The 57% 'Never Dated' Stat Has the Wrong Denominator

The Denominator Behind That 57.3% Is Wrong

Around Valentine’s Day two years ago, a headline swept through every Korean online community: “57.3% of people in their 20s and 30s are motae-sollo” — a Korean slang term literally meaning “born single,” used for someone who has never dated in their life. Reactions split roughly into two camps: people who found it reassuring, and people who thought something was off.

The second group was right. That number has the wrong denominator baked into it.

Then, on the 21st, KBS aired an episode of its investigative documentary series Sisa Kihoek Chang (“Current Affairs Planning: Window”) titled “The Disappearance of Dating.” The reporting combined a five-country international comparison survey with a fresh reanalysis of raw government statistics. Read together with the existing data, this reporting lets us separate two different things: what’s wrong with the denominator in that 57.3% figure, and how much time people actually spend meeting others in person has genuinely changed.

How Did We Get 57.3%?

The survey in question was published in February 2024 by PMI, a data consulting firm. When they asked 1,174 unmarried men and women nationwide, among respondents who said they’d never dated, those in their 20s and 30s made up 57.3%.

Two things got conflated here. First, this isn’t “57.3% of people in their 20s and 30s” — it’s “the share of 20-somethings and 30-somethings among those with no dating experience.” Second, and more importantly, the survey pool was restricted from the start to unmarried men and women. Married people weren’t in the sample at all. That means anyone who dated and then got married was excluded entirely before the question “have you ever dated?” was even asked. The sample frame¹ had already predetermined the conclusion.

Segye Ilbo, a Korean daily newspaper, plugged in marriage-rate data from Statistics Korea and recalculated the figure against the full 2030 population (Korea’s shorthand for people in their 20s and 30s). The result came out to roughly 21%. Broken down by age, it was 33% for people in their 20s and 9% for those in their 30s. In this recalculation, the share of people with no dating experience is actually lower among those in their 30s than those in their 20s. But this compares two different age groups, not the same people tracked over time. It’s a completely different picture from 57.3%.

Still, even after stripping away the exaggeration, something real remains: one in three people in their 20s. In a separate survey by the same company, covering 3,000 people nationwide aged 20 to 69, only 44.0% of respondents in their 20s said they were currently dating. The top reason for not dating was “I’m comfortable being alone,” at 33.6%.

I think it’s worth questioning whether that 33.6% really reflects people freely choosing to be alone. That’s why, below, I want to look at this alongside the question of opportunity and cost.

In America, Time With Friends Dropped First

The same debate is raging in the US. In a conversation published by New York Times Opinion on the 22nd, the host cited a survey finding that one in four Gen Z adults has no sexual experience, along with this figure: the share of young people who hadn’t had sex in the past year doubled from 12% in 2010 to 24% in 2024.

An analysis by the American Family Institute of General Social Survey² data tells a similar story. Among adults aged 18–64, the share having sex at least once a week fell from 55% in 1990 to 37% in 2024.

So far, this is a familiar narrative. But there’s another number in the same report that gets cited far less often.

It’s the number of hours young Americans spend with friends each week. That figure fell from 12.8 hours in 2010 to 6.5 hours in 2019. It dropped further to 4.2 hours during the pandemic, and even in 2024 it remains stuck at 5.1 hours. In 15 years, 60% of that time simply vanished.

Most of that decline had already happened before the pandemic. COVID didn’t create this shift — it amplified a decline that was already underway. Over the same period, the share of 18-to-29-year-olds living with a spouse or partner fell from 42% in 2014 to 32% in 2024. According to psychologist Jean Twenge’s analysis, the share of American high school seniors who had been on a date in the past year dropped from 80% in 2000 to 45% in 2023.

Why 2010, of all years? It lines up almost exactly with the spread of smartphones. Still, I’m wary of the one-line explanation that “smartphones did it.” Over the same stretch, young people’s living arrangements, working hours, and the shape of cities were all shifting too. What’s certain is the sequence: time spent meeting people declined first, and the decline in dating came after.

Encounters produce relationships, and relationships lead to romance. The dating rate is the number that comes out at the very end of this chain. But by fixating only on that final number, we’re missing the fact that time spent meeting people dropped first.

More Leisure Time, Fewer Meetings

What about Korea? Statistics Korea’s Time Use Survey³ gives an interesting answer.

In the 2024 survey, Koreans’ daily leisure time was 5 hours 8 minutes — up 21 minutes from five years earlier. But while average leisure time overall increased, that alone doesn’t mean every young person now has enough time to meet others.

The picture sharpens when you look at where those extra 21 minutes went. Over the same period, media usage time rose from 2 hours 26 minutes to 2 hours 45 minutes — a 19-minute increase. That’s nearly the entire gain. Notably, the share of people watching video content on weekdays jumped from 15.8% to 40.4%. On average, the rise in leisure time and the rise in media usage time are almost identical in magnitude.

Time spent alone has grown too. Among people in their twenties who ate breakfast, 58.5% ate alone. In Statistics Korea’s Social Survey, the share of respondents saying “I have no one to talk to when I’m depressed or discouraged” climbed from 21.8% in 2019 to 30.6% in 2021 and 31.6% in 2023. The Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs has estimated that as many as 540,000 young people may be in a state of social isolation or withdrawal.

An investigation by KBS’s current-affairs program Sisa Gihoek Chang (Current Affairs Planning: Window) adds an income dimension to this picture. The reporting team reanalyzed raw government statistical data covering roughly 4,800 unmarried men and women, and found that the desire to date was similar regardless of income level. But the share who actually ended up dating diverged sharply. Among unmarried men, the dating rate gap between the lowest and highest income brackets was roughly twofold.

A five-country comparison by the same reporting team pointed the same way. The correlation between income and dating was pronounced in Korea, China, and Japan, but relatively weak in the United States and Spain. Regional disparities showed up too. In non-metropolitan areas, a skewed gender ratio combined with young women migrating to the Seoul metropolitan area has reduced the very opportunity to meet peers — to the point that local governments have started organizing group matchmaking events themselves.

The regional story is worth spelling out. The reporting team argues that the severe distortion in the birth sex ratio around 1990 is now showing up in full force, as that generation reaches marriageable age. On top of that, young women moving to the capital region for jobs and schooling has widened the gender imbalance in non-metropolitan areas even further. There are, quite literally, fewer people around to meet. It isn’t a problem that individual effort can fix.

If the desire to date is similar across income levels but the actual dating rate diverges, then the outcome is being shaped less by individual preference than by conditions like income.

Why We Shouldn’t Call This a Dating Problem

Let’s go back to that 33.6% who said “being alone is comfortable.”

In a New York Times conversation, journalist Carter Sherman made a point along these lines: being powerless isn’t cool, but being in control is. So people relabel circumstances they can’t actually change as if they’d chosen them. Columnist Christine Emba makes a similar observation. Declaring “I’ve chosen celibacy” or “I enjoy solitude” is a way of reclaiming a sense of control. Editor Nadja Spiegelman summed it up by saying that what separates loneliness from solitude ultimately comes down to whether it was chosen.

Apply this framing to the “being alone is comfortable” responses, and they read differently. For a good number of people, that’s not a statement of preference — it’s an adaptation to circumstances. In an environment where chances to meet people have shrunk, dating is expensive, and the odds of rejection have climbed, they’ve picked the explanation that hurts least. The same conversation notes something else: getting rejected by 49 out of 50 people you approach on a dating app is a scale of rejection with no precedent in the history of romance.

Which is exactly why policy misfires. Local government matchmaking events and dating-app subsidies aim directly at the dating-rate number. But the dating rate is a lagging indicator⁴. If the upstream conditions — the time, the venues, the cost of meeting people — stay the same, the dating rate ticks up briefly and then slides right back down.

None of this means these programs are pointless. Creating occasions for people to meet does address upstream conditions in a real way. The problem is scale and sustainability. A handful of events per year can’t manufacture enough everyday opportunities to meet people. And the roughly 7-hour weekly decline mentioned earlier is a U.S. figure, so it can’t be applied directly as the decline for young Koreans. More fundamentally: the very fact that meeting someone now has to become a special event is itself a sign that everyday social networks have already thinned out.

The childcare-cost and birth-rate story from issue No. 131 follows the same pattern. Korea drove childcare costs down to among the lowest in the world, and the birth rate still didn’t rise — because when people said things were “too expensive,” they weren’t really talking about daycare fees. When young Koreans today say “being alone is comfortable,” there’s a good chance they’re pointing at something other than dating too.

Oswarld’s Lens

This is the mistake I run into most often, whether I’m teaching data analytics or building GTM strategy: mistaking a lagging indicator for a leading one.

Here’s a pattern that keeps repeating. A client comes to me worried about high churn. So they blast discount coupons at customers who look like they’re about to leave. The numbers improve briefly, then slide back within a few months. When you trace the usage data back to the earlier stages after signup, the real problem turns out to be onboarding. Users who never touched the core feature in their first week end up on the churn list months later — churn was the outcome, activation was the cause.

The dating rate is the same kind of number as churn: it shows an outcome that has already happened. Socializing time is the metric that tells you how many opportunities actually exist for a relationship to start. But that statistic alone doesn’t nail down the causal story behind the decline.

That’s why I’m skeptical of explanations that pin this phenomenon on a generational shift in values. Values have changed, sure. But as reporting from KBS, South Korea’s public broadcaster, showed, the desire to date was roughly the same regardless of income. If the willingness is unchanged and only the conditions have shifted, that’s not a story about changed hearts.

So what should we actually be watching? In my view, two things, in place of the dating rate: how many hours per week young people spend with other people face to face, and in which income bracket that number is falling fastest. The trouble is, South Korea essentially has no time series that tracks this figure by age group over time. While the U.S. has been charting 15 years of data, we’re effectively checking the overall average once every 5 years.

One more thing worth adding: this isn’t only a young-generation problem. The decline in socializing time shows up across every age group. It just appears earlier, and more sharply, among the young.

Closing

The claim that “half of people in their 20s and 30s have never dated” misreads the sample and the denominator — recalculated against the total population, the figure from Segye Ilbo, a Korean daily newspaper, comes out to around 21%. Still, that leaves one in three people in their 20s, and behind that number sits a far less-cited statistic. Time young Americans spend with friends has fallen by 60% over 15 years.

Before romance declined, the time people spent simply meeting other people declined first.

If you’ve noticed your own hangouts with friends shrinking in recent years, tell me in the comments what took that time away — was it work, distance, or just the fatigue of making plans at all? I’ll gather your responses and put together a follow-up in the next issue.

If you’ve been disconnected from people for a long time, you can get support through your local youth center or Korea’s Health and Welfare Counseling Center (129).

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📨 If you know someone who’s been thinking “why is it so hard to meet people these days,” send them this piece.

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References & Further Reading

Primary sources

• Institute for Family Studies, “The Sex Recession: The Share of Americans Having Regular Sex Keeps Dropping”, 2025. Link ··· This is the core evidence behind today’s issue. I’d recommend looking at the socializing-time graph before the sex statistics.
• Nadja Spiegelman, Carter Sherman, Christine Emba, “Gen Z-ers Are Ditching Sex. They Might Be Onto Something.”, The New York Times Opinion, 2026. Link ··· The line this piece draws between “choice” and “helplessness” became the backbone of Chapter 4 in this issue.
• KBS Current Affairs Chang, Episode 556, “The Disappearance of Dating,” July 21, 2026. Link ··· One of the first domestic analyses to separate income from dating intent. I’d recommend watching the rerun.
• Statistics Korea, “Results of the 2024 Time Use Survey,” 2025. Link ··· Put leisure time and media-use time side by side, and the argument of this issue becomes clear at a glance.

Background

• Segye Ilbo, “[Exclusive] Are 57.3% of People in Their 20s and 30s Really Never Dated? A Look at a Strange Statistic,” 2024. Link ··· This article points out the problem with the denominator behind that 57.3% figure. Good practice for reading statistics critically.
• Ministry of Health and Welfare, “Support Measures for Socially Isolated and Reclusive Youth,” 2023. Link ··· Contains the source and calculation basis for the estimate of 540,000 people.

Related past issues worth reading

• Empty Strollers and ₩380 Trillion (~$274 Billion) (Issue No. 131) ··· The next chapter in today’s story. It covers, through the same structural lens, why lowering childcare costs didn’t raise the birth rate.

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The author is Oswarld (Kwangseob Ahn). Current roles: Adjunct Professor at Sejong University, Strategy Consultant at INLEVEL9. Career, research, books, and recent work are kept current on the About page. Latest · July 2026: HEMA-2: A Consolidation-Aware Tri-Memory Architecture with Multi-Channel Scheduling for Lifelong Conversational AI.

📝 Glossary

Footnotes

1. Sampling frame: The list of the population from which a survey draws its sample. If this list doesn’t match the actual group of interest, the conclusions end up skewed no matter how precisely the survey is conducted. ↩

2. General Social Survey (GSS): A landmark American social survey run by a University of Chicago research team since 1972. Because it asks the same questions decade after decade, it serves as a baseline for comparing generational change. ↩

3. Time Use Survey: A survey conducted by Statistics Korea every five years that records how citizens spend their 24 hours a day, activity by activity. Its value lies in capturing actual time allocation rather than self-reported “perceptions.” ↩

4. Lagging indicator: A number that shows the results of something that has already happened, after the fact. Trying to directly move a lagging indicator usually produces only short-lived effects — you have to find the leading indicator upstream to actually shift outcomes. ↩