I don’t buy your “dating recession” - by Halina Bennet

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Evening Edition<br>I don’t buy your “dating recession”<br>The collapse of romantic infrastructure is an engineering failure, not a Gen Z character flaw.

Halina Bennet<br>Mar 13, 2026

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The Gen Z slander must end. (Photo by MoMo Productions/Getty Images)<br>I planned five first dates in 2025. I did not attend a single one.<br>Instead, I’ve taken up matchmaking in a time of dating app fatigue, pairing up my enthusiastic friends for completely blind dates. So my Zoomer friends, at least, are definitely dating, contrary to the many articles that indicate otherwise.<br>My own social circle is not a representative sample, of course. But last May, while reporting a story that didn’t quite come together, I spoke with a young man named Caden from central Ohio. Caden, who is currently in his first year at college, told me that he and all of his friends were actively dating or in relationships. During his senior year at his public high school, he said, “everyone dates.”<br>These are impressions, not data points. But they push back against an increasingly popular narrative that itself is not well-supported by data.<br>What’s clear is that many of the systems that once moved people toward each other have greatly attenuated. We dismantled the social infrastructure that reliably moved people from singlehood into relationships for most of the 20th century, replaced it with technology that was supposed to fix the problem, and are only now reckoning with the fact that the fix didn’t work very well. The resulting dysfunction gets misdiagnosed, repeatedly, as a generational character flaw.<br>Every few months, a new round of think pieces and polls conclude that young people are not dating. Young people aren’t going on dates, aren’t forming relationships, aren’t getting married. (That last point is mostly accurate.) The implication is that something has gone badly wrong with this specific generation — that young millennials and Gen Z, uniquely afflicted by phones or anxiety or impossibly high standards or whatever your preferred cultural villain is, have simply opted out of romance. I’m not convinced.<br>The data problem

The hot study du jour comes from the Institute for Family Studies and Brigham Young University, which last month published a report arguing that “Today’s young adults are in a dating recession.” In its survey of 5,275 unmarried young adults between the ages of 22 and 35, what the institute calls “prime dating years,” the authors found that one in three is actively dating — which they define as dating at least once a month. This is an interesting observation, but the study has no baseline from past generations or comparisons to prior years. The concept of a “dating recession” implies that a much larger fragment of the population was meeting that “actively dating” standard in the past, but the data simply does not support that.<br>One of the few comparisons that does exist comes from the Survey Center on American Life. Their 2024 study found that 56 percent of Gen Z adults reported being in a romantic relationship at any point during their teen years, compared to around three-quarters of baby boomers and Gen Xers. For Gen Z adult men specifically, nearly half reported having had no relationship experience during adolescence — about double the rate for men of older generations. That’s a real gap, but those numbers are about teenagers, not the young adults the Institute for Family Studies is looking at.<br>The most rigorous longitudinal data comes from the Monitoring the Future survey, which has asked high school students the same questions annually since 1975. It shows that the decline in teen dating started not with smartphones but in the early 1990s and accelerated in the mid-2000s. Those responses are from teenagers only, so they, again, do not tell us anything about young-adulthood dating habits.<br>There’s an additional problem buried in that data. The survey asks teens how often they “go out on a date” — phrasing that may simply read as archaic to a teenager today who hangs out in their boyfriend’s basement instead of going out somewhere. (This is a more accurate account of dating when I was in high school — and, frankly, college — not too long ago.) That survey may be measuring a change in vocabulary as much as a change in behavior.<br>So the more defensible claim — which is itself not very defensible — is narrow: high school dating has declined steadily for 30 years. What young adults are actually doing romantically is much harder to nail down, and the researchers declaring a recession have not managed to do that.<br>What clearly has changed

My grandmother at 19 married a boy she had known since childhood, in the same 5,000-person Arkansas town where they both grew up. My mother left that town for high school, then boarded a bus to Massachusetts for college. My parents met after graduate school. The impulse to marry your high school sweetheart...