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Key points
- An annual survey of over 5,000 singles explored their relationship priorities.
- The pandemic-era trend for singles to seek partners interested in marriage has waned.
- Today's singles are especially concerned about potential partners' financial stability.
- Many of today's singles believe that artificial intelligence is a promising technology to aid online dating.
For the 13th year in a row, the online dating service, Match, surveyed more than 5,000 single adults for their annual Singles in America study. Today, they released their newest data. In 2020, 2021, and 2022, I wrote about their data and described some of the changing dating attitudes in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, we can see if pandemic-era trends have survived, and how newer trends in attitudes toward monogamy, artificial intelligence, and the economic and political climate have affected singles.
How Serious Are Singles About Getting Serious?
Following the pandemic, there was an uptick in singles' interest in getting married. In 2021 and 2022, about 75 percent of singles were looking for a partner who wanted to get married. This represented a marked increase from earlier estimates of under 60 percent. This year, the trend toward seriousness seems to have stopped, with only 64 percent of singles seeking a partner who eventually wants to get married.
This year's survey also asked singles about their preference for monogamous relationships compared to some form of consensual non-monogamy. Close to 50 percent of singles said that their ideal was a sexually monogamous relationship. This suggests that a somewhat traditional relationship has staying power.
However, that also means that a substantial proportion of singles are not only open to, but may prefer, other arrangements. Close to a third said they had a non-monogamous relationship at some point, with the most common arrangement being “monogamish,” reported by 21 percent of respondents. This means the relationship is committed, but some sexual variety with other people is allowed, just not as much as in an open relationship. In addition, a full 21 percent of singles reported that they were not currently interested in getting involved in a sexual relationship at all. Research suggests that this may actually be especially true of older singles who have settled into and enjoy their single lives.
Have Concerns About Inflation Increased Daters' Emphasis on Potential Partners' Finances?
Both this year and last year, singles listed money issues as a major stressor. But how is this affecting their dating choices? Today's singles are prioritizing a mate's financial stability, with 73 percent saying this is important to them. While the Match data release doesn't break this finding down by gender, a large body of research shows that a desire for a mate with good financial prospects is stronger among women than men. So, while a financially stable mate may be important for a large majority of singles, it is still likely that women are prioritizing this more than men.
How Do Singles Feel About Using Artificial Intelligence to Enhance Online Dating?
For the first time, Match asked singles about the role of artificial intelligence in the online dating domain. Given the newness of widespread AI use, there isn't much research on how online daters feel about using AI as part of the online dating process. This may not be surprising given the new data which suggests that the vast majority of singles are not currently using AI to help with dating. Match found that only 6 percent of singles were using AI in their dating lives. Of those, 43 percent used it to write their online dating profile, and 37 percent used it to help write their first message to a potential romantic interest.
However, a much larger group of singles sees AI as a promising technology when used to aid online dating. Almost half of young singles (those 18 to 42) felt that AI is able to assess partnership compatibility. As a relationships researcher, I'm less optimistic about AI's potential in this area. Prior research suggests that matching algorithms, which rely on matching people due to similarity in personality, are not effective. While technology does continually improve, the results are only as good as the available data.
While relationship scientists have made great strides in understanding what predicts relationship satisfaction and longevity, there are important limitations to that research. These effects, while significant in the aggregate, are typically not that large and likely to do not apply to every individual person. More importantly, studies on relationships typically draw data from real couples and seek to understand how they interact with one another. No matter how much data a dating app collects from two individuals, it will never have any data on how they interact with one another in their actual relationship, which is really the most important information in predicting the quality of the relationship.
In a controversial field experiment, the dating site, OkCupid showed some users how compatible they were with other daters based on the site's algorithm, but led others users to believe that poor matches were actually great matches or great matches were actually poor matches. They found that users were just as likely to continue a conversation with a real "90 percent match" as they were with a 30 percent match they were falsely led to believe was a 90 percent match. This suggests that people put a lot more faith into these algorithms than is warranted.
Close to a third of young singles reported that they would like it if AI could help them create a profile or come up with conversation topics on a date. So, there is a sizable minority of singles who would like to take AI from the matching domain and into the dating process itself. But how do most singles feel about the prospect of dating someone who had used AI to compose their profile or messages? Forty-six percent of singles thought it was a deal breaker if a match used AI to change their image, and 39 percent felt it was a deal breaker to use AI in all of their conversations. While this is a high percentage of singles declaring AI use to be a deal breaker, using AI in all conversations is a pretty extreme behavior. Perhaps minor use of AI would be more acceptable to a wider range of daters.
In one study, participants read online dating profiles and were either led to believe they were written completely by the dater, or that the dater had used AI to help craft the profile. They found that whether or not the profile was partly AI-generated had no effect on how attractive they found the dater, but it did make them seem less trustworthy. This suggests that whether or not AI use in a profile or message is a deal-breaker may depend on online daters' goals. Those looking for a serious relationship, where trust and honesty are key, may be more likely to find it deal-breaker than those just seeking an attractive person with whom to have some short-term fun.
You can find more data from Match on how singles feel about dating and mental health, sex education, and the recent Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe vs. Wade in their full release.
