Somewhere along the way, “are you seeing anyone?” became a question half of single America answers with “not looking.” The internet calls it the dating recession. The data says it’s real, but the most viral number attached to it, the famous 63%, is actually two different statistics wearing one trench coat. Let me untangle them.
The short answer: 57% of single Americans are not looking for a relationship or even casual dates, and only about 1 in 3 single young adults in their prime dating years actively date. The often-quoted 63% is a different stat: 63% of men under 30 are single, versus 34% of women, a gap that deserves more scrutiny than it usually gets.
Every figure below names its survey and its population, because on this topic the populations get swapped mid-argument constantly. Sources at the bottom.
Table of contents · 8 sections
The Dating Recession: Editor’s Choice
- →57% of single Americans are not looking for a relationship or casual dates. (Pew Research Center)
- →Only 42% of singles are looking at all, down from 49% in 2019, a drop driven almost entirely by men.
- →Just 1 in 3 single young adults in their prime dating years actively date. (National survey data)
- →63% of men under 30 are single, vs 34% of women (Pew), but other surveys put the gap at 10–12 points, not 29.
- →47% of Americans say dating has gotten harder in the last decade. (Pew)
- →Over 40, the disinterest flips gender: 71% of single women vs 42% of single men say they aren’t interested in dating at all.
- →Active daters spend roughly $189–213 a month on dating. (Consumer finance surveys)
What percentage of Americans don’t date anymore?
Start with the base: about 31% of US adults are single. Here’s what that group says about dating:
1. 57% of single US adults are not looking for a committed relationship or casual dates.
The real headline number behind every “Americans quit dating” take. A majority of the single population, tens of millions of people, has deliberately parked itself outside the dating market. Not failed out of it: opted out.
2. The share of singles looking at all fell from 49% in 2019 to 42%, and men drove the drop.
Single men became 11 percentage points less likely to be looking over that stretch. One nuance the discourse misses: among singles, men still look MORE than women (about 50% vs 35%). Men just fell the fastest, while women were never as interested to begin with.
3. Only about 1 in 3 single young adults in their prime dating years actively date.
The 22–35 bracket, the demographic every app is built for, and two-thirds of its singles are functionally out of the market. When people say the dating pool feels empty, this is the statistic they’re feeling.
4. About 31% of all US adults are single, and singleness among young adults keeps climbing.
Single here means not married, not cohabiting, and not in a committed relationship. Combine the 31% base with the 57% not looking and you get the quiet math of this page: roughly 1 in 6 American adults is single and content to stay that way for now.
The famous 63%, fact-checked
The most viral dating statistic of the decade deserves the full treatment, because the internet has been quoting it wrong in two separate ways.
5. The real stat: 63% of US men under 30 describe themselves as single, vs 34% of women the same age.
A 29-point gender gap that launched a thousand think pieces. Note what it is NOT: it is not “63% of singles aren’t looking” (that number is 57%, measured on a different population), and the two get fused constantly, including in the top-ranking discussions for this exact search.
6. Other national surveys find the same gap at only 10–12 points, not 29.
The GSS has shown a roughly 10-point gender gap in young singleness for years, and the American Perspectives Survey measured the gap narrowing from 21 points in 2020 to 12 in 2022. When one survey shows triple the gap of the others, a data researcher’s eyebrow goes up.
7. A big chunk of the gap has a boring explanation: young women date older men.
Many “non-single” women aged 18–29 are partnered with men in their 30s, outside the surveyed bracket. Count both sides of those couples and the male surplus inside the bracket shrinks substantially. It doesn’t vanish, but the age-gap effect alone deflates a lot of the discourse.
8. The honest verdict: young men really are more single, by meaningfully less than the memes claim.
Every dataset agrees on the direction; they disagree on the size. A 10-to-29-point range with the truth likely in the middle is a real social shift worth taking seriously, and also about a third the size of the crisis being narrated on your feed.
Why people quit dating
The reasons are measured, and they split sharply by gender and age.
9. 47% of Americans say dating has gotten harder in the last ten years.
Nearly half the country agrees the game got worse. When asked why, the answers diverge: men most often point at apps and how impersonal the process became; women most often cite increased physical and emotional risk. Both are describing the same market from opposite ends of it.
10. Over 40, disinterest flips hard by gender: 71% of single women vs 42% of single men say they don’t want to date at all.
The stat that breaks the “men gave up” narrative. Among older singles, it’s women who have overwhelmingly closed the door, and the researchers note many describe their lives as full, not lacking. Opting out isn’t always defeat; sometimes it’s a verdict.
11. 27% of non-dating singles say the main reason is simply that they enjoy being single.
Alongside bigger priorities: careers, school, friendships, recovery from a past relationship. The recession framing implies failure; a quarter of the opted-out describe it as a preference.
12. Active daters spend roughly $189–213 per month on dating.
Call it $2,400 a year of drinks, dinners, rides, and subscriptions, against inflation and rents that already ate the budget. For plenty of younger singles, the market isn’t just emotionally expensive.
13. And the experience itself: about 3 in 4 people have been ghosted.
The everyday texture of modern dating, silence as the default ending, is documented across surveys and gets its own full page in my ghosting statistics. A market where most participants have been vanished on is a market people rationally hesitate to re-enter.
What the dating recession looks like downstream
When a third of prime-age singles date, the effects show up everywhere else on the timeline.
14. Roughly 1 in 3 men under 25 reported no sex in the past year, up from about 1 in 5 two decades ago.
The “sex recession” in one line, concentrated among young men, the same group leading the dating pullback. Young women show a rise too, just smaller. Less dating, measurably less intimacy.
15. Median age at first marriage has hit record highs: about 30 for men and 28–29 for women.
A decade later than the 1950s and still climbing. Marriage isn’t disappearing so much as migrating later in life, for those who still get there.
16. A record 25% of 40-year-olds have never been married.
One in four, the highest ever measured, up from 6% in 1980. Some will still marry; the researchers project a historic share won’t. This is the dating recession compounding into a marriage recession, one cohort at a time.
17. Inside relationships, frequency is falling too: partnered adults report less sex than the same groups did in the 1990s.
The pullback isn’t only at the market’s entrance. It runs all the way through, into marriages, a decline I documented in my sexless marriage statistics. Whatever is happening to American intimacy, it is not confined to the single.
Where the opted-out went
Sixty million singles didn’t vanish. The attention, the evenings, and the need to feel heard went somewhere, and part of it is measurable.
18. Over 65% of AI companion users are aged 18–24, and about 1 in 3 young men have chatted with a romantic AI.
The same cohort leading the dating pullback leads AI companion adoption, and companion apps now hold users about 92 minutes a day, longer than TikTok. Correlation isn’t causation, but the overlap is the single most striking pattern across my research pages, unpacked in my AI companion statistics.
19. The counterweight: research on singles-by-choice finds many are genuinely content, not defeated.
Decades of work on lifelong singles shows large numbers thriving: strong friendships, autonomy, full lives. The dating recession contains real loneliness and real contentment at the same time, and any story that tells only one half is selling something.
A generation didn’t stop wanting connection. It changed where it looks for it.
Fewer first dates, more late-night conversations with something that always answers. Measuring that shift is literally my job: I research the AI companion market and pay to test its apps myself. The numbers are in my AI girlfriend statistics, and the apps are compared side by side on my homepage.
Read the AI girlfriend statistics →Conclusion
So, what percentage of Americans don’t date anymore? A majority of singles, 57%, aren’t looking, only a third of prime-age singles actively date, and the famous 63% turns out to be a different statistic with an asterisk the memes never include. Behind it all: dating that costs more, feels riskier, ends in silence three times out of four, and increasingly loses to simply staying home.
My read as a data researcher: “Americans don’t date anymore” is the wrong headline. Americans stopped dating the way the apps wanted them to, and the market hasn’t offered them a better way yet. The number I’d watch isn’t the 57%; it’s the quiet split inside it, between the opted-out who are thriving and the opted-out who are just waiting for the market to deserve them again.
FAQs
What percentage of Americans don’t date anymore?
Among single US adults, 57% are not looking for a relationship or casual dates, and only about 1 in 3 single young adults in their prime dating years actively date. Since roughly 31% of US adults are single, that works out to about 1 in 6 American adults being single and out of the dating market by choice.
Why are 63% of young men single?
The Pew stat is real: 63% of men under 30 described themselves as single vs 34% of women. But other national surveys (GSS, American Perspectives Survey) put the gap at 10–12 points, and part of it reflects young women dating men over 30, outside the measured bracket. The honest answer: young men are meaningfully more single than young women, driven by later partnering, app-market dynamics, and a male-led retreat from looking, but the gap is smaller than the viral version.
What percentage of women over 40 are single?
By Pew’s measures: 17% of women aged 30–49 are single, rising to 30% at 50–64 and 39% at 65 and older. Notably, 71% of single women over 40 say they aren’t interested in dating at all, nearly double the rate of single men the same age.
Is there really a dating crisis in America?
There is a real, measurable dating recession: a majority of singles not looking, young-adult sexlessness up sharply, record-late marriage, and 47% saying dating got harder. Whether it’s a “crisis” depends on the person: about 27% of non-daters simply prefer single life, while others report genuine loneliness. The data supports both stories at once.
What percentage of 25-year-olds are single?
Pew doesn’t publish a single-year figure, but in the 18–29 bracket that contains them, 63% of men and 34% of women describe themselves as single, roughly half of young adults overall. By 30–49, singleness falls to 25% of men and 17% of women.
Sources
- Pew Research Center: 5 facts about single Americans. pewresearch.org
- Pew Research Center: Nearly half of US adults say dating has gotten harder. pewresearch.org
- Institute for Family Studies: There’s no huge gender gap in being single among young adults. ifstudies.org
- Survey Center on American Life: The enduring gender divide in American dating. americansurveycenter.org
- Psychology Today: Half of all single people just don’t want a relationship. psychologytoday.com
- US Census Bureau: Median age at first marriage.
- Pew Research Center: A record share of 40-year-olds have never been married.
- General Social Survey analyses: Young-adult sexual inactivity and frequency trends.
- Forbes: Pew singles survey findings summarized. forbes.com