If you liked this episode, be sure to subscribe to the LOOPcast. We bring you a new episode of The Deep every Thursday at 4 p.m. Eastern.