Data shows under-35 crowd lacks love match

Austin Spivey, a 24-year-old woman in Washington, has been looking for a relationship for years. She’s been on several dating apps. She’s on a volleyball team, where she has a chance to meet people with similar interests.

“I’m a very optimistic dater,” Spivey said, adding that she’s “always energetic to keep trying.” But it can get a little frustrating, she adds, when she’s talking to someone on a dating app and they disappear mid-conversation.

Spivey has a lot of company in frustration and in being single. A little more than half of Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 — 51 percent of them — said they do not have a steady romantic partner, according to data from the General Social Survey released last week. That 2018 figure is up significantly from 33 percent in 2004 — the lowest figure since the question was first asked in 1986 — and up slightly from 45 percent in 2016.

The shift has helped drive singledom to a record high among the overall public: 35 percent say they have no steady partner, up slightly from 33 percent in 2016 and 2014.

Several other trends go along with the increase in young single Americans. Women are having fewer children, and they’re having them later in life. The median age of first marriage is increasing.

Of course, not everyone who’s younger than 35 and single is looking to change that. Caitlin Phillips,

a 22-year-old student at the University of Georgia, is open to love if it walked into her life, but she’s not actively seeking it.

“I’m too busy, honestly. I travel a lot, and I have a great group of friends that I hang out with,” Phillips said in a phone interview.

Ford Torney, a 26-year-old in Baltimore, wants a steady partner — he just hasn’t found the right connection yet. Torney said he occasionally feels isolated in his social circle because most of his friends are married or in serious relationships. He has to remind himself, he said, “that most people my age aren’t married, and I just have an

outlier in terms of my social group.”

Laura Lane, co-host of the podcast “This Is Why You’re Single” and co-author of a book by the same name, said that a lot of people who write in to her podcast looking for love advice are unhappy with their lives, and they think another person will fix that.

“You really have to find that yourself,” she said, adding that nothing really clicked, romantically, for her or for her co-host Angela Spera, “until we had something personally exciting that we were doing. I think it was an energetic thing where we attracted people into our lives.”