The heartbreaking reason Gen Z is struggling to find love

Ben Keenan estimates that over the past year, he's spent somewhere between $1,500 and $2,000 on dating. Despite spending a hefty sum on everything from drinks and food to tickets and Ubers, the 31-year-old Seattle communications consultant and content creator said the payout had yielded no real results: His relationship status is "nonexistent."

"A lot of times I'm spending money just to get to know somebody out from behind a screen," he said

Like many younger Americans, Keenan is encountering a harsh reality: Not only is the modern dating scene really tough, but putting yourself out there adds up. To be smarter about his romantic spending, Keenan has become more selective with whom he meets — and instead of immediately suggesting pricey drinks, he's proposing lower-cost options like grabbing a coffee or going for a walk.

As someone who's also been dating through whatever it is we've been doing romantically since 2020, I've noticed that my dating costs are going through the roof. There are, of course, the basic increases in just about everything, as anyone who's bought groceries or gas knows. In addition, new costs are getting layered on every day as the dating pool becomes tougher to navigate — relationship apps are barren unless you pay for access, and the new crop of exciting speed-dating events will cost you (if they don't sell out first).

In an age of increasing isolation, an intimate relationship can be especially valuable. And, pragmatically, finding a partner can have some economic advantages — after all, things are cheaper when they're divided by two. But the price tag to find the right person is getting higher. Love, in this economy, is increasingly reserved only for those who can afford it.

Bring in the dating coaches!

There's no magical financial formula for a relationship (sadly), but to sketch out the new cost of love, I decided to ask several dating coaches a few questions that could help me develop a relationship road map: How long does it usually take to find out whether you're compatible? How much should a date cost? Who is expected to pick up the tab?

The coaches said it usually takes about three months of seeing someone once or twice a week for most people to consider it a relationship. So that's at least 12 dates before getting into a relationship. Not every date is the same — costs and activities will vary by person, location, and what you're drawn to. Amy Nobile Messing, a New York City dating coach with a holistic and technology-based approach and clients aged 25 to 81, recommended a "mini screener date" for a first meetup before escalating to anything more.

"First dates should not be the traditional go out to dinner for four hours and spend a ton of money," she said. "They really shouldn't."

Damona Hoffman, a Los Angeles dating coach, similarly recommended doing drinks because clients could otherwise end up overstaying their welcome and shelling out a whole lot of money.

"First dates should be something short and sweet," she said.

After the first date is when the tabs get more substantial — a longer meal where you can sit across from one another and delve deeper. Daphney Poyser, whose Fern Connections specializes in queer dating, recommended dinner and an activity like mini golf, ax throwing, or cooking classes.

As things progress, another big question is who's picking up the bill — a decision that comes with a host of gendered assumptions and changing norms. Messing said that among her heterosexual clients, there's still an expectation that the man is paying for all the dates.

"If you're in a heterosexual relationship and you believe in chivalry, which, again, 95% of my clients do, then the man is paying, period, end of story," Messing said.

But the answer is not as clear-cut for same-sex couples, couples who don't skew toward traditional heterosexual norms, or younger generations.

"My younger daters, they're like, 'Of course, we're going to split the cost of the date,'" Hoffman said. "That's a huge shift."

Poyser tells her clients that everybody should expect to split the cost.

"If you like someone and they like you, then you should be willing to split the cost," Poyser said. Among Messing's queer clients, the rule of thumb has been that whoever asked the other person out or planned the date should pay — and they naturally trade-off as things progress.

So for simplicity's sake, in our road map, let's assume that you're always splitting costs, with the expectation that straight men will pick up the bill more often.

The nitty-gritty

Now that we have a sense of the time, shape of the activities, and share of the bill, we can get a sense of what dating costs look like for a 12-date plan. Of course, these numbers are all approximations — your favorite restaurant or activity might cost more or less. But to get to rough estimates, I tried to stick close to real menu prices and approximate how much costs have risen.

Since the coaches' first-date suggestions generally boiled down to drinks, I started the tabulation by looking at the average cost of a cocktail, which was about $12 in 2019 across major US markets. Adjust that for inflation, and it's about $14.50 in 2024 dollars. For alcohol-free drinkers, the average price of a coffee is about $6 in New York City, which is comparable with other markets.

"The cost of everything is more expensive," Hoffman said.

For movies, prices vary across the country. The average ticket cost $11.75 in 2022, the research firm EntTelligence estimated; round up for recent inflation, and the average movie ticket costs about $12, plus $27 for a large popcorn, a drink, and candy. The same logic can be applied to museums: Ticket prices across the country have ticked up to the $30 range. I chose the American Museum of Natural History as our museum date spot because it is, inarguably, a great place to go on a date. The cost of an adult ticket: $28 for non-NYC residents. I also chose a premium concert experience for our daters since those are less likely to get canceled than smaller shows right now. Pollstar, a live-music industry publication, found that the average ticket price for a tour of the top 100 performing artists was $123.25 in the first quarter of 2024, up from $95.63 in 2020.

Numbers got a little fuzzier when I looked at how much it cost to go out to dinner or order in. I chose my favorite date spot — Thai72 — as a menu example, and it tracked fairly closely with MoneyGeek's estimate that a romantic dinner out costs $96. Similarly, I used my favorite pizza spot — Mama's Too — to gauge the cost of a nicer takeout pizza and then added a Trader Joe's Caesar salad and a bottle of Josh rosé.

After they have a few dates under their belt, I figured that many daters clustered in too-small urban apartments would want to get some breathing room. After all, there's nothing like a day trip to figure out what longer-term travel with your partner might look like. I looked at the cost of driving from New York City to Hudson, New York, a popular mini-road-trip destination (and, conveniently, a great way to visit Business Insider's economic-data editor, Andy Kiersz, who helped oversee these calculations). For our later dates, I also included a few spicier ideas, like a visit to the board-game café Hex&Co., a pasta-making class, and a cheese tasting at Murray's Cheese, as fancier date activities.

With these estimates, it's easy to see how dating adds up: Our hypothetical dater is spending $650 to make it to the 12-date mark.

The estimates also don't take into account the subtler costs of dating. That could be as simple as the price of the commute to and from your meetup — which would cost you $5.80 if you took New York City's subway — or having to fill up your gas tank. The dating experts I spoke with also listed services their clients may want to invest in for dating, from hair and makeup to Botox and dating-app subscriptions.

Hoffman, for instance, said that beauty norms had shifted: Skincare and different types of filler, along with Botox, are increasingly seen as necessary parts of a beauty regimen.

"All of these beauty enhancements, people aren't really thinking about the cost of them, but many times the reason that they're doing it is for attraction," she said. "I consider that a cost."

Given these costs, I decided to incorporate a few of the major categories into the road map. An informal survey of salons across the country pegged the average haircut at $56, so add one of those to the tab for the three-month getting-you-know-you period. In a 2023 survey by the data-analytics firm Inmar Intelligence, one-third of surveyed consumers said they spent over $500 on beauty products in the past year — that works out to $125 in beauty-product spending, if we're accounting for around a three-month period. Meanwhile, an informal 2022 report found that the average cost of a full body wax was $152, and Cosmopolitan reported in January that low-end forehead Botox would cost you $300. Taken together, that could mean up to $500 more in beauty spending alone.

Modern dating also comes with a new cost: forking over money for dating apps. In a 2022 Pew poll of adults who were online dating, 35% said that they'd paid to use one. Messing recommended paying for HingeX — $50 a month — and Bumble Premium, which runs about $40 a month. Hoffman doesn't have a uniform recommendation for dating apps but said people should pay for what's important to them. Similarly, Poyser recommended paying for Hinge preferences.

"The average dater that only started using dating apps in the last five or 10 years has what I feel like is an unrealistic expectation of what they should get from a free dating-app experience," Hoffman said. She added: "A lot of the apps are breaking out the different levels of service, different features that you can pay for, and it's kind of like streaming television. You just pay for the ones that you are going to use."

You could also choose to employ a dating coach. Messing's services run $25,000 for a four-month program. Hoffman's costs range from $9 into the five figures; she said her most popular program was group coaching, which costs $2,500. Poyser said that she charged $200 for her initial one-hour session and then $150 for bundled sessions afterward.

After adding up all the direct and implicit costs of dating, the price of finding that special someone rang in at about $1,000 for around 12 dates. Adjusting for inflation, that would've come out to about $800 in 2019 — without accounting for the loneliness and geographical shifts the pandemic caused, where people are willing to spend more to find friends. Notably, the $50 paid version of Hinge that our coaches recommended rolled out in 2023, and pricier app offerings are a more recent invention all around.

And that's just the cost to get into a relationship. Even deeper down the romantic path, couples face the soaring cost of weddings — not to mention the rising price of being a parent.

What does that mean for all of us?

The daters out there might not be too surprised to learn that getting into a relationship is expensive — though even I was taken aback by just how much I'd been sinking into finding a partner.

But the rising costs of dating aren't just an issue for the lonely hearts of America, they also point to a growing problem for everyone in the US: The things that bring us joy, happiness, or meaning are all getting more expensive. Dinner out with friends is more expensive. Going on vacation is getting pricier. Owning a pet will cost you more.

Even those who have moved beyond the cycle of dating and into building a family are facing these price pressures. Research has found that marriage is becoming increasingly reserved for the wealthy and more educated. Some people are happily opting not to have children, while others are finding themselves pushed into a child-free existence because they can't afford to have kids. But even with the high up-front cost of dating, getting into a long-term relationship might pay off in the long run. Solo Americans often come up against what's known as the "singles tax": They're paying thousands more than couples to live alone and need to make nearly (if not more than) six figures to live comfortably.

Keenan, the Seattle dater still looking for love, is keenly aware of the singles tax.

"Bills are made for a household," he told me. "I'm paying the same amount on my sewer and my garbage and my gas as I would if I had four people living in my apartment as I do with one person living in my apartment. There's nothing that is intended to be comfortable for one person."

As things get more expensive, the singles tax gets worse — creating an ever-increasing price for singledom.

"Just because I haven't found my person, suddenly society's expecting me to pay more because I'm living alone," Keenan said.

But Keenan's still out there. For about six to eight months, he tried to just meet people in person — which, as he noted, is often cheaper. Bumping into somebody at a bar means they probably already have a drink, and it's less formal than a sit-down dinner.

Keenan's status, though, might be familiar to fellow beleaguered daters out there: He's back on the apps. It's a fate we all may have to resign ourselves to in the era of modern dating. It looks like those $12 first-date cocktails aren't going anywhere anytime soon (and they soon may be $20 cocktails). The only question is what new paywall might emerge in pursuit of a partner.

Juliana Kaplan is a senior labor and inequality reporter on Insider's economy team.

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