Valentine’s Day Preview: American Marriage and Dating by the Numbers - Horowitz

Valentine’s Day Preview: American Marriage and Dating by the Numbers - Horowitz

It’s the day before Valentine’s Day, leaving all of us gift procrastinators one more day to step up.  And this year, we all should work to do better than a last-minute purchase at CVS for brand name boxed chocolates and an uninspired card—or perhaps that’s just me. Less of us, however, will even be buying Valentine’s Day gifts as the numbers of Americans married or in committed long-term relationships continues to decline.

“These are among the major findings of a compilation of facts about marriage and dating from the Pew Research Center.  Specifically, “69% of Americans say they are married (51%), living with a partner (11%), or otherwise in a committed romantic relationship (8%),” reports Pew.  The remaining about 3-in-10 Americans indicate they are single.” This is defined by Pew as “those who are not married, living with a partner or in a committed romantic relationship.”

 

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Additionally, the share of 40-year-olds who have never been married has increased more than 4-fold over the past twenty years or so. “As of 2021, a quarter of 40-year-olds in the U.S. had never been married – up from 6% in 1980,” according to a Pew analysis of census data.  Only, about 1-in-5 of today’s never married adults in the 40 to 44- year -old age range are living with a romantic partner.

 

Underlying the retreat from marriage by a growing share of Americans is the fact that less than 1-in-4 (23%) of us view “marriage as essential for people to live a fulfilling life,” according to Pew. This compares to more than 7-in-10 (71%) Americans who say job satisfaction is essential and the more than 6-in-10 (61%) who say having close friends is essential. 

 

Turning to dating, about 2-in-3 “single—and looking adults” surveyed in 2019 believed “their dating lives were not going well, and three-quarters said it was difficult for them to find people to date.”  This same high level of dissatisfaction appears to still be the case.

 

Perhaps more telling, more than half of single adults evidently don’t have a Valentine’s Day's date and are just fine with that; 56% of single adults said in a 2022 survey that “they were not looking for a relationship or casual dates,” according to Pew.

 
For those in the market, however, the use of dating sites continues to increase. Nearly, half of singles who are looking to date have used an online dating platform. Three in ten Americans now say they have used a dating site or app at least once, including more than half of adults under 30, reports Pew.  “One-in-ten partnered adults, including 1-in-5 partnered adults under 30, “met their current significant other through a dating site or app.”

 

With Valentine’s Day tomorrow and loneliness a pervasive national problem, one takeaway from these findings: it sure seems like it’s time for more of us to take a risk and get back in the game.  After all, with modern technology, you don’t have to even get off the couch or call anyone to get a date