# 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. Harris released more than one report from those same field dates. The marketplace wording, the transactional wording, and the app-usage split below are from the [Modern Dating Survey](https://theharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Modern-Dating-Survey-February-2026.pdf). They are not from [Singles in America Year 2](https://theharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Singles-in-America-2-February-2026.pdf), which measured relationship status (46 percent of U.S. adults single; Gen Z leading at 67 percent single). Same field window. Different questions. Different bases. A [Harris write-up](https://theharrispoll.com/articles/dating-apps-detox-child-care-drives-productivity-and-fobo-fuels-the-self-taught-skills-boom/) published February 26, 2026 restates the marketplace and transactional lines. The percentages and the exact wording below are taken from the Modern Dating PDF. ## 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 (free-only plus paid) and 67 percent not currently using (past users plus never-users). The 67 percent is not a never-used figure. 41 percent never used the apps; 26 percent used them and are not using them now. Treat the decimals as survey estimates, not a census. This is a three-day online poll, not a probability panel on the scale of the American Community Survey. The direction is what earns the space: most singles in this sample are not in the feed right now, and most singles in this sample describe dating as a marketplace. ## Transactional is the all-adult finding A different question went to the full sample (n=2,177). 72 percent of Americans agreed: "Dating apps made dating more transactional than romantic." That is a broader base than the singles marketplace line. It includes people who are partnered. It is still a supermajority saying the dominant product made romance feel like a deal. Two more all-adult items sit next to it. 56 percent of Americans said meeting through a dating app is "cringe." 80 percent said meeting "in the wild," meaning organically, is cute or cool. You do not need those last two to make the case. They are useful because they point at taste, not at character. The objection is to the venue. :::pullquote 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 sentence is hard to read as a culture that has given up on partnership. It is easy to read 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). Those shares do not add to 100. Harris did not publish the rest of the table in the pages we have, so we will not invent it. This is also a different question from the Stanford "How Couples Meet and Stay Together" series we covered in [how couples actually meet now](/blog/how-couples-meet-now). Rosenfeld's series tracks how *new* couples met, year by year, and found online overtaking friends around 2013. Harris asked adults about their current or most recent partner, which folds in long relationships that began before swipe apps existed. Both can be true at once: the front door for new couples moved online, and a majority of adults, asked about the partner they have or last had, still name an offline introduction. Do not paste one number into the other study. ## The format that feels like a store Here the survey stops and the reading starts, so treat this section as ours. 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](/blog/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](/blog/swipe-fatigue-the-case-for-slower-dating). 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](/blog/dating-app-giants-are-shrinking), and the participation side in [the romance recession is a search problem](/blog/the-romance-recession-is-a-search-problem). None of that is a verdict on the people who still open the apps, or on the people who closed them. 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. ## What this does not show Harris did not follow the same people over years. Nobody in this poll was assigned an app and watched. The causal thread from "feels like a marketplace" to "I closed the app" is a reading, and it is ours. A person can agree that dating feels transactional and still be on an app tonight. A person can have never used an app and still want a partner. The 67 percent who are not currently using includes people who tried the product and people who never did, and those are different stories. The sample is an online Harris poll of U.S. adults, not a register of every single person in the country. Question wording on items like "cringe" and "cute or cool" is doing some of the work. Carry the percentages as a snapshot of how this sample described the format in January 2026. What you can say without the extra step is narrower and still worth having. Most singles in this survey are not currently using dating apps. Most singles in this survey call dating a marketplace. Most adults in this survey say the apps made dating more transactional than romantic. Three-quarters of singles want a more curated way to meet than those apps offer. ## Design after the match If the complaint is that search has been built like a store, the useful response is not a pep talk about trying harder in the aisle. It is a different object. That is the bet Bloom makes, and it is a product bet rather than a lecture. Fewer introductions, considered like people. 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](/pricing) is the plain version of that. The survey does not prove that design. It describes the feeling a store produces, and the number of singles who have already walked out of it. Those are the conditions. The work is to build something that does not feel like inventory. Bloom is pre-launch, starting in Utah along the Wasatch Front.