One bad breakup is apparently enough to make a lot of singles give up on dating altogether, at least for a while. A majority of unmarried adults, 55%, say a past breakup made them reluctant to date again, and nearly half report they simply don’t feel confident in their ability to date well, according to the “State of Our Unions 2026: The Dating Recession” report from the Wheatley Institute at BYU and the Institute for Family Studies.
Key Points
- 55% of unmarried adults say a bad breakup made them reluctant to date again.
- 49% cite low confidence as a barrier to dating, and only 37% say they trust their own judgment when choosing who to date.
- Just 28% say they’re able to stay positive after a bad date or breakup.
- 45% report passing up an actual dating opportunity because of a past negative experience.
These numbers describe something more specific than general dating fatigue. It’s a resilience gap: singles aren’t just tired of dating apps or bad first dates in the abstract, they’re carrying forward the emotional residue of specific past experiences in a way that’s actively shrinking how much they date going forward.
The 45% who say they’ve turned down an actual opportunity to date someone because of a previous bad experience is the number worth sitting with. That’s not hypothetical caution — it’s real interest declined in real time because of what happened last time. Combined with the 55% who report general reluctance after a breakup, the picture is of a dating pool where a meaningful share of people are opting out not because they lack options, but because they’re still recovering from the last round.
Confidence compounds the problem. With only 37% saying they trust their own judgment in choosing partners and just 28% able to stay upbeat after things go badly, a rough breakup doesn’t just end one relationship — it appears to erode the self-trust needed to try again with any momentum. The report lists lack of confidence alongside money as one of the two most commonly cited barriers to dating more, at 49% and 52% respectively, putting an emotional barrier on nearly equal footing with a financial one.
Taken together with the report’s separate finding that only 30% of unmarried adults are currently dating in any form, the resilience gap looks less like a personality quirk and more like a structural drag on the dating pool overall. It’s not simply that people can’t find time or money to date — a real number of them have decided, at least temporarily, that the risk of another bad outcome outweighs trying again. For anyone dating right now, that suggests the person across the table may be showing up with more baggage from the last relationship than they’re letting on, and that a little patience with a slow-to-trust partner might be less about them being difficult and more about them still recalibrating after getting burned.
