Most unmarried young Americans say they want to get married one day, yet the vast majority are barely dating. A major new national study finds just 31% of unmarried adults ages 22 to 35 date once a month or more, exposing what researchers are calling a “dating recession” at the heart of prime relationship years.
The gap between aspiration and action
The 2026 report examines contemporary dating trends using the 2025 National Dating Landscape Survey, a nationally representative sample of 5,275 unmarried young adults ages 22, 35 in the United States. The State of Our Unions report is an annual report produced by the Wheatley Institute at Brigham Young University and the Institute for Family Studies on the health of marriage and family life in America.
The 2026 report examined contemporary dating trends using the 2025 National Dating Landscape Survey; 86% of respondents said they expect to marry someday. When asked how often they were dating, only 31% of young adults, a quarter of women (26%) and a little more than a third of men (36%), reported that they were active daters, defined as dating once a month or more.
Nearly three-quarters of women (74%) and nearly two-thirds of men (64%) reported they had not dated, or had dated only a few times, in the last year.
That discrepancy between stated goals and day-to-day behavior is the report’s central and most striking finding.
About half (51%) of respondents reported they were single but interested in starting a relationship, although this was much more the case for men (60%) than for women (47%). That asymmetry, the report suggests, may itself be a source of friction in the dating market, with men and women calibrating differently when it comes to readiness and initiative.
Low resilience, high reluctance
Many young adults lack the needed skills for dating and the resilience to handle the natural ups and downs of relationship starts and stops along the journey of dating. The report found that only about a quarter of respondents (28%) said they can stay positive after a bad date or relationship setback.
More than half (55%) agreed that their breakups had made them more reluctant to begin new romantic relationships.
The report concludes there is a gap between young adults’ marital expectations and their dating skills. “What the 2026 State of Our Unions report tells us is that most young adults across America endorse relatively traditional purposes for dating and do not express an overt fear of commitment, but many lack the needed skills for dating and the resilience to handle the natural ups and downs of relationship starts and stops along the journey of dating,” said Brian Willoughby, an author of the report and a Fellow at the Wheatley Institute. The authors argue this requires a concerted effort to teach healthy dating skills, something that currently receives little attention from the general culture or the relationship education field.
The findings arrive alongside a separate SSRS Opinion Panel Omnibus poll conducted in January 2026, among a nationally representative sample of 2,012 adults, showing that just 6% of all US adults are currently using a dating app or site, even as 37% have tried one at some point in their lives. That active-user figure sits well below the cultural prominence of these platforms.
Among dating app users, the most important matching criterion was shared family values, rated “very important” by 51%. Only 9% rated a potential partner’s income as very important.
Who is still using apps, and why
About half of adults aged 18 to 29 (51%) and 30 to 49 (53%) have used online dating sites or apps, compared with just 20% of adults aged 50 or older. Those younger age groups are also more likely to be current users: 10% of 18-to-29-year-olds and 8% of 30-to-49-year-olds, compared with 2% of adults over 50.
More than six in ten LGBTQIA+ adults (63%) report having used online dating sites or apps, including 14% who are current users, compared with 34% of non-LGBTQIA+ adults.
A study conducted as part of Stanford’s How Couples Meet and Stay Together project found that, for heterosexual couples in the United States, meeting online had become the most popular way couples meet, eclipsing meeting through friends for the first time around 2013. That research, using 2017 data, found 39% of heterosexual couples met online. Yet that structural shift has not translated into a surge of active daters on the ground.
What researchers say should happen next
The authors acknowledge their focus was on individual behavior and personal experiences of dating, and they explored how relationship education efforts could help improve young adults’ dating lives.
Young adults want to build real human connections, form serious relationships, and explore what they want in a future long-term partner, the authors write. The obstacle, according to the report, is a shortage of the practical skills and confidence to act on those desires.
The pattern intersects with broader behavioral data. Research on couples and relationship satisfaction consistently shows that the quality of time invested in a partnership matters enormously, yet the IFS findings suggest a growing share of young adults are not yet reaching the point where that question even arises.
Separately, a rise in workplace loneliness among US adults may be compounding the hesitancy, shrinking the informal social environments where new romantic connections traditionally form.
The full State of Our Unions 2026 report is available through the Institute for Family Studies and the Wheatley Institute at Brigham Young University.
