Complaints about dating are usually complaints about supply: not enough good candidates, a pool skewed by the algorithm, bad luck. Olga Khazan’s Atlantic piece on why so many people can’t find anyone they like points at something less flattering — the setting. Her sources argue that the modern date is an evaluation format almost nothing in human life resembles, and that the conditions which once made romance likely have been quietly dismantled.
The piece opens on a chorus that will be familiar to anyone who has been single in the last decade: “water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink.” Possible mates abound — on apps, in the databases of professional matchmakers — and none of them appeal. A woman quoted in New York magazine put it as “the odds are good, but the goods are odd.” The New York Times recently featured a 38-year-old man who had been on 40 first dates without finding a keeper; one woman seemed good “on paper,” he said, but there was “something that was … off.”
The structure that disappeared
For most of American history, most people met their partners through family, friends, church, or — as coed universities and offices became normal — college and work. The romantic question came after acquaintance, not before it. The UC Davis psychologist Paul Eastwick, one of several academics Khazan interviewed, puts it plainly: “You hung out with folks, and sometimes the sparks started to grow slowly from that.”
That route has narrowed in measurable ways. In 1970, about a third of heterosexual couples met through friends; by 2020 it was 20 percent, and the share who met through family, school, college, or work also fell. Americans spend much less time with friends than they did twenty years ago, and many people — young men in particular — have few or no friends of the opposite sex. The office, long the default mixed-gender space for adults, has become a thornier place to start something as awareness of harassment and power dynamics has grown.
What was lost is not just volume of contact but a particular kind of it: casual, repeated, low-stakes. That is the condition under which inside jokes form and first impressions get corrected. Most people, the piece observes, are more of an acquired taste than an immediate yes. After four or five informal conversations in a dining hall or break room, some pairs will conclude they don’t care for each other at all — and others will like each other considerably more than they did at the start.
What the apps optimize for
Paying for access, Khazan suggests, changes how people approach the date itself. Liesel Sharabi, a communication professor at Arizona State who studies dating, says apps and matchmakers encourage the belief that “I should be able to find exactly what I’m looking for,” which she calls “the wrong attitude to have.” The more useful frame is that compatibility is generally built rather than discovered: “I’m gonna make something work with somebody.”
The burnout Sharabi documents has a mechanical cause. In a study that followed hundreds of dating-app users for three months, many reported “emotional exhaustion and inefficacy,” driven in part by the sheer number of possible matches to scroll through and by dating coming to feel like a part-time job. The filters don’t help in the way users assume. Screening for height, education, and age produces precision that doesn’t predict who someone will actually like as a long-term partner. Two inches below a stated preference, Sharabi says, stops mattering within six months, when other qualities matter a lot more. Pamela Torres, who runs an Austin company that organizes events for single people, has a crisper version: “Chemistry happens when you meet someone and then you make an exception” to the checklist.
Why groups do what dates can’t
A first date is an audition, and auditions are bad at revealing the traits that matter. Humor under pressure, or kindness toward someone with nothing to offer, shows up more readily in a volunteer shift than at a table for two. Stephanie Coontz, an emerita family-studies professor at Evergreen State, told Khazan that what really counts in a relationship becoming love is how the person interacts with other people as well as with you — a thing a single evening of mutual performance is poorly designed to surface. Coontz met her husband while they worked together on political projects. “I didn’t even think of him as attractive,” she said, “the first two or three times I met him, until suddenly he seemed very handsome to me.”
Hence the advice Eastwick and others give: spend less energy optimizing a profile and more on being in rooms with people. Join a hiking club. Throw parties. Flirt at work, respectfully. Torres’s company doesn’t promise to find anyone “the love of your life in one night” — only to “take people out of their houses.” You may not meet a soulmate on the first hole of golf, but by the back nine you may at least have found someone you’d like to see again.
The argument is a contributing explanation rather than a complete one, and Khazan treats it that way: the loss of mixed-gender social contexts is one factor among several, described largely through correlational research and researcher testimony, with the survey base rates cited through linked studies she doesn’t interrogate. There is also a tension she flags in passing but doesn’t resolve — the advice to flirt with co-workers arrives two paragraphs after the observation that workplace romance has become risky precisely because of power imbalances.
What the piece does establish is that the complaining and the format are mismatched. People are asking an interview to do the work of a milieu, then concluding that the candidates are the problem.