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The Last Eighteen Months Were Not a Verdict on You
In February a report landed with a title that reads like a weather warning. The Dating Recession.
It came from the Wheatley Institute at Brigham Young University, with the Institute for Family Studies. The authors are Alan Hawkins, Brian Willoughby, Jason Carroll and Brad Wilcox.
Under it sits a national survey from 2025. Five thousand two hundred and seventy-five unmarried Americans, aged twenty-two to thirty-five.
Thirty percent of them are dating anybody at all. Casually, seriously, either way. Thirty percent.
Thirty-one percent go on a date once a month or more. That is thirty-six percent of the men and twenty-six percent of the women.
Seventy-four percent of the women had either not dated in the past year or barely had. So had sixty-four percent of the men.
Sit with the size of that. Three quarters of the women in a national sample went a year with almost nothing.
Which changes how you read your own last eighteen months, if you let it. The stretch you have been treating as a verdict on you is the ordinary weather nearly everyone is standing in.
You did not miss a window. You did not price yourself out. You did not get left behind by people who were doing it better.
The report asked why, too. Fifty-two percent named money as the main obstacle. Forty-nine percent said they lack confidence in their own dating ability.
And fifty-five percent said a past breakup had made them reluctant to try again.
Hold that one. More than half of a national sample is carrying somebody, the way you are carrying somebody, and it is keeping them out of the room.
Here is the number that complicates the gloom. Eighty-six percent still expect to marry one day. They are not dating and they have not stopped wanting it.
So the thing that looks like a private verdict is a national holding pattern. Holding patterns break.
Not all at once, and not on any schedule a person could hand you. They break anyway, and they tend to break for the people who kept their standards intact while they waited.
The room you keep thinking you were not picked for is standing mostly empty. That is not a reason to want less. It is a reason to stop reading the empty room as a message about you.
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