77 percent of singles say dating feels like a marketplace. Two-thirds have already left the apps.

77 percent of singles in Harris Poll's Modern Dating Survey agreed with this sentence: "Dating today feels more like a marketplace than a romance story." Among single women it was 82 percent.

That is the finding to start with. Not a mood. A majority of singles, asked directly, described the current search as a store.

Two-thirds of those same singles are not currently using a dating app. Harris's own headline in the report pairs the two: "Two-thirds aren't using dating apps as dating feels more like a marketplace than romance." People are not walking away from wanting a partner. They are walking away from a format that feels like inventory.

What Harris actually asked

Harris fielded this online between January 22 and January 24, 2026, among 2,177 U.S. adults aged 18 and over. The singles questions use a base of 785 people, defined as single and not dating, or single and dating but not in an official relationship.

The figures below come from the Modern Dating Survey. Harris ran a separate report from the same field dates, Singles in America Year 2, which asked different questions (it found 46 percent of U.S. adults single, and 67 percent of Gen Z).

The opt-out is among singles, and it is not "never used"

On current dating-app usage, asked of singles (n=785):

• 22 percent currently use free versions only
• 11 percent currently use paid versions
• 26 percent have used dating apps in the past
• 41 percent have never used dating apps

That is 33 percent currently using and 67 percent not. The 67 percent is not a never-used figure: 41 percent never used the apps, and 26 percent used them and stopped.

Transactional is the all-adult finding

A different question went to the full sample of 2,177 adults, partnered people included. 72 percent agreed: "Dating apps made dating more transactional than romantic." 56 percent said meeting through a dating app is "cringe," and 80 percent said meeting "in the wild" is cute or cool. The objection is to the venue, not to the people in it.

Most singles in this survey are not on a dating app. Most singles in this survey still call dating a marketplace. Those two facts belong together.

People still want a way to meet. They want a different one.

75 percent of singles agreed: "I want more curated ways to meet compatible people than dating apps can offer." Among single women it was 80 percent.

That is hard to read as a culture that has given up on partnership. It reads as a culture that has given up on one method.

When Harris asked all adults how they met their current or most recent romantic partner, 57 percent named an in-person path (mutual friends or family 23 percent, work or school 23 percent, "in the wild" 11 percent) and 24 percent named an online path (social media 12 percent, dating apps or websites 12 percent).

That is a different question from the Stanford study we covered in how couples actually meet now, which tracks how new couples met each year and found online overtaking friends around 2013. Harris's question folds in long relationships that began before swipe apps existed. Both can be true: by 2017, online had become the most common way new couples met, and most adults' current or last partner still came through an offline introduction.

The format that feels like a store

The survey stops here. What follows is our reading.

A marketplace is a place you go to evaluate inventory. You compare. You keep your options open. You pay for a better look at the stock. You leave when the browsing stops paying off. That is a reasonable way to buy a toaster. It is a miserable way to be seen, and a miserable way to see other people, for months at a time.

We have already written the mechanism. An endless feed of strangers trains your default answer toward no, and it leaves both the browser and the browsed feeling processed. That is why a feed of strangers makes you feel like inventory. The exhaustion has been asked about directly, and the answers match what the choice research would predict: swipe fatigue.

Underneath the feed is an incentive. When the product is a paid search sold to people who are still looking, the customer who finds someone and leaves is a lost subscriber. That is an accounting identity, not a theory about daters. We laid the industry side of it out in the dating app giants are shrinking, and the participation side in the romance recession is a search problem.

Wanting a partner and refusing a store are compatible. The survey is what you would expect if the method, not the desire, is what broke. That link is our reading: this is a three-day online poll, and nobody in it was followed over time.

Design after the match

If search has been built like a store, the answer is not a pep talk about trying harder in the aisle. It is a different product.

That is the bet Bloom makes. Fewer introductions, each one a person rather than a card. A free plan with a set number of likes a day, because a bounded day is the condition under which anyone reads. Seeing who liked you is not the paywall. The app is meant to keep going once two people find each other, because the business should do better when a relationship works than when a search continues. The pricing page is the plain version of that.

The survey does not prove that design. It describes the feeling a store produces, and how many singles are not in it right now, including the quarter who tried the apps and stopped.

Bloom is pre-launch, starting in Utah along the Wasatch Front.