Karen Lewis, a therapist in Washington, D.C., talks with a lot of frustrated single people—and she likes to propose that they try a thought exercise.
Imagine you look into a crystal ball. You see that you’ll find your dream partner in, say, 10 years—but not before then. What would you do with that intervening time, freed of the onus to look for love?
I’d finally be able to relax, she often hears. I’d do all the things I’ve been waiting to do. One woman had always wanted a patterned dish set—the kind she’d put on her wedding registry, if that day ever came. So Lewis asked her, Why not just get it now? After their conversation, the woman told her friends and family: I want those dishes for my next birthday, damn it.
Lewis, who studied singlehood for years and is the author of With or Without a Man: Single Women Taking Control of Their Lives, doesn’t mean to suggest that anyone should give up on dating—just that they shouldn’t put their life on hold while they do it. That might be harder than it seems, though. Apps rule courtship culture. Finding someone demands swiping through sometimes thousands of options, messaging, arranging a meeting—and then doing it again, and again. That eats up time but also energy, motivation, optimism. Cameron Chapman, a 40-year-old in rural New England, told me that dating is the only thing she has found that gets harder with practice: Every false start leaves you with a little less faith that the next date might be different.
So some people simply … stop. Reporting this article, I spoke with six people who, like Chapman, made this choice. They still want a relationship—and they wouldn’t refuse if one unfolded naturally—but they’ve cycled between excitement and disappointment too many times to keep trying. Quitting dating means more than just deleting the apps, or no longer asking out acquaintances or friendly strangers. It means looking into Lewis’s crystal ball and imagining that it shows them that they’ll never find the relationship they’ve always wanted. Facing that possibility can be painful. But it can also be helpful, allowing people to mourn the future they once expected—and redefine, on their own terms, what a fulfilling life could look like.
Chapman didn’t used to hate dating. When she got back into it after her marriage ended, she had a philosophy: “There’s no such thing as a bad date. There’s just good dates and good brunch stories.” But she started to feel discouraged by how few options she had in her small town. Some people were there on vacation; others just weren’t a match. She stopped going on app dates in 2017 and got off of them completely about four years ago—until, in early 2023, she resolved to try them once more for at least a week. In that time, she told me, she swiped through hundreds of profiles and matched with two people. One, she found out, hadn’t disclosed that he was in a polyamorous relationship. “I was counting down the minutes to the end of that week,” she said. After that, she decided, “I don’t need any more brunch stories.”
In years past, before apps became the most common way to meet a partner, people tended to pair up with friends, acquaintances, or co-workers. The divide between dating and not dating wasn’t so stark. Now, though, searching can feel like an unrelenting obligation. Mai Dang, a 34-year-old program manager in Washington, D.C., told me she thinks often of one friend’s response when she said she wanted to eventually have a family: “Well, are you doing something about it?” Most of the books, podcasts, and influencers targeting single people address how to date better—more efficiently, more confidently, with more of an open mind. Few highlight that love takes luck, or that, as Lewis told me bluntly, there may not be someone out there for everyone.
Growing up, most of us know we may not snag our dream job or become famous. But a relationship, a family, a place to build a life together—many of us are raised to see these things as the building blocks of a meaningful existence. It can be hard to accept that they aren’t birthrights. Without them, you may feel frozen in place: like you’re waiting for something, for someone.
Lewis believes that prolonged and unwanted singlehood is a form of “ambiguous loss,” a term first coined by the University of Minnesota social scientist Pauline Boss in the 1970s. At first, Boss was writing about the psychological absence of a father. But this was during the Vietnam War, and it quickly became apparent that the phenomenon was spurred by physical absence too—as with the prisoners of war whose families didn’t know whether to grieve them or keep hoping for their return. When loss is ambiguous, closure is near impossible; it’s not clear whether there’s anyone to mourn. Perpetual singlehood doesn’t have the same gravity, but it can feel similarly unresolved. If you’ve long had an idea of a future partner, and that imagined person keeps not showing up, how do you know whether to keep hoping or to move on? “That hanging in the middle,” Lewis told me, “is a very, very uncomfortable place.”
For the people I spoke with, the lack of control over their romantic life was exasperating. They could decide to make friends, or move, or switch jobs—but they couldn’t will a partner into being. Quitting dating was a way to reconcile themselves to that fact. Jeffrey B. Jackson, a family therapist and a professor at Brigham Young University’s School of Family Life, reminded me about a prayer that’s a core part of Alcoholics Anonymous: The goal is to develop “the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
That approach comes with risks. What if you miss the date that would’ve changed everything? (One person I talked with did find a relationship after she decided to delete her apps and freeze her eggs; her last app date was with her current partner.) Geoff MacDonald, a University of Toronto psychologist who studies singlehood, has found that when you ask people about their biggest dating regret, they talk about missed opportunities a lot more than rejection.
But with a laser focus on romance, you might pass up other possibilities. When Nicole Vélez Agosto, a 38-year-old psychologist in Texas, decided more than two years ago to stop dating, she felt freed of “the anxiety of Is he gonna call? or, you know, Does this person like me?” she told me. “When you get rid of that, you’re like, Oh, wow. Life is lighter.” With that mental burden lifted, the people I spoke with turned their attention elsewhere. “When I was married, my life became about my husband,” Chapman said. She didn’t even really know what her own interests were. But now that she’s single—and not dating—she’s been hiking and taking burlesque and belly-dance classes.
MacDonald told me that when his research team surveyed participants on the best thing about being single, most said “the freedom.” The worst part, they said, was “the loneliness.” Yet the people I talked with seemed to feel less lonely when they weren’t dating—better able to appreciate their solitude and the bonds they already had. Chapman is freer to visit her aging mom, and she spent a lot of time with her father before he died a few months ago. And now that she’s not keeping herself available for romantic prospects, she’ll chat with anyone at the local bar. She’s made more new friends than she ever used to.
Counting out a partner might upend your whole life plan. But when you’re pushed to consider alternate directions, you might end up somewhere both imperfect and wonderful. Vélez Agosto adopted a girl whom she’s raising on her own; recently, when her daughter was in the hospital, two close friends showed up to help. Others told me they’d come to terms with not having the family they’d wanted and were pursuing new goals: making a career shift, writing a book, buying a home, surfing.
Giving up dating brings good days and bad. You can’t just stop hoping for a partner on command, after all. In certain moments—on Valentine’s Day, or when something great happens and no one’s around to hear about it—you may be reminded: This isn’t what you would have chosen. Your loss is still ambiguous.
The drive for clarity is natural. “When things get tough, we often will try to simplify things,” Jackson told me. But he wants people who feel caught in the painful limbo of singlehood to ask themselves: “How could you, in the present, build the life that you want for yourself and continue searching for this person?” Maybe that means buying the patterned dishware and sending a DM while you’re at it; maybe it means signing up for an activity you’ll enjoy whether or not you meet someone cute; maybe it means taking a break from romance rather than walking away forever. In his clinical experience, Jackson finds that people tend to return to dating eventually anyway.
Marching on, after so many letdowns and embarrassments, is brave. But so is the decision to stop, a choice that American society too often doesn’t celebrate or even present as an option. It might seem extreme, but the people I spoke with had already tried to date and be fully present for other endeavors—and found it untenable. Refusing to continue isn’t a cop-out so much as an affirmation of everything else precious that fills one’s days. As Shani Silver, the host of the podcast A Single Serving, who quit dating in January 2019, told me: “If you were treating your life like a waiting period before you find love, you are missing your own life.”
Silver’s point reminded me of something I’d heard from Drew Clement, a 37-year-old in Ohio who told me that his “entire approach to life changed” when he quit dating. He used to attend concerts often, but he was always distracted by the possibility of romance—he’d make eye contact with someone in the crowd, then spend the rest of the show thinking about smiling their way or trying to get their number. But he doesn’t worry about that anymore. For the first time, he’s just watching the stage and listening to the music.
By Karen Gail Lewis
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