Why are fertility rates at an all-time low? Since the figures for England and Wales were released last week, we’ve heard the same old theories. The cost of living means that couples can’t afford to start a family. Career-hungry women are eschewing children. Childcare and house prices mean that families are reluctant to expand.
Yet these analyses ignore a key group: those who would like to have children with a partner but are single. In a 2021 survey of women who were “childless by circumstance”, of those women who wanted children but had not tried to have them, four in 10 said this was because of the lack of a partner. Which leads us to a hidden factor in the decline in fertility: a crisis in modern dating.
That crisis is threefold. First, there are the apps, which many now depend on to find a partner. About 4.4 million people in the UK use them, up from 3.1 million users in 2017. Tinder, the world’s highest-grossing dating app, boasts of having created 55bn “matches” – but as I have reported, there’s mounting evidence that these apps are designed to be addictive – to retain users in order to create revenue and sell services to desperate daters. If they worked as they claim to, they would lose two customers every time a lasting relationship was formed. Instead, dating apps in 2024 have the same powerful siren call as any other endless feed of scrollable smartphone content.
A match is a chat, and a chat is an obligation, a to-do, an appointment booked in, a whole evening swallowed up. This explains the phenomenon of so many people now matching on dating apps without ever bothering to chat or meet in real life.
And when they do meet, they’re often disappointed. Apps can filter based on age, religion, education or location, but they cannot predict or match people based on chemistry. Without the subtleties of attraction – a person’s scent, gait, tone of voice, giddy laugh, twinkly eyes – every first date from an app is an emotionally blind date.
If dating apps are so expensive, addictive and disappointing, why not quit them? This leads us to the second problem in dating, which is that “real life” dating is also broken.
Anyone who quits the apps and ventures “into the wild” is confronted with a culture in which making “cold approaches” is rare, if not frowned upon. Next time you step out on to the street, count how many people are staring at their smartphones, and then subtract them from the number of encounters that might have happened had those people allowed their eyes to meet the eyes of strangers.
For women dating men, there’s another factor, too: post-#MeToo, some men feel uncertain about making romantic advances to women in real life for fear of intimidating them, being a nuisance or appearing creepy. Many I have spoken to say they’ve heard the message loud and clear, that it is not acceptable to chat up women at the gym, in the workplace or on public transport.
In the past year or so there has been a raft of reports about people “quitting the apps” (in spite of which, dating apps’ revenue continues to climb). It’s easy to assume that this means daters are once again finding romantic relationships as effortlessly and serendipitously as Hugh Grant might spill orange juice on Julia Roberts in a Notting Hill market. But it’s not quite so simple. Real-life singles events such as supper clubs and mixers have indeed been springing up in reaction to the dire dating-app landscape. Yet anecdotally, many of them are poorly attended by men, with female tickets to some selling out in seconds.
And some people are quitting not just the apps, but dating as a whole. This is borne out by the Pew Research Center in the US which, unlike the UK, does amass granular data on the single person demographic. In 2022 researchers found that almost 60% of single Americans were not looking for a relationship. Would-be daters have chosen to forgo the humiliation, rejection and emotional pummelling altogether.
The third factor in the dating crisis is that it is unacknowledged. The stigma of loneliness and the shame of feeling “romantically unchosen” means that millions of daters are privately wondering: “Is it me?” when they continue to be unsuccessful in dating. But dating has never been easy, which is why the attitude from the non-dating public is: “Nothing to see here.”
Yet in the last 10 years, dating has become more difficult. And the effects of this are playing out. Loneliness has been declared a global public health concern by the World Health Organization. People are having less sex. Single-sex friendship clubs are booming, with the London Lonely Girls Club trebling in members from 10,000 to more than 30,000 in a year.
Young people are the loneliest demographic – lonelier than pensioners. According to Pew, 60% of men under 30 in the US are single. Incidentally, 18- to 24-year-olds make up on average 40% of global users of the popular dating apps Tinder, Hinge and Bumble. People aged between 25 and 34 are their second largest user base, making up 30%.
To solve the dating crisis, society must acknowledge the unprecedented difficulties that single people face in finding relationships, thanks to a technology barely a decade old. Regulators should investigate consumers’ rights and online harms caused by dating apps. And we have to relearn how to talk to each other in real life, and remember that it starts with a conversation – not a swipe.
Siân Boyle is a freelance journalist
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