Lonely hearts

In 2009, Emily Young moved to Syracuse, N.Y., expecting to party and do “all the crazy college things.” Instead, she ended up at church and gave her life to the Lord. After that, Young spent her early 20s learning more about her newfound faith.

About the time she was 25, Young realized she would like to find someone to marry, a committed Christian she could serve the Lord alongside. “I looked around, and I realized I was like 10 years late to the game,” she said. “Everyone was married. Everyone was in a serious relationship already.”

There was only one single guy at her church. And Young wasn’t interested in dating him. So, she tried other ways to meet people, going to young adult groups across central New York.

“You name it, I tried it,” she said. But it was hard to break in when most of those people went to church together, and she was showing up alone.

That was nine years ago.

Today, Young is 34 and works as a master’s prepared registered nurse at a ministry for the terminally ill. It’s difficult work, but she feels called to it. Young still wants to be married. But that just hasn’t panned out for her yet.

She’s not alone.

Singles in the United States are living through what a recent Institute for Family Studies (IFS) report labeled the “dating recession.” Over 70% of Gen Z and millennials say they hope to marry someday, but only about 1 in 3 in the IFS survey report actively dating. Almost three-quarters of women and nearly two-thirds of men said they hadn’t dated or had only dated a few times in the last year.

A tangle of factors contribute to the problem, but most can be summed up as a sweeping breakdown of society spurred by the digital revolution: loss of in-person socializing and churchgoing, changing views of marriage, high rates of anxiety and isolation, and alienation between men and women. All this has created a chasm between expectation and reality for many people when it comes to dating and marriage in the United States.

Most singles want to be married eventually. But it can seem almost impossible to get there, especially for Christians who aren’t willing to compromise on worldview alignment and Biblical sexual ethics. Some Christian influencers and teachers are stepping into that gap—seeking to create low-stakes opportunities for singles to meet each other and develop strong dating and relational skills.

But matching people and coaching them through relationships can be tougher than expected in an era where people are used to hiding behind screens and steeping in social media’s distorted picture of reality. And with as many as 1 in 3 of today’s young adults projected to never marry, churches will likely need to reckon with an unprecedented share of ­singles filling up the pews in the years ahead.

DATING APPS AND WEBSITES now top the charts as the most common way for couples to meet. According to data from the wedding website The Knot, one-third of over 10,000 surveyed U.S. couples married in 2025 met online, with Hinge, Tinder, and Bumble ranking as the most popular apps.

Emily Young said she’s tried all of them, the free ones and the subscription ones. “I have spent hundreds and hundreds of dollars on dating apps,” she said. “I have used every type from secular to Christian ones.” Upward. eHarmony. Christian Mingle. Bumble. Hinge.

The experience hasn’t been great. Sometimes, Young saw profiles of people she knew on dating apps—people she knew shouldn’t be dating. One was actively divorcing his wife. Another was waiting to go to prison.

She said the Christian sites offered especially slim pickings. “I’m convinced that they’re all bots, because I would be on there for months and never connect with anybody,” Young said. She had her friends read over her dating profile for any glaring issues. “Do I look like a serial killer?” she asked them. “No,” they told her. Everything looked fine.

And it wasn’t that Young had ridiculously high standards, either. She has some deal-breakers related to faith and theology. But she isn’t overly picky. She just wants someone she can enjoy talking to and hanging out with.

“I’ve probably been on over 50 first dates,” Young said. “I did three in one day just to see if I could do it.” She said her primary goal reflecting on a date is just to see if she wants to continue the conversation. If the answer is yes, she goes on another date. If not, she moves on. The most dates she’s ever had with one guy is five or six.

She’s had some pretty terrible experiences, too. One guy accused her of exploiting him for a free dinner when she didn’t text him back immediately after a date. Others dominated phone calls or started oversharing their emotional baggage in the first conversation. And she said plenty of guys make lewd comments, send explicit images, or ask her to stay the night with them. “You name it, it’s been said to me,” Young said.

Usually, it’s like pulling teeth to have any sort of dialogue, she said. People message her one-word or one-sentence answers when Young asks them questions as simple as “How was your day?” She said it seems like people just don’t have basic conversational skills anymore.

Young isn’t just imagining that.

Brad Wilcox directs the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia and serves as a senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies. He co-authored its 2026 report on the dating recession. Wilcox said findings linked the current dating breakdown to several factors, but one of the most significant seems to be an erosion of social and conversational skills driven by the rise of digital technology.

“The digital revolution has degraded young adult social skills and divided young women and men from one another,” Wilcox said. Lots of people don’t know how to talk to each other and develop healthy relationships, he added. It’s also harder for people to meet informally, since in-person socializing of all kinds has declined dramatically.

This climate of isolation has created a painful paradox for single adults today, Wilcox said. The happiness premium for marriage has increased in recent years, but finding a suitable marriage partner has become much more difficult.

That’s a tough reality for marriage-minded singles caught in the middle, especially those committed to upholding Christian standards for faith and character. Young said engaging with dating apps feels like a full-time job, and it can be exhausting and demoralizing.

Young already works an intense and demanding job, spending almost 60 hours a week caring for dying people every day. She said she just doesn’t have time or energy to waste on superficial text exchanges with strangers who haven’t figured out their dating intentions or family goals.

It’s a situation that becomes more deeply painful as the years go by. “I’m 34, and my biological clock is screaming in my ear,” she said. “And so when I meet somebody, it’s like I just have a constant timeline going in my head.”

KATY FAUST WORKS in the marriage and family space running the children’s advocacy nonprofit Them Before Us. She travels a lot for her work, and everywhere she goes she meets Christian singles who want to be married and seem like great candidates. “It wasn’t like there was this big skeleton in their closet,” Faust said. “It was just hard to find people to date—even if you narrowed it down to devout conservatives.”

Last year, Faust decided to try to do something about it. She thought if she created a spreadsheet of all the eligible singles she had met personally, maybe she could make a few matches. “Maybe the limiting factor was there were all these great people, but not enough great people in Dallas, Texas, or not enough great people in Denver, Colo.,” she said.

Before launching her matchmaking endeavor, Faust outlined a few ground rules. She wanted her process to be fundamentally different from popular dating apps, which she said prioritize “hotness” and chemistry over worldview and character.

Faust asked each person participating to list the Top 10 attributes they wanted in a spouse, along with their primary deal-breakers.

After deciding on a match, Faust presented each person with a bio of the other. If both people agreed to move forward, she facilitated a picture swap. Then, if both still agreed, they would exchange contact information with the understanding they were committing to three dates, either in person or virtually.

In May 2025, Faust announced her project on X. Right away, people hoping to participate bombarded her with direct messages. Faust didn’t have time to vet everyone who reached out, so she picked about 100 profiles for her database. Most were people she either knew personally or who came highly recommended by someone she knew.

Faust expected if she could deliver people an 8-out-of-10 match, they would take it and run. But that’s not how things turned out. “I was really bewildered by a lot of them rejecting people that lived up to almost everything they themselves said they wanted,” she said.

People were quick to raise objections, especially after the photo swap. They would dismiss someone as “not really my type” or “not really attractive.”

Often, Faust had to work really hard just to convince people to give the pairing a try. She said that made her realize this isn’t simply an issue of putting single guys and girls together. Many people need someone to teach them how to date and relate to one another.

That’s a mission near and dear to the heart of Elles Maddry. She and her husband Daniel co-direct Moral Revolution, a nonprofit focused on teaching God’s design for sex and sexuality to the next generation. A big part of their work is teaching young adults how to navigate dating and relationships in a wise and God-honoring way.

Maddry said one of the primary things holding people back is the illusion social media creates that there is always something better out there. She said that myth, coupled with a common fear Christians have of marrying the wrong person, creates a recipe for anxiety around dating.

Her goal is to push back on cultural narratives she sees as unbiblical—like the idea that there is just one right person someone should marry—and help singles lower the stakes and enjoy getting to know others.

Maddry said she definitely thinks there’s a role for older, wiser believers to play in introducing Christian singles. “I have a running Rolodex of single people in my brain that I’m like, ‘Oh, would this person be good with this person?’” she said.

At the end of the day, Maddry encourages singles to open themselves up to some way of meeting new people. “And what better way than when a mutual person in your church or in your community goes, ‘I know you, and I know this person, and I think there could be something there,’” she said.

OF THE  100 PROFILES she received, Katy Faust has made about 20 matches. Only a handful continued beyond the three-date minimum. But she doesn’t feel like her experiment was a failure. She just realized it required more time and energy than she had to give.

Now, she only matches people on a very selective basis, usually if she gets a new profile and immediately thinks of a good fit. But she posted her matchmaking criteria on Substack for other people to use in their own contexts.

Faust said she would love to see a matchmaker in every church. “We need hundreds of these,” she said. “We need older women who are able to shepherd and coach and reassure both the guys and the girls.” But she added it would have to be someone who sees it as a ministry and has the time and wisdom to do it well.

Institute for Family Studies senior fellow Brad Wilcox agrees matchmaking is a valuable strategy for churches and individuals to consider. He also encourages parents, professors, and friends to be more proactive in hosting events where singles can meet and build relationships.

At the same time, Wilcox said churches need to reckon with the fact that many people—perhaps more than ever before—won’t end up marrying. He said the challenge for the church is to do a better job incorporating singles into the fabric of both faith communities and families.

Meanwhile, many Christian singles say they’ve experienced profound spiritual fruit from walking with Jesus through the pain of extended singleness—even if it’s a path they wouldn’t have chosen for themselves.

Back in Syracuse, N.Y., Emily Young described her emotional journey over the past nine years as a “full-blown rolling-on-the-ground wrestle” with God. She said there are days when she’s OK. And then there are days she’s not.

Going to weddings for young adults she helped mentor can be especially hard. “I taught these kids how to ride bikes, and now they’re getting married,” Young said. “And it’s like, ‘What have I done wrong? What is wrong with me?’”

Once, a woman at her church told her she was too intimidating to ever have a husband. Young said that hurt a lot, because that’s not her intention. She just doesn’t want to waste her life. “I can’t wait to get married before I buy a house, or before I go on vacation, or before I build my 401(k),” she said.

Young encourages married people to think about what they say to singles in the church instead of blaming them or preaching platitudes. “Just acknowledge that, ‘Yes, this is really hard. And I’m going to sit with you through this,’” she said.

Over the years, she’s embraced the friendships in her life as a source of meaningful connection. She has a list of close friends she can reach out to when she just needs a hug or a place to go for dinner. “They invite me over to their house, and I hold their babies, and they ask me how I’m doing,” she said.

Sometimes, they just drive around running errands together.

Young also keeps a gratitude journal, writing down even the most seemingly mundane blessings of her life, like drinking coffee on a Saturday morning with her dog. Or the time when a little kid ran up and gave her a hug unprompted. “That was the first time somebody touched me all day,” she said.

Right now, Young is leading several groups through a study of God’s promises—mostly for herself, she says. She reminds herself that even if she doesn’t get married, God is still good.

“I am not worthless. My life is not in vain. I have blessed many people in this life,” she said. “And that’s OK.”