All over the rich world, fewer people are hooking up and shacking up
Social media, dating apps and political polarisation all play a part
Nov 6th 2025|New York and Singapore|14 min read
“I don’t date conservative or moderate men,” says Nancy Anteby, a 30-year-old New Yorker who works in social media. “I only date** liberal **men.” Politics is not her only concern. She is also looking for someone ambitious, with a stable career, who is Jewish and, perhaps most important, shares her desire to start a family. Finding dates who tick all of these boxes is not easy. “Very often a man will disappoint you,” she laments. Then again, she recently realised, “I don’t need to rely on a man to have the life that I dream of.”
Ms Anteby is far from unusual. Across America 41% of women and 50% of men in her age band (25-34) were single in 2023, a share that has doubled over the past five decades. Nor is America exceptional in this regard. Between 2010 and 2022 the share of people living alone (an admittedly imperfect measure of singlehood, but one for which data are more widely available) rose in 26 of the 30 members of the OECD, a club mostly of rich countries. Marriage rates are falling across much of Asia, including in China and India and especially Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. And singlehood is accelerating across different age cohorts. In Europe each new generation is less likely to be married or living with a partner than previous ones at the same age (see chart).
This relationship recession is hitting not just those wanting to marry or move in with a steady partner, but also those looking for a date or casual sex. Younger people are socialising less, dating less and starting to have sex later in life than previous generations. They are also having less sex in general (as, alas, are most of us).
Michael Rosenfeld, a sociologist at Stanford University, has found that the reduction in dating owing to the covid-19 pandemic produced 13.7m more singles in America in 2022 than if the singlehood rate (conservatively defined) had stayed at the level of 2017. To generate an estimate of the global increase in plus-nones, The Economist extrapolated from his data, while also taking into account sharp falls in marriage rates in a number of Asian countries, which predate the pandemic. We calculate that over the past decade such effects have swollen the ranks of single people around the world by at least 100m.
Two’s a crowd
Dating, sex, marriage and divorce are all intensely personal choices, and their effects are felt most directly by those making them. The fact that more people feel able to choose to be single now than in the past, when there was far greater social and economic pressure to marry, could be considered one of the great emancipations of the past half century. Untold numbers have been liberated from unhappy unions.
But not all those who remain single have chosen to do so. A study of singles in 14 countries found that only 40% said they were “not interested in being in a relationship”. A smaller survey of single Americans by the Pew Research Centre in 2019 did find that 50% were not interested in dating. Yet only 27% said they were not dating because they enjoyed being single. The rest gave reasons including being too busy, too old, or because no one would want to date them. No less than 34% of singles in the 14-country study said they did not want to be alone but found it “difficult to attract a mate”, with 26% describing themselves as “between relationships”. In short, there are growing numbers of lonely hearts, pining for a partner but unable to secure one.
Don’t want a ring on it
There is an alarming mismatch in this regard between women and men. In the Pew survey, 62% of single women did not want to date, whereas only 37% of single men felt the same way. America and South Korea, among other countries, have big, vocal movements of young men who feel they have been unfairly deprived of romantic opportunities. All over the world, a high proportion of unmarried young men is strongly associated with elevated levels of violence and crime.
Even relatively small shifts in coupling rates, when multiplied across a whole population, can have far-reaching effects on society as a whole. The biggest impact will be on fertility rates, since married women tend to have more children than single ones. This will be especially marked in East Asian countries such as Japan and South Korea, where only 2-4% of babies are born to unmarried mothers. All the world over, however, the rise of singlehood will be a further drag on already slowing birth rates. The effects will also be felt in property markets (more demand for housing, since more people will be living alone) and government finances (less public spending on maternity wards and schools and, in time, more on care homes).
The fact that a large proportion of single people would rather be in a relationship (whether they are still looking for one or have given up hope) suggests that either there is some sort of dating-market failure that is preventing compatible people from finding one another, or that society is changing in ways that are making large numbers of singles incompatible. In practice, it seems to be a bit of both.
In Asia, where singlehood is growing fastest, a mix of structural and cultural changes is increasing incompatibility. Start with demography. China’s one-child policy has created a huge imbalance in the ratio of men to women. When it comes to those of peak marriageable age, the country will have 119 men for every 100 women by 2027. In all, there may be 30m-50m “excess men” in China, reckons Xiaoling Shu of the University of California, Davis. Singlehood in China, like most places, is not evenly distributed. Instead, it is disproportionately concentrated among men who are poorer and poorly educated, and thus less attractive as mates, and among highly educated women (of which more later).
China’s one-child policy makes it an outlier, but heterosexual men in other countries with a strong cultural preference for sons will also struggle to find partners. Sex-selective abortions resulted in 111 boys being born in India in 2011 for every 100 girls, according to census data. The natural ratio is about 105. Although the distortion has since become less extreme, we calculate that around 20m more boys than girls were born in India in 2000-15.
Improved opportunities for women to go to university and enter the workplace are also fuelling the growth in singlehood in East Asia, argues Wei-Jun Jean Yeung of the National University of Singapore. As women gain financial independence, they no longer need a husband to support them. They also have more to lose by getting married. “There’s still a culture of patriarchy in Asia where women carry most of the responsibilities of caring for children and domestic housework,” says Dr Yeung. “The opportunity cost of getting married may be high: women think that if they get married they may have to give up working to take care of their in-laws, parents and children, plus do housework.”
One result of this is that well-educated women are also disproportionately likely to be single in a number of Asian countries. “The best-educated, urban, college-educated women are becoming more egalitarian in their gender attitudes,” says Dr Shu of women in China. “Many college-educated men are hostile towards feminist ideas or even feminists…[they] think these women are hurting their prospects and interests at a personal level.”
In South Korea the gap between women’s opportunities and men’s sexist expectations is particularly wide. Around half of young Korean men think they are discriminated against (other than having to do military service, they are not). Some 60% complain that feminism demeans them. They also tend to be terrible slouches when it comes to housework. Little wonder, then, that ambitious young women are far less keen on marriage than they are.
A similar pattern of singlehood pertains in America and Europe, despite their less ingrained gender roles. Until roughly the middle of the 20th century, far more men went to university than women. As a result there were far more couples in which the man was better educated than the other way round. More recently, however, women have surpassed men in studiousness. Across the OECD on average 51% of women aged 25-34 had a university degree in 2019, compared with 39% of men. That makes the old pattern impossible to sustain. “Highly educated women who still want to marry up won’t find enough candidates,” says Albert Esteve, the director of the Centre for Demographic Studies in Barcelona. “So the question is, are they going to start marrying down?”
If mathematics were the only driving force, rather than cultural norms, there would have been a big rise in the share of couples where the woman is better educated. Yet the expectation that women should marry up is hard to dispel. Researchers in Germany, for example, found that highly educated women over the age of 30 were more likely to remain single than settle for a man with less education.
There is some evidence that more women are beginning to marry down in terms of education, but it is not happening to nearly the degree that might have been expected. What is more, Mr Esteve has found that educated women are “picking the best non-educated men” by coupling with those who earn more than they do. In effect, they are simply switching from one form of marrying up to another.
Educated women’s hesitance to marry down is not wholly irrational. In a number of countries, men are not adapting well to changing times. In Australia, for example, those who earn less than their female partners are more likely to beat or berate them. But people can change. A study in America found that marriages where the woman is better educated than the man were more likely to break down among older cohorts, but not among younger ones.
Changes in relative levels of education explain some of the increase in singlehood in Western countries, but not all of it. Another part of the explanation lies in technology, and the huge shifts it has brought in how people meet their mates. For about 60 years after the end of the second world war, the most common way that heterosexual couples met was through friends, according to a study published in 2019 by Mr Rosenfeld and colleagues. But after the introduction of smartphones in the late 2000s, the proportion who met online surged. In 2013 that became the most common way for couples to get together.
Yet online dating is fundamentally different from the old-fashioned sort. When looking for a date, Kristian Del Rosario, a 27-year-old lawyer who lives in New York City, is able to winnow down matches on Hinge, a popular app, using all manner of criteria. She looks at a man’s age (no more than six years older than her, but “beggars can’t be choosers”), job, religion, political views, whether they smoke marijuana (“I cross them off”) and how tall they are, which is important to her. “I’m five-six and I’ve literally had men who were like five-five, who tried to match with me,” she says. “Well, that’s definitely not happening.”
People have always been finicky when choosing a long-term mate, at least when sober. But social media and online dating have turbo-charged pickiness, allowing people to filter candidates not just for the sorts of things that have always been important (age, religion, ethnicity and education), but also for all sorts of other attributes, such as their political views or narcotic preferences, not to mention their height and weight. One consequence is that many people now lie: researchers in Germany found that online daters claim to be a little taller and a little less overweight than the average person. Another is that many struggle to find dates.
Reporting in the Wall Street Journal suggests that most women on Bumble, an online dating app, screen out all men who are less than six feet tall. That rules out about 85% of men at a stroke. To be sure, women have long tended to prefer taller men—but not to such an extreme. Most young British women say that kindness, honesty and a sense of humour are far more important in a partner than looks, according to polling by Ipsos. So why do so many online daters write off all kind, honest, funny men of average height?
Part of the answer is found in online and social-media cultures that promote unrealistic ideals. In the “manosphere”, online communities united by the idea that men are oppressed, young “incels” (involuntarily celibate men) complain that women are selfish and manipulative for not sleeping with them. Misogynistic social-media influencers such as Andrew Tate advise them to become hyper-masculine and to dominate women.
Women have their own (less nasty) version of this echo chamber. Some vet potential dates on private social-media forums where others post the names and pictures of men they say have cheated on them or are abusive. That may help make dating safer, but some women use them simply to complain about bad dates or men who spurned them. This can be off-putting for the 41% of women who say they often come across videos or social-media posts in which women share negative dating experiences. It is also daunting for men, who are afraid of asking women out in case they are publicly shamed, says Daniel Cox of the Survey Centre on American Life, part of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank.
Some social-media personalities with big followings create unrealistic expectations about courtship, says Sabrina Zohar, a dating coach based in Los Angeles with 1.3m followers on TikTok. She charges clients $9,999 for a three-month membership, during which she feels obliged to spell out such basic principles as, “If somebody doesn’t text you every day, it doesn’t mean that they don’t like you.”
Unrealistic expectations are probably as old as dating and relationships, but a generation of young people who have grown up with personalised music playlists and online entertainment may be less willing to set their preferences aside. “You can filter your news feeds, right? You can curate your online life,” says Mr Cox. “How easy is it to do that when you’re thinking about prospective relationships?” That also extends to ideology. As men have drifted to the right and women have become more liberal in America and parts of Europe, politics is getting in the way of pillow-talk, he says.
Wedded to devices
New technology not only fosters pickiness about whom to date, it also absorbs a lot of time, leaving less for socialising and group activities—tried-and-tested ways of meeting partners. In America the amount of time 15-to-24-year-olds spend hanging out face-to-face has fallen by more than a quarter over the past decade, whereas the amount of time spent gaming has increased by about half (and nearly doubled for young men).
Time spent streaming, surfing or gaming even seems to be displacing sex. Almost everywhere in the rich world people are having sex less often than before, and many more are having none at all. Brits aged 18-44, for instance, have gone from copulating five times a month in 1990 to twice a month in 2021, notes Soazig Clifton of University College London. Researchers have posited, variously, that this is because they are too busy, more stressed, are watching porn instead, or are simply distracted by Netflix. As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more adept, growing numbers of people are turning to it, rather than humans, for
intimate relationships.
People who spend their late teens and 20s watching television, playing computer games or chatting with AIs may be reducing their chances of ever finding a mate, since they are missing their best chance to hone their dating skills and learn how to weather the ups and downs of relationships. “Dating is really not like riding a bike,” says Mr Rosenfeld. “You need constant practice to be good at it and if you are out of practice for a while, it’s harder.”
In other words, singlehood, which is already reshaping Western society, is likely to keep growing for some time to come, with all the consequences—good and bad—that it entails. At some point it will surely plateau, but it shows no signs of doing so yet. Until recently, demographers had thought that, once men’s attitudes caught up with women’s emancipation, a new equilibrium would be reached. “Men would do a bit of cleaning and housework to be attractive, and happy families would be produced again,” says Mr Esteve. Yet even in egalitarian Scandinavia, he notes, “regardless of how beautiful are the men”, marriage and fertility rates are still falling. “Why is this happening?” he asks. It is the 100m plus-nones question. ■
全世界富裕國家中，越來越多人不交往、不同居
社群媒體、交友軟體與政治對立，都扮演了重要角色
2025 年 11 月 6 日｜紐約、新加坡｜閱讀時間 14 分鐘
「我不跟保守派或中間派男性約會。」30 歲、在紐約從事社群媒體工作的南希·安特比（Nancy Anteby）這麼說。「我只跟自由派的男人約會。」
她的條件不只政治立場。她希望對方有上進心、穩定工作、是猶太人，最重要的是，願意和她一起組家庭。要找到符合這些條件的人並不容易。「很多時候男人會讓你失望。」她感嘆。但她最近也發現：「就算沒有男人，我也能過上自己想要的生活。」
安特比並不特別。美國 25～34 歲的人中，2023 年有 41% 的女性與 50% 的男性是單身，這比例在五十年間幾乎翻倍。
這現象也不只出現在美國。2010～2022 年間，在 OECD 30 個主要富裕國家中，有 26 國的獨居人口增加。亞洲的結婚率也大幅下降，包括中國、印度，尤其是日本、韓國與台灣。
不只追求婚姻或同居的人受到影響，連只是想談戀愛或尋求性關係的人也愈來愈少。年輕人社交變少、約會變少、開始發生性行為的年齡更晚，整體行為次數也都大幅下降。
史丹佛大學社會學家羅森菲爾德（Michael Rosenfeld）發現，疫情造成的約會減少，使美國 2022 年約多出 1370 萬名單身者。
《經濟學人》根據此資料並考量多個亞洲國家婚姻率下降後推估，過去十年間，全球至少增加 1 億名單身者。
兩個人的世界，也可能變得擁擠
戀愛、性、婚姻與離婚都是個人選擇，影響最直接的是當事人。如今更多人能自由選擇單身，而非因社會壓力被迫結婚，這對許多人來說是一種解放。但並非所有單身者都「想」單身。對 14 國的研究顯示，只有 40% 的單身者說他們不想進入關係。
2019 年美國皮尤調查也發現，50% 的單身美國人不想約會；但真正因「喜歡單身」而不約會的只有 27%。其他人則是太忙、太老，或覺得沒人會想跟他們交往。
在 14 國研究中，有 34% 單身者表示不想孤單，但「難以吸引對象」；26% 說自己「正在兩段關係之間」。
總結來說，想要伴侶卻找不到的人越來越多。
男與女的期待差距正急速擴大
在皮尤研究中，62% 的單身女性不想約會，但同意的男性只有 37%。
一些國家（如美國、韓國）甚至出現一大群覺得自己被「剝奪戀愛機會」的男性團體。而全球統計顯示，未婚男性比例過高常與暴力與犯罪上升相關。即使是交往率的小變化，擴大到整個人口後，也會造成巨大影響。
其中最大效應是 生育率下降——已婚女性通常比單身女性更常生育。
對日本、韓國這種未婚生子極少（僅 2–4%）的國家影響更大。
此外，更多人獨居後，也會影響房市（更大量的小宅需求）、公共預算（托嬰與學校需求下降，但長照需求上升）。
許多想脫單的人之所以無法，是因為：
1. 交友市場失靈，讓適合的人找不到彼此
2. 社會變化加劇了人與人之間的不相容性
實際上，兩者同時發生。
亞洲：人口失衡與傳統文化，使單身潮更嚴重
首先是人口結構。中國的一胎化讓男女性比例嚴重失衡。到 2027 年，中國適婚年齡層中，每 100 名女性竟有 119 名男性。
整體而言，中國可能有 3000–5000 萬名「多餘的男人」——大多來自較貧困、教育程度較低的背景，不易找到配偶。
高度受教育的女性也更常保持單身。
印度也有類似情況。2011 年印度每 100 名女生出生就有 111 名男生。雖然情況略改善，2000–2015 年間仍多出生了約 2000 萬名男性，未來同樣會面臨婚配問題。同時，越來越多亞洲女性受高等教育並投入職場，經濟獨立後就不再需要靠婚姻生活。
但婚姻對女性的「代價」仍然很高：
她們常得承擔照顧公婆、父母與小孩的責任，外加大部分家務。
因此許多女性認為「結婚＝失去自由、職涯停滯」。
在中國、韓國等地，受高等教育的女性反而最不願結婚。
原因之一是：許多大學畢業男性仍抱持傳統、甚至反女權觀念，認為女性進步「損害」了他們的利益。
在韓國，情況更極端：
· 一半年輕男性覺得自己被歧視
· 60% 認為女權主義貶低男性
· 男性在家務分擔上極度不均
難怪許多有抱負的女性更不願意結婚。
西方：教育、文化與科技，使配對更困難
在歐美，雖然性別角色較平等，但單身率也快速上升。
其中一個原因是教育。女性的受教育程度已全面超越男性。2019 年在 OECD，25–34 歲女性中 51% 有大學學歷，男性只有 39%。
傳統「男方學歷較高」的婚配模式因此無法維持。
理論上，女性應該開始願意「嫁給學歷較低但其他條件不錯的男人」。
然而研究發現，許多高學歷女性寧願保持單身，也不願降低標準。有些女性的確開始「學歷下嫁」，但比例遠比預期低。
而且即便如此，她們通常還是會選「收入比自己高的男性」——換句話說，從「學歷門當戶對」轉成「收入門當戶對」。
在一些國家，收入較低的男性對伴侶較容易有攻擊、貶低等行為，這也讓女性更猶豫。然而新研究顯示，年輕世代的「女高男低」婚姻，其實不一定比較容易破裂。
教育差異能解釋部分單身潮，但遠遠不是全部。
科技重塑了人們相遇的方式：更挑剔、更孤立
在二戰後的 60 年間，異性戀情侶最常透過朋友介紹而相識。但智慧型手機普及後，網路交友迅速崛起。
2013 年起，網路成為人們最主要的交友方式。
但網路交友跟傳統交往方式完全不同。
以 27 歲的紐約律師德爾羅薩里奧（Kristian Del Rosario）為例，她在 Hinge 上篩選對象的條件非常細：年齡、工作、宗教、政治立場、是否用大麻、身高……
「我 5 呎 6（約 168 公分），很多 5 呎 5（165 公分）的男生想跟我配對——不可能。」
人們本來挑剔，但科技讓「挑剔」變成系統化。
不只基本條件，就連政治理念、使用什麼毒品、身高體重，都能瞬間排除。
許多人因此美化自己的個資，以免被刷掉。
有報導指出，Bumble 上大多數女性直接排除身高不足 6 呎（183 公分）的男性——一下就淘汰了約 85% 的男性。
雖然女性一向偏好高個子，但並沒有到這麼極端的地步。
同時，網路和社群文化也製造了不切實際的想像：
· 男性圈子裡（manosphere）充斥抱怨女性不給機會的聲音
· 女性圈子裡則有私密社群公開「黑名單」
這些現象都讓人更害怕踏出第一步。
此外，花大量時間在滑手機、追劇、打遊戲，也大幅壓縮了社交和面對面互動的時間。
過去十年，美國 15–24 歲的面對面相處時間下降超過四分之一，遊戲時間則幾乎翻倍。
性行為頻率也在下降，某些人甚至轉向 AI 建立「親密關係」。
年輕時不練習社交與約會技能，未來要脫單的難度只會更高。
羅森菲爾德說：「約會不像騎腳踏車。你不練就會退步。」
單身潮短期內不會停止
單身正重新塑造西方社會，而且短期內看不出頂峰。
原本學者以為，隨著男性態度逐漸調整、與女性更平權後，會恢復平衡。
但即使在北歐等最平等的地方，婚姻與生育仍不斷下降。
這讓人口學家不禁問：「這到底是怎麼回事？」
答案，正是那個價值上百萬、遍布全球的——
「1 億單身者」之謎。
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