Fifty-six percent of singles have deleted a dating app entirely because of how badly their “talking stage” went, according to a new survey of 1,000 U.S. online daters from the dating platform CanWe, covered by Global Dating Insights. Eighty percent say they burn between one and five hours a week on conversations that never turn into an actual date. Forty-four percent blame unreliable, inconsistent communication for killing things before they even start. If you’ve ever refreshed a thread wondering whether you’re “talking” to someone or just being strung along, the data finally puts real weight behind what that limbo has been costing you.
Why no one can agree on a single number
Here’s the uncomfortable part: no dataset yet hands you one clean figure — “the talking stage lasts 23 days” — because the stage itself is built to resist definition. Scott Stanley, a research professor at the University of Denver who has spent decades studying how couples move (or don’t move) toward commitment, has written about what he calls “motivated ambiguity” — the idea that one or both people in an early connection often benefit from keeping things undefined, so neither side names the status and neither side has to be the one who backs out. Stanley’s broader “sliding versus deciding” framework, developed with colleagues studying relationship transitions, argues that couples increasingly drift into commitment through inertia rather than an actual conversation. That drift is exactly why a stage with no clear start or end line is so hard to time.
What the hours actually add up to
What the CanWe data does capture is how much of your week this ambiguity eats. Eighty percent of respondents reported spending one to five hours weekly on talking-stage exchanges, and more than half said the experience felt outright awkward. Sixty-two percent still said the stage was useful for gauging compatibility before investing further — so it isn’t purely wasted time. But 44% pointed to flaky, inconsistent communication as the specific thing that turns a promising conversation into nothing, and that number is the closest thing to a villain origin story the data offers: it isn’t the stage itself people resent, it’s partners who use its ambiguity as cover to disappear and reappear on their own schedule.
The real endpoint is burnout, not a date
If duration is hard to pin down, exhaustion isn’t. Match’s 2025 Singles in America study, conducted with the Kinsey Institute and the research firm Dynata across 5,001 U.S. singles, found that 47% of singles now report burnout from dating overall, 54% say the current landscape leaves them feeling depleted, and 46% have deliberately paused dating to recharge. Two-thirds of the people who took a break said it helped them get clearer on what they actually want. Seventy percent said men and women increasingly misread each other’s expectations — which tracks with a stage where nobody has agreed on the rules. Put the two studies together and a clearer picture forms: the talking stage doesn’t end when someone finally says “so what are we,” it often ends when one person simply taps out.
So how long does it actually last?
The honest answer, based on what’s actually been measured, is that duration was never the right question. The CanWe and Match data both point to something more useful: a threshold. People stay in an undefined talking phase until the hours spent outweigh the clarity gained — and for a large share of daters, that threshold arrives faster than the culture around “just be patient” suggests. Fifty-six percent walking away from an app entirely isn’t patience running its natural course; it’s patience running out. Stanley’s research offers the psychological reason why the phase is engineered to run long in the first place: ambiguity protects the person who benefits from it, at the direct expense of the person waiting for an answer.
What this means if you’re in it right now
If you’re three weeks into texting someone who still hasn’t asked you out, the data suggests you’re not imagining the drag — you’re living inside a phase that was never built to have a defined shape, and that a huge share of your peers are actively abandoning rather than riding out. That’s not a reason to panic-define the relationship on day four. It’s a reason to notice what Stanley’s research names directly: ambiguity usually serves whoever asked for it. The moment you can name whether that’s you or the other person is closer to “exactly how long it lasts” than any week count could ever be.
