Thirty-four percent of singles rank kindness and empathy as the single top trait of healthy masculinity, more than any other quality named, according to the 14th annual Singles in America study from Match and the Kinsey Institute, which surveyed 5,001 U.S. singles ranging from 18 to 98 years old. Emotional openness and humility followed close behind. Physical strength, financial dominance, and stoicism, the traits most closely associated with older definitions of masculinity, didn’t top the list at all. That’s a meaningful data point for anyone trying to understand what singles actually want, as opposed to what dating culture commentary assumes they want.
The study, now in its 14th year and drawing on more than 75,000 singles surveyed since 2010, gives this finding weight beyond a single snapshot. It’s tracking a real shift in stated preference over time, not a one-off poll result. And the specificity of the ranking matters: kindness and empathy aren’t vague, feel-good answers. They’re the two traits that showed up most when singles were asked, directly, what healthy masculinity looks like in practice.
Singles say they can spot the opposite fast
The flip side of the finding is just as telling. Seventy-nine percent of women in the study say they can identify toxic masculinity by the third date. That’s a fast read, and it suggests singles aren’t waiting for a pattern to fully emerge before making a judgment. A handful of early interactions, how someone handles a minor disagreement, how they talk about ex-partners, whether they can sit with an emotion without deflecting it, appears to be enough signal for most women to draw a conclusion.
That speed cuts both ways for men navigating the dating pool. On one hand, it means the traits singles say they value most, kindness and empathy, don’t require years to demonstrate. A man doesn’t need to prove himself over a long courtship to signal emotional maturity; small, consistent behaviors in the first few interactions carry real weight. On the other hand, it means there’s very little runway to recover from an early misstep. A defensive reaction to a minor disagreement on date two can do more damage to how someone is perceived than years of genuinely kind behavior could easily undo, which raises the stakes on those first few interactions considerably.
That third-date benchmark also reframes what “healthy masculinity” is functioning as in the dating pool: less an abstract ideal and more a screening criterion applied early and applied fast. Kindness and empathy topping the list isn’t just about what people hope for long-term. It’s about what gets someone a fourth date at all.
An unexpected wrinkle: who’s modeling it
One of the more counterintuitive findings from the same research: men raised by single parents were more likely to describe themselves as modeling healthy masculinity than men raised in two-parent households. That runs against a common assumption that a two-parent home, and specifically a present father, is the more reliable path to healthy relational habits in sons. The Match/Kinsey data doesn’t fully explain why, but it complicates a narrative that’s often treated as settled. Family structure alone doesn’t appear to predict who ends up embodying the traits singles say they value most.
Justin Garcia, executive director of the Kinsey Institute, connected this back to what singles are broadly looking for in the study’s own release, noting that “emotional depth, among both men and women, is incredibly valuable as singles search for someone they can reliably weather the storms of life with.” That framing matters: emotional depth isn’t being treated as a nice-to-have add-on to attraction. It’s being described as functionally load-bearing, the quality that determines whether a relationship can survive an actual hard stretch, not just a good first few months.
Coverage of the same study from the Kinsey Institute’s home institution, Indiana University, frames 2025 as a broader “relationship reset,” with singles across generations recalibrating what they’re actually screening for. Kindness and empathy ranking above traditional markers of masculine strength fits that pattern. It’s not that singles have stopped valuing confidence or ambition. It’s that those traits stopped being sufficient on their own a long time ago, and the data is finally catching up to say so plainly.
What this means for how men present themselves
For men actually trying to date well, the data offers something more useful than a vague call to “be kinder.” It’s a ranking, drawn from tens of thousands of singles surveyed over more than a decade, that puts empathy and emotional openness ahead of the traits a lot of dating advice still leans on: confidence, ambition, physical presence. Those older markers haven’t disappeared from what singles want. They’re simply no longer treated as sufficient on their own, and the men who understand that distinction, that strength and softness aren’t opposites but pair well together, appear to be the ones singles are describing when they talk about healthy masculinity in practice.
