Why Do We Care If People Are Single?
A Matchmaker’s Case for Taking Love Seriously as a Public Good
By Nick Rosen — Met By Nick
Nobody talks about it directly. We skirt around it with statistics about declining birth rates, rising rates of depression, the collapse of civic participation, the housing crisis. We publish think pieces about loneliness and policy papers about social capital. But we rarely ask the most fundamental question underneath all of it:
Why do we actually care if people are single?
It sounds almost rude to ask. Like we’re implying something is wrong with single people; that they are deficient, incomplete, or a burden on society. That’s not what I’m asking. I’ve spent years as a matchmaker working with single people across more than a dozen cities, and I have enormous respect for the complexity and courage of choosing to pursue a committed partnership in an era that has made it harder than it’s ever been. I ask this question not to judge single people but because I believe the answer matters profoundly and because if we can’t answer it clearly, we will keep building the wrong solutions to the wrong problems.
So let’s try to answer it honestly.
The Question Most People Won’t Sit With
Here is what I observe after years in this industry: most people pursue romantic partnership without ever interrogating why. They know they want it. They feel the pull of it. But the underlying architecture, why the human organism orients toward this particular kind of bond with such force, goes largely unexamined.
And this is a problem. Because when you don’t understand why you want something, you become vulnerable to substitutes. You reach for whatever promises the feeling without asking whether it delivers it. You download another app. You go on another first date. You mistake novelty for progress. You confuse being busy with moving forward.
The dating industry, which I use loosely to mean everything from apps to coaches to influencers selling frameworks for romantic success, has no incentive to help you answer this question. Its business model depends on you remaining in a perpetual state of seeking. The moment you’re satisfied, you’re no longer a customer. So it sells you the search, not the destination.
Before we can talk about how to fix anything, we need to go back to first principles. Why does a committed partnership, specifically, matter? What is it actually doing for people and for the broader social fabric that they belong to?
The Biology Beneath the Romance
Strip away everything cultural about romantic love: the poems, the rituals, the diamond industry, the rom-com genre, and what remains is a biological imperative so ancient it predates our species.
Humans are what biologists call “pair-bonding animals.” We are not the only ones; wolves, certain birds, some primates share this trait, but we are among the most thoroughgoing examples of it. The human infant is uniquely helpless and requires an unusually long period of intensive care. For most of human evolutionary history, raising a child to maturity required more than one caregiver. The pair bond wasn’t romantic sentiment; it was a survival architecture.
What evolved alongside that architecture was a neurological system designed to make the bond feel extraordinary. The early stages of romantic attachment activate dopamine reward circuits comparable to stimulant drugs. Long-term partnership produces oxytocin and vasopressin; hormones associated with trust, attachment, and the kind of sustained calm that the nervous system rewards. The loss of that bond activates the anterior cingulate cortex, the same region that processes physical pain.
Loneliness is not a mood. It is a survival signal. Your body treats it the same way it treats a broken bone.
This is not poetic exaggeration. It is neuroscience. And it has a direct implication for why we should care about singlehood at scale: a society with high rates of chronic loneliness is a society whose members are operating under persistent physiological distress. They are not just sad. They are measurably less healthy, less cognitively functional, and more costly to the systems that support them.
John Cacioppo, the late University of Chicago neuroscientist who spent decades studying loneliness, found that chronic loneliness increases the risk of premature death by roughly 26%; comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. It raises cortisol levels, disrupts sleep, compromises immune function, and accelerates cognitive decline. Loneliness, at the biological level, is a chronic illness.
What Partnership Provides That Nothing Else Does
If loneliness is a survival signal, then partnership is the answer to that signal. But not just any human connection. Friendship matters. Family matters. Community matters. So why does the romantic pair bond occupy a unique position?
Because it provides something that no other relationship structure reliably does: a chosen witness.
Your family loves you by obligation, by history, by the accident of blood. Your friendships are organized around shared interest, proximity, and the mutual availability of time. Your colleagues know you in a role. Your therapist knows you in a context. But your partner (if the relationship is functioning as it can) is the only person in your life who has chosen you specifically, who knows you across contexts, who has skin in the game for your outcomes, and who shows up not because it’s convenient but because they have made a deliberate, renewable decision to invest in your life.
That is what people mean when they say they want someone who genuinely cares about them. They don’t just mean warmth or affection, though those matter. They mean chosen-ness. They mean: someone whose presence in my life is an act of will, renewed daily, not an artifact of circumstance.
This is also why consistency, commitment, and genuine care are not just romantic preferences. They are the operational definition of attachment security. And attachment security is not a luxury. It is a psychological foundation without which most people find it very hard to function at their best.
Securely attached adults show up differently at work. They take risks more readily because they have a base to return to. They regulate their emotions more effectively. They are better equipped to sustain other relationships. They are less likely to self-medicate with substances, compulsive behaviors, or the numbing scroll of a phone at 1am. The presence of a stable, committed partner in someone’s life is not separate from their professional success, their civic participation, their health outcomes. It is foundational to all of them.
The Social Arithmetic of Love
Let’s zoom out from the individual and look at what happens at the aggregate level when a society has a lot of people in stable partnerships, and what happens when it doesn’t.
The data here is not subtle. Married and partnered adults have better health outcomes across nearly every category: cardiovascular disease, cancer survival, mental health, substance use, mortality. They have higher household wealth; not just because two incomes combine, but because stable partnerships allow for longer time horizons in financial decision-making. They vote more. They volunteer more. They are more embedded in their communities and more invested in the future of those communities, partly because partnership tends to produce a stake in what comes next.
People in stable partnerships are also, on average, less expensive to public systems. They use emergency mental health services less. They are less likely to end up in the criminal justice system. They are less susceptible to political radicalization; a finding that has become increasingly significant as researchers examine the relationship between social disconnection and the rise of extremist movements, particularly among young men.
When we talk about the crisis of loneliness, we are also talking about a crisis of democratic participation, public health, and economic resilience. These are not separate conversations.
None of this means that single people do not contribute to society or cannot live meaningful, productive lives. Plenty do, brilliantly. But at the population level, the correlation between stable partnership and social functioning is robust and consistent. When rates of partnership decline, as they have significantly over the past several decades, particularly among people without college degrees and particularly among men, the downstream effects ripple through public health systems, economic productivity, civic institutions, and political stability.
We have been treating this as a private matter. The data suggests it is a public one.
How We Got Here: A Brief Diagnosis
The current crisis of connection didn’t emerge from nowhere. It has identifiable causes, most of which were not intentional and some of which were the side effects of genuinely positive social changes.
The feminist revolution rightly dismantled the economic coercion that had historically kept many women in partnerships that did not serve them. The sexual revolution decoupled physical intimacy from relational commitment in ways that expanded personal freedom. The geographic mobility of the modern economy dissolved the community structures: neighborhoods, religious congregations, civic organizations, that had historically served as natural matchmaking infrastructure. College became a place where educated people met potential partners; those without college degrees lost access to the institutional contexts where coupling had traditionally occurred.
And then, in the 2010s, the smartphone arrived. Followed by the dating app. And an industry emerged that was structurally incentivized to keep people swiping rather than settling.
This last point deserves more attention than it typically gets. Dating apps are not neutral tools that help people find each other. They are engagement-optimization engines. Their product metrics are time-in-app and return visits, not successful relationships. Every successful match is, from the app’s perspective, a lost customer. The incentive structure is not aligned with the outcome the user thinks they’re buying.
The result has been a population of people who are more experienced at the early stages of romantic interaction than any previous generation; the swipe, the opener, the first date and dramatically less practiced at the later stages: the difficult conversation, the repair after conflict, the sustained choice to remain invested in another person through the ordinary unglamorous middle of a relationship.
Dating apps have optimized the funnel and neglected the destination. And we’ve built an entire culture around the funnel.
What Institutions Could Actually Do
If stable partnership is a social good with measurable effects on public health, economic resilience, civic participation, and political stability, then why do our institutions treat it as a purely private matter? Why is there no serious public policy around connection?
The honest answer is that the benefits of stable partnership are diffuse and the costs of singlehood are distributed across systems. No single agency bears the full weight. So no single agency owns the problem. But this is a coordination failure, not evidence that the problem doesn’t warrant institutional attention.
Here is what each of our major institutions could do, if they chose to take this seriously:
Government and Public Policy
The most immediate lever is public health. Loneliness should be measured the way obesity and smoking rates are measured; as a population-level health metric that informs funding and intervention. Former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy made this argument explicitly, calling loneliness an epidemic and issuing a formal advisory in 2023. The UK went further and appointed a Minister for Loneliness in 2018. These are gestures toward acknowledgment, but they have not yet translated into substantive policy.
What substantive policy might look like: investment in physical social infrastructure; the “third places” that sociologist Ray Oldenburg identified as essential to community life: public parks, libraries, community centers, coffee shops, places where people can be among others without a commercial transaction required. These spaces have been systematically defunded or priced out of existence in most American cities. Their absence is not an accident; it is a policy outcome.
Housing policy matters here too. Single people face significant financial penalties in a housing market designed around two-income households. Zoning laws that restrict co-housing, boarding houses, and other forms of communal living remove options that have historically allowed people to live in proximity to others during the years when they are most likely to form partnerships. Policy that expands housing options for single people is not just an affordability intervention; it is a social infrastructure investment.
Some European countries have experimented directly with subsidized matchmaking services as part of broader pro-natalist policy. This is a blunter instrument and carries obvious political difficulties in an American context. But the underlying logic, that the state has an interest in its citizens forming stable partnerships, is sound, and there are more culturally palatable versions of it.
Education
This is, I believe, the highest-leverage intervention and the most systematically neglected.
We spend twelve years educating children for careers and almost no time educating them for relationships. We teach algebra and chemistry and the causes of the Civil War. We do not teach attachment theory. We do not teach conflict repair. We do not teach the difference between infatuation and compatibility, or how to recognize when you are choosing a partner out of anxious attachment rather than genuine affinity. We do not teach communication skills that are actually applicable to the most emotionally charged conversations of adult life.
The closest most students get is sex education, which is largely biological and often still primarily focused on risk prevention. The relational dimension; how do you build something with another person, how do you sustain it, how do you repair it when it breaks, is almost entirely absent from formal education.
We prepare people meticulously for the job market and almost not at all for the relationship decisions that will most determine the quality of their lives.
A semester of relational literacy, taught with the same rigor and seriousness that we apply to other life skills, would be among the highest-return investments any school system could make. Not because it would produce better marriages. Because it would produce people who understand themselves better, communicate more effectively, and approach the central project of building a life with another person with some degree of skill rather than pure improvisation.
This is not a conservative or progressive proposal. It is a human development proposal. The resistance to it is largely cultural; the sense that relationships are private and that teaching people how to navigate them is somehow intrusive. That resistance has costs.
The Workplace
Employers have become, by default, the dominant social institution in most adults’ lives. In the absence of strong civic and religious community, work is often where people spend the most time, form the most relationships, and construct the most significant portion of their social identity.
This has happened largely without intention, and institutions have responded to it primarily by managing its risks: conflict of interest policies, anti-harassment training, HR liability frameworks. These are necessary. But they address the downsides of workplace sociality without investing in its potential.
Employers have a direct financial interest in the relational wellbeing of their employees. Partnered employees show better mental health outcomes, lower absenteeism, greater tenure, and higher reported job satisfaction. The business case for investing in employee social health is at least as strong as the case for investing in physical wellness benefits, which most large employers now take for granted.
What this could look like in practice: social infrastructure investment (events, spaces, programs that facilitate genuine connection rather than performative team-building), employee assistance programs that include relationship counseling as a standard benefit alongside therapy and financial advising, and a cultural shift away from the implicit norm of overwork as a signal of commitment; a norm that consistently crowds out the time people need to build and sustain relationships outside of work.
None of these are radical proposals. They are extensions of the wellbeing logic that employers already accept in other domains.
The Private Market Failure and What Comes After
It is worth naming clearly what the current private market solution to this problem actually is, and why it has failed.
The dating app industry has generated billions of dollars in revenue and produced, by any honest measure, a worse environment for finding a partner than existed before it. Match rates are lower. Relationship satisfaction is lower. Time spent dating has increased dramatically while the rate of successful partnership formation has declined. The apps have monetized the search and made the destination harder to reach.
This is not a failure of execution. It is a structural outcome of the incentive misalignment I described earlier. You cannot fix it by making a better app. The problem is not the algorithm; it is the business model.
Human matchmaking, what I do, is in many respects a private correction to this public market failure. I am paid to produce an outcome, not to extend a search. My incentive is aligned with the person in front of me in a way that no app’s incentive ever can be. But I am also, by myself, operating at a scale that cannot address the problem systemically. Matchmaking at the scale the problem demands requires the involvement of institutions that have reach, resources, and public accountability.
The question is whether those institutions will ever recognize the problem as theirs to address. That requires a cultural shift in how we categorize it.
Reframing the Category
We have classified romantic partnership as a private good: something individuals seek for personal fulfillment, funded entirely out of pocket, with whatever time they can find after meeting all of their other obligations. We have treated the pursuit of a life partner as a lifestyle choice comparable to a hobby.
This framing is wrong. It is wrong empirically; the evidence that partnership has population-level effects on health, productivity, and civic life is clear. And it is wrong in terms of the structural obstacles that stand between people and the partnerships they want: a dating industry with misaligned incentives, a cultural context that has dismantled natural matchmaking infrastructure, an educational system that has never taught relational skills, and a work culture that consumes the time and energy that relationships require.
Partnership is not a luxury that self-reliant adults acquire on their own time. It is a social good that has systematic barriers to access, and those barriers have systematically worsened over the past several decades. Treating it as a public concern rather than a private one does not mean the government starts arranging marriages. It means we acknowledge that the conditions under which people meet, connect, and build lives together are shaped by policy and institutional design, and that we could design them better.
The loneliness crisis is not a personal failing. It is a design failure. And design failures can be corrected.
This is the core argument I want to leave you with. Not that singlehood is bad or that people who are single are suffering; though many are, and it matters. But that the conditions that make partnership difficult to find and sustain are not naturally occurring phenomena. They are the product of decisions: decisions about how to build cities, what to teach in schools, how to regulate industries, what to measure as public health outcomes, and what to treat as a legitimate object of public investment.
We have made bad decisions in most of these domains, largely by omission. We have not chosen to make partnership difficult. We have simply chosen not to make it easier. And at the scale the problem has now reached, that omission has become its own kind of policy.
A Final Word to the Singles
If you are single and reading this, I want to be clear that none of this argument is about you being incomplete, insufficient, or a social problem to be solved. Some of the most alive, purposeful, deeply human people I know are single: by circumstance, by choice, by the simple fact that they haven’t yet found the right person.
What I am saying is that the difficulty you may be experiencing in finding a genuine connection is not primarily a failure of your dating profile or your conversation skills or your willingness to put yourself out there. It is, in significant part, a structural problem. The infrastructure that used to support human connection: community, proximity, shared institutions, social rituals of introduction, has been substantially dismantled. What replaced it was built by people whose incentive was your engagement, not your fulfillment.
You deserve better than that. And more importantly, you deserve to understand that the difficulty is real, the obstacles are structural, and the solution is not to try harder at a broken system but to demand better ones.
That is what I am arguing for. Not just as a matchmaker with a professional stake in the question. But as someone who believes that the capacity to love and be loved by a chosen partner is among the most significant things a human life can contain, and that we have made it, absurdly, unnecessarily hard to find.
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Nick Rosen is the founder of Met By Nick, a human-centered matchmaking service
operating across 10+ North American cities, and co-founder of QUALITY Matchmaking.
