Match’s 14th annual Singles in America study surveyed 5,001 single U.S. adults ranging from 18 to 98 years old, and one number sets the tone for everything else in it: 46% say they’re ready right now for a long-term relationship. That’s not a fringe finding buried in an appendix — it directly contradicts the idea that singles have collectively checked out of dating. What the study, run with the Kinsey Institute and the research firm Dynata, actually shows is more specific and more useful: singles aren’t burned out on wanting connection. They’re burned out on how hard it’s gotten to find it.
This is the 14th year Match has run the study, going back to 2010, and the cumulative sample now covers more than 75,000 people. That scale is part of why researchers treat year-over-year shifts as real trends rather than noise. A single-year survey can catch a mood. A 14-year one catches a pattern.
The desire is real, the fatigue is too
Just under half of singles say they’re ready for commitment, but a similar share say dating itself has worn them down: 47% report feeling burned out, and 54% say modern dating leaves them drained. Nearly half — 46% — have taken a deliberate break from dating altogether, and of those, roughly two-thirds said the break actually helped, according to reporting on the findings. None of that reads as apathy. It reads as people who still want the outcome and have started rationing the process to get there, spending an average of $213 a month on dating in the meantime.
Romantic idealism is climbing, not falling
If burnout were winning, you’d expect cynicism to be rising too. Instead, belief in love at first sight jumped to 60% of singles, nearly double the 34% who said the same in 2014. Seventy-three percent still believe in a forever kind of love, and close to 70% believe in some form of relationship destiny. The complication: 39% say they don’t personally know anyone who represents what they’d call relationship goals.
What “masculinity” means to singles now
The study also tracked how singles talk about gender, and kindness and empathy have overtaken older “alpha” traits as the top markers of healthy masculinity among respondents. That shift comes with friction: 70% of singles say men and women frequently misread each other, and 79% of women say they can spot toxic masculinity by the third date. Men, for their part, report feeling boxed in — 33% say they feel labeled as only interested in sex, and 25% say they’re assumed to be commitment-phobic before they’ve said a word. “Today’s singles are rejecting the one-size-fits-all approach to dating,” said Dr. Justin Garcia, the Kinsey Institute’s chief scientific advisor, in comments accompanying the study’s release.
AI enters the dating pool
The most volatile number in the whole study is technological: 26% of singles now use AI somewhere in their dating life, up 333% from the year before. Forty-four percent want an AI tool to help filter potential matches, and 40% want help writing their profile. Dr. Amanda Gesselman, the Kinsey Institute’s director of Sex and Relationship Science, framed the shift as additive rather than a replacement for actual connection: “AI isn’t replacing intimacy, it’s giving singles an edge,” she said.
Sex, confidence, and the 40-something plateau
The most sexually satisfied group in the study isn’t the youngest one. Singles in their 40s report the highest rates of feeling turned on — 73% say they frequently do — and 93% of all singles surveyed say sexual chemistry is essential to a relationship, not optional. “By their 40s, many singles have outgrown the pressure to perform or conform,” Gesselman said.
None of this describes a generation that’s given up. It describes one that’s gotten pickier about the terms — wanting a real connection enough to keep trying, but no longer willing to fake being fine with a version of dating that clearly isn’t working for them.
What makes Match’s study different from a typical dating-app survey is the timeline. Fourteen years of consistent methodology means the swings the researchers are tracking — belief in love at first sight nearly doubling, AI adoption jumping 333% in a single year — read as genuine cultural shifts rather than a single year’s mood, which is part of why the study has become a reference point for how outlets and researchers talk about single life in America more broadly.
