We Have More Ways to Date, and Fewer Ways to Meet
Ordinary life has stopped producing relationships, so now governments, companies and AI are getting involved.
When I moved to New York in 2008, it was the era of multi-dating. I’d never experienced anything like it in London. Friends were dating two, three, sometimes four people at once. Arranging a drink with one person and then dinner with another on the same night. The problem wasn’t getting dates, it was fitting them all in.
Dating apps had unlocked supply. You were no longer limited to dating the people you met at work, who knew your friends or were in the same bars you went to.
Eighteen years later, the dating landscape looks very different. A growing number of people are deciding whether they can afford to go on one date, let alone many.
We Solved the Supply Problem
BMO estimates that the average “all-in” date now costs $189 in the US. Intuit found that 51% of Americans are going on fewer dates because of the economy, rising to 58% among Gen Z. For a growing number of people, dating no longer feels financially worth it.
Financial constraints are frequently cited as one of the reasons why birth rates are falling. People are unable to afford a house, childcare or fertility treatment. But what if the financial challenges are starting earlier.
According to Morning Consult 22% of Americans say the biggest issue affecting their romantic life is lack of money. For those earning more than $100,000, 71% say they are satisfied with their romantic lives. Yet among those earning less than $50,000, that falls to 46%.
We talk about the dating market like everyone has equal access to it. Increasingly, people don’t. Lower earners don’t just spend less on dating, they are also reporting fewer friends, social invitations and weekly activities. Money is shaping not only whether you can afford to date, but how often you are in places where you might meet someone you want to date.
Before all the other nudges towards parenthood came a more basic one: meeting people you might actually date. The ordinary overlap of lives.
Choice Changed How We Choose
When dating moved online, we didn’t just get access to more people, we started assessing potential partners differently. If you meet someone through friends, at work or in a pub, you assessed them in real-time. Online the judgement starts before you even meet with filters on height, job, education, location, children and hobbies. While someone might slip through a filter in person, online you don’t even get to see any outliers.
The Cut interviewed a matchmaker who described one client as having a list so detailed it felt as though they were commissioning a “bespoke robot”. Is it any surprise, when a first date not only costs money, but takes up an evening and comes with a reasonable chance of going nowhere. Some people are happy paying to improve their odds before they even leave the house.
Behavioural economics has spent years showing that more choice doesn’t necessarily make us better at choosing. People compare more and become hyper conscious of what they might be giving up. They also replace difficult questions like “Could I fall in love with this person?” with easier ones like “Can I be with someone who likes early morning Hyrox?” It’s made us judge faster and become more fickle.
Now We’re Paying to Narrow the Choice Again
At one end of the dating market, people are deciding that another $189 first date isn’t worth it. Then at the other, they are paying matchmakers up to $75,000 to make their search more efficient.
The Wall Street Journal recently reported on a cheaper matchmaking alternative: AI matchmakers. Instead of people swiping through hundreds of profiles, the AI matchmaker interviews them about their lives, values and preferences, then chooses someone for them. One woman spent weeks talking to her AI chatbot before it selected a match, then told her where to meet him and charged her $20 for the introduction. They were still together when the article was published.
Justin McLeod, the founder of Hinge, left the company last year and is now building an AI matchmaking startup. He believes there has to be a better way to date than asking people to swipe through a thousand profiles.
He’s not the only one shaking things up. Bumble is redesigning its original women move first model too. Its whole proposition was built around one deliberate behavioural intervention: women made the first move. They are now allowing men to initiate conversations too. Bumble found that 66% of women actually prefer men to send the first message, partly because it removes some of the pressure. I’ve sat opposite countless women talking about the exhaustion of making all the decisions in their lives and wanting someone else to make the call. The app tried to change the behaviour of the dating market. In the end, culture changed the app instead.
There is something bizarrely circular about these innovations. Your grandmother might have been introduced by a friend at a dance. You might be introduced by a chatbot in a bar, like a digital wingman. The job both do is to narrow the field, make an introduction, then get out of the way.
Early AI dating chatbots tried to remove people completely from the equation until necessary. Apps like Volar sent AI clones on “first dates” with each other before their humans ever met, so the bots could report back on compatibility before any time was wasted. Thanks to hallucinations it didn’t go quite to plan, one user’s proxy told other bots she had a dog named Bailey. Her dog is called Chester. It also claimed she loved anime. She doesn’t.
There is another problem, AI can only learn from what we tell it we want and often we don’t know. Human matchmakers have always argued that part of their job is to challenge clients’ specifications because people are often not very good at predicting who will make them happy. And AI has a tendency to tell us what we want to hear and not challenge us.
The Solution to Meeting Doesn’t Look Like Dating
According to Morning Consult, men are more likely than women to say they spend time and energy on their romantic lives each week, and 28% of women say they spend no time on their romantic lives at all. However, those women are not necessarily withdrawing from social life as many are redirecting their time towards friendship, hobbies and community instead. Why? Because women are looking for ways to be around other people without dating being the reason.
The response to dating-app fatigue is not another dating app. It’s people rebuilding ways to connect. Running clubs and book groups are very different from the Saturday night dances where earlier generations met, but they may be doing some of the same work.
The Birth-Rate Debate Starts Too Late
Governments are already starting to intervene further upstream. Japan has experimented with publicly backed matchmaking services and subsidies towards dating apps, while Tokyo has created its own matchmaking platform. The UAE is rewarding marriage and family formation. China has gone in the opposite direction, restricting AI companions in an attempt to stop virtual relationships replacing human ones.
You have to wonder if China has seen a future others haven’t yet. Human relationships can be expensive, uncertain and inconvenient. People need to leave the house, risk rejection and deal with another person who has wants of their own. AI companionship removes quite a lot of that friction. We might soon all be trying to make human relationships compete not only with other humans, but with AI intimacy that’s designed to be easier.
AI relationships create an unexpected problem in a society already worried about declining birth rates: they can satisfy some of the desire for intimacy but without leading to the families governments are encouraging.
I’ve written about how the nudges that once pushed people towards parenthood – social, familial and physical proximity – desynchronised and now happen on separate timelines. What’s happening to dating is the same mechanism, just one stage earlier.
If you mapped falling birth rates backwards like a consumer journey, you wouldn’t start with the baby. You’d start much earlier: social participation, meeting, first date, repeated dates, relationship, commitment, then perhaps a child. There are opportunities to fall out at every stage, but more friction seems to be building at the beginning.
Governments can subsidise dating. Companies can build better matching algorithms. Billionaires can reward weddings and babies. But none of these interventions recreates what earlier generations had without even thinking about it: places where people could repeatedly meet one another and a relationship that had the chance to grow.
The birth-rate debate is focused on the wrong end of the chain. We keep asking how to persuade people to have babies, while ignoring the decline of the ordinary places and moments in which two people might meet, see each other again and eventually decide if they want a baby together.
SOURCES
- BMO — “Date-flation Hits Hard: Average Date Spend Nears $200”
Supports the $189 average date, 12.5% increase, and 47% saying dating isn’t financially worth it.
- Intuit — “The Cuffing Economy: How Gen Z is Redefining Love and Money”
Supports 51% of Americans going on fewer dates because of the economy, rising to 58% of Gen Z.
- Morning Consult — “The Love Gap: A Data Deep Dive on Americans’ Romantic Lives”
This is one of your most useful sources. It supports:
22% citing lack of money as the biggest issue affecting their romantic life; 71% satisfaction among $100k+ earners vs 46% under $50k; lower earners having fewer friends, invitations and activities; men 63% vs women 52% spending time/energy on romance; 28% of women spending none; and the move towards friendship, hobbies, community and “local hosts.”
- The Cut — “The Good-Man Shortage Has Gotten Exponentially Worse” by Anna Louie Sussman
Supports the woman who approached dating with “full-time job effort”, Select Date Society starting at $35,000 then rising to $75,000, and the high-end matchmaking discussion.
The Cut: The Good-Man Shortage Has Gotten Exponentially Worse
- The Wall Street Journal — “Love in the Time of AI: Chatbots Are Taking Over Online Dating”
Supports Amata/Known and AI matchmaking, the woman who spent weeks talking to the chatbot before being sent on a $20 date, the early bot-on-bot dating experiments, and Justin McLeod’s move into AI matchmaking.
- WIRED — “Bumble Tried to Change Dating, but the Dating Market Forced It to Change Instead”
Supports Bumble changing its women-first messaging mechanic, the 66% of women surveyed preferring men to message first, and the wider argument that app design sits inside a larger system of behaviours and dating norms.
- Axios — “America’s Meetup Explosion”
Supports the rise of “soft socializing” and low-pressure offline gatherings around chess, books, puzzles and other shared activities.
- Axios — “Dating App Fatigue: Why Singles Are Choosing Bars Over Bios”
A good additional source for your real-world meeting argument: singles events on Eventbrite doubled between 2022 and 2025, with people using running clubs, dinners and other IRL activities to meet.
- Associated Press — “Chinese users of AI companions bereft after government tightens regulations”
Supports China’s July 2026 AI-companion restrictions, including rules intended to prevent virtual relationships replacing real social interaction, and the story of Li Linlin and her AI boyfriend.
- Tokyo Metropolitan Government — 2050 Tokyo Strategy
This is the cleanest official source for TOKYO ENMUSUBI, Tokyo’s AI matching system, and explicitly places dating and marriage in a wider pathway through pregnancy, childbirth and raising children.
- Tokyo Metropolitan Government — 2026 marriage support campaign
Also useful if you want something explicitly current: Tokyo describes 2026 as a special year for encouraging marriages.
- Emirates News Agency — UAE President declares 2026 the Year of the Family
Official source for the UAE’s Year of the Family and National Family Growth Agenda.
- Khalaf Ahmad Al Habtoor marriage grant — reported by Moneycontrol
Supports the Dh50,000 / roughly $13,600–$14,000 marriage grant for Emirati employees and increased support following the birth of a child within two years.