Is Dating a Total Nightmare for You Right Now?

On a recent Saturday night in Austin, Anya Haas went out hoping to meet someone. She planned to grab a bar seat at a trendy restaurant and scope out her options, but when she arrived, it was packed. While waiting, an elderly man offered to buy Haas dinner; she politely declined and left to grab some sushi before heading to a comedy show. There, she figured, it would be easier to mingle with people her own age. But when the 32-year-old hospitality worker arrived at the club, it was mostly empty. She was also the only person who sat in the front row, and the comics singled her out for being alone. Humiliated, Haas then got a ride home from a single, 75-year-old woman who said she drove for Uber in order to meet people. That’s going to be me, Haas thought while petting the driver’s dog.

Once she got home, Haas recorded a video recapping her mortifying experience. “I’m not someone who posts or cries on the Internet,” she says. “So this is a new one for me.” Haas, who has been single for the past seven years, talks through tears about how tired she is of people telling her a dream man will “come along when you least expect it.” “I’m so sick of hearing that,” she says, slamming her hands down on her kitchen island. “There’s such a thing as people who just don’t find their person and don’t get married.”

Haas had posted on TikTok only three times before, but by the next day, her video had millions of views across the internet. People began to repost her TikTok alongside other videos of tearful 20- and 30-something single women, and the reactions showed just how disconnected the sexes are when it comes to the state of dating in 2024. Many men criticized Haas for having “unrealistic expectations” or seemed confused by her dilemma. “Why are so many 29 yr old boss girls from Tiktok having public meltdowns about failing to find a man?” wrote one dude on X. Meanwhile, legions of women commiserated. “I’m in the same boat,” one 30-year-old wrote, adding that she also hadn’t been in a relationship in almost seven years.

Single people have always griped about trying to meet someone, but lately, it seems heterosexual women have reached a breaking point. Not only are they crying on-camera and swearing off dating apps, they are becoming voluntarily celibate like Julia Fox or going “boysober.” When Bumble ran an anti-celibacy campaign last month, the company received so much backlash it was forced to pull the ads and apologize. Taken together, it looks as though single women in the U.S. are one more bad date away from launching their own version of South Korea’s 4B movement, in which women refuse to date, fuck, marry, or have kids with men.

Ryan Spencer vented her frustrations on TikTok in mid-May because conversations with a new love interest were stuck at surface level. None of the five men she had previously dated provided the 29-year-old with the deep commitment she’s seeking either. “How much longer do I have to pray and manifest and wait?” she says in her video. Choking back tears, she wonders, “Is it just supposed to be me, alone?” Spencer tells me she grew up with parents who still “absolutely love the shit out of each other,” and along with marriage, kids, and a house, she wants the fairy-tale romance, too. “I’m not denying that I’m a little bit delulu when it comes to falling in love,” she says. “I’m sorry, I grew up watching Disney movies!”

Taylor, who asked to go by her first name only, could relate to Spencer’s video even though she’s not angling for a marriage proposal. “She has a solid life but doesn’t have a person to share it with,” the 30-year-old pastry cook says of the TikTok. “It hit me recently: 90 percent of the things I do on a daily basis I do alone.” Taylor, who lives in Brooklyn and wants a partnership of some kind, says so many of the guys she meets suffer from what she calls “porn brain”: They prize performative masculinity over actual connection. During sex, she says, they focus on dominance rather than her pleasure. Her only relationship ended a year and a half ago, and while she has been on a few dates since then, it’s been hard to have meaningful conversations.

All the women I spoke with said they feel apps have turned dates into transactions. Haas swore off Bumble and Hinge more than a year ago, finding that most guys just pretended to want something serious in order to get laid. (Since posting her video, she says two men she previously matched with sent unprompted dick pics.) Anissa, a 31-year-old corporate lawyer who asked to go by a pseudonym, tells me the guys she meets seem interested in “conquest” while she and other single women are “trying to just find their person.” She describes three male archetypes she has encountered on the apps: “He either wants to have sex with you immediately. Or he’s already in a relationship and is just so obviously noncommittal. Or he’s obsessed with you.” One guy lied to her about his job and where he lived, another confessed last-minute to being in an open relationship, and the last man she went on a date with became overly attached to her after spending only a few hours together. She flaked on their follow-up plans. “There’s a sickness where we don’t see people as people because of the apps,” she says. “We always think that there’s something ‘better’ out there.”

Anissa isn’t finding it any easier to meet guys offline. In her experience, men her age tend to pick up younger women in bars. “He’s going to go up to the scantily clad 21-year-old who’s having the time of her life,” she says. “Not three grumpy 31-year-olds.” Taylor also hasn’t had any luck in the wild after ditching dating apps. She says that in her 20s, it was easy to meet someone every weekend at Union Pool, the notoriously horny Williamsburg club. Now, she finds the bar crowd is more closed off and cliqued up. Watching Haas’s video, she thought, Someone’s sitting alone at a comedy show? Sounds about right. “In the past five years, I don’t think I’ve ever met someone out there randomly,” she adds.

Each woman offers different theories on why dating is such a drag right now. Taylor blames technology, and Spencer finds men her age are more interested in “getting shit-faced in New York City every weekend” than in committing to a relationship, partly because the COVID-19 pandemic derailed their prime sexual years. Another woman in her early 30s tells me she has been on an eight-month break from dating men because she thinks they’ve become more politically conservative. (Some studies show that young women are becoming more liberal than young men, though experts are skeptical that there’s a significant political divide between the sexes.) Haas is concerned about the online network of men’s-rights activists who want to “turn guys against women.” The one common thread throughout these conversations, though, is that the women believe their romantic priorities are fundamentally different from those of guys their age. That may not be a new problem (see: Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus), but it feels especially pressing in the age of Andrew Tate and swiping left.

Taylor still feels hopeful that she’ll meet someone even if she has no idea when. But Anissa isn’t so sure. Like Spencer and Haas, the thought of being single long-term terrifies her; she doesn’t want to spend her Friday nights with her cat eating sushi. She also hates it when people tell her a relationship will happen when she stops trying to make it happen. “I think that is the biggest lie that we tell each other and ourselves,” Anissa says. “You have to look.” But where is she supposed to look, exactly? For her part, Haas wants to be more proactive about flirting IRL by complimenting hot men she sees at the grocery store or in a coffee shop. Rather than going to a bar and hoping to get hit on, she’s also forcing herself to get off the couch and hang out with friends she doesn’t normally see. “I’m just going to try and have fun and see if that helps,” she says.

On Instagram, she currently has 180 unread messages, but the DMs Haas is most excited about have been from other women in Austin asking her to hang out. If the video scores her a few new friends, it will have served a purpose — though she has thought about taking it down. “If I magically do meet somebody,” she says, “I don’t need them to be able to go to my TikTok and see me crying all over the internet.”