Seventy percent of singles say the gender divide in dating is getting worse, according to the 14th annual Singles in America study from Match and the Kinsey Institute, which surveyed 5,001 U.S. singles ages 18 to 98. Eighty-five percent say stereotypes about their gender actively shape how their dates treat them before they’ve said a word. Nearly seven in ten describe a widening emotional gap between men and women. This is the largest running study of single Americans, tracking more than 75,000 people since 2010, so the shift isn’t a blip. It’s a documented trend line, and it’s landing hardest on how men and women interpret each other’s basic intentions.
The specifics break down along fairly predictable but still striking lines. About a third of single men say women assume they’re only after sex. A quarter feel unfairly typecast as commitment-phobic before they’ve had the chance to prove otherwise. Women, meanwhile, report being cast as either provider-hunters or, in a contradictory twist, as people who only want casual hookups over anything meaningful. Both sides are being flattened into a stereotype that doesn’t match how they’d describe themselves, and 85% saying those stereotypes affect their actual dating lives suggests this isn’t just an abstract complaint. It’s shaping who gets a second date.
The exhaustion is measurable, not just anecdotal
The gender-divide numbers pair with a burnout problem that seems to be feeding it. Forty-seven percent of singles in the Match/Kinsey study report feeling burned out by dating, and 54% say the process leaves them drained. Independent coverage of the same research from Global Dating Insights put the emotional exhaustion figure at 53%, with 46% of singles saying they’re now prioritizing personal growth over active partner-seeking. Whatever the exact percentage, the direction is consistent: a majority of single adults are tired in a way that shapes their behavior, not just their mood.
Nearly half of singles, 46%, have taken a deliberate break from dating to recharge, and about two-thirds of those who did found the pause clarifying rather than just a relief. That’s a meaningful distinction. It suggests the exhaustion isn’t pushing people to give up on dating altogether so much as pushing them to slow down and get more deliberate about who they pursue, which may be part of why the gender-divide perception keeps climbing: burned-out people are more likely to read ambiguous behavior as confirmation of a stereotype rather than as a one-off.
What’s actually driving the misread
Justin Garcia, executive director of the Kinsey Institute, said the underlying issue is less about men and women wanting fundamentally different things and more about inflated expectations colliding with limited bandwidth. In the study’s own release, Garcia said single adults have “ramped up expectations, wanting partners to be instant best friends, lovers, therapists, and travel buddies.” That’s a lot of roles to project onto someone in the first few dates, and it leaves very little room for a normal, uneven getting-to-know-you process. When a date doesn’t immediately deliver on all of it, it’s easy to file the disappointment under “men are like this” or “women are like this” instead of just this specific mismatch, with this specific person.
The generational data reinforces that this isn’t only an older-singles-versus-younger-singles story either. Coverage of the same release from the Kinsey Institute’s own home institution, Indiana University, frames 2025 as a “relationship reset” year, with singles across Gen Z, Millennial, Gen X, and Boomer cohorts all reporting the same basic frustration: a sense that the other side has stopped extending good faith.
There’s also a communication piece underneath the stereotyping. When people are dating from a place of exhaustion, they tend to have less patience for the normal awkwardness of getting to know someone, the mismatched jokes, the slow-to-warm-up conversations, the dates that start flat and improve. Instead, ambiguous signals get processed through whatever stereotype is already loaded and ready to go. A man who takes a few days to text back isn’t read as busy; he’s read as confirming that men are commitment-phobic. A woman who asks a pointed question about someone’s job isn’t read as curious; she’s read as confirming she’s screening for a provider. The Match/Kinsey data doesn’t prove those interpretations are usually wrong, but it does show how consistently both groups feel misread rather than met.
The gap between men and women in dating isn’t necessarily about diverging values as much as it’s about two exhausted groups reading each other’s exhaustion as hostility. Closing it probably starts with the least algorithmic thing possible: letting one disappointing date be just one date.
