Loneliness is an epidemic. Love is in a recession.

There’s an old idiom about a frog in boiling water: drop it into a pot that’s already boiling and it will leap out, but raise the temperature slowly and it won’t notice the danger until it’s too late. A sudden replacement of time with friends, family, and community would have been obvious to earlier generations. They would have felt it immediately.

But like the slowly boiling water, this change has been gradual. For generations raised alongside technology, connection didn’t disappear overnight; it was siphoned off over time. Every new convenience: remote work, grocery delivery, food apps, streaming, same-day shipping, have created a more solitary world. We now shop alone, eat alone, exercise alone, worship alone, and unwind alone. We’ve made life easier, but lonelier. The result is a lonely generation. Compared to our parents we spend roughly thirty percent more of our lives alone.

You cannot subtract human contact from daily life without consequences, and dating has taken a tangible hit.

For most of our history, people met partners through the worlds they lived in and their subtle webs of friends that connected them. Many of those structures have been weakened.

As much as the technocrats would like you to believe that the shift to online dating was inevitable and happened because “people preferred it”, the reality is that online dating was catapulted by the quiet dissolution of our social structures.

Fewer young people go to church. Dating your co-workers prompts a conversation with HR. Many of us don’t know our neighbors’ names. And everyone now carries the most addictive object ever invented in their pocket.

Technology has turned our lives inward. We go out less. We have smaller social circles. We take fewer chances. Dates are rare. Sex is rare. And the small, inherited rituals of meeting someone -- being introduced, planning a date, showing interest plainly -- have eroded.

Romance will not survive this shift. Increasingly, approaching someone in public feels risky, even potentially perceived as creepy. Dating apps offer a way around that moment entirely. You’re allowed to express interest at a distance and abandon without consequence.

Desensitization of social norms on the internet and poor behavior on dating apps has shaped our expectation that the people we see are hypothetical, and therefore our actions do not require accountability.

It isn’t a design flaw that dating apps fail to turn matches into dates. Their revenues depend on keeping users active, and plummet if they pair off quickly. Because most of these apps are free, the most desirable users are their product. That incentive shapes everything. Swiping is addictive, while follow-through is not. You’re shown an endless stream of possibilities, but given little reason, context or support, to choose someone. The companies perform best when you keep browsing and suffer when you leave.

With fewer people meeting in real life, ineffective dating apps, and many of us swearing off dating altogether, we simply aren’t going on enough dates to find love. In fact, the average single person only goes on two dates a year. But, finding a long term partner has always meant needing to go on many (often bad) dates and having enough morale to continue. In order to end the love recession we must bring back intentional dating.

“Big Dating” would prefer we replace the absence of community and courtship with endless swiping while they carefully stack the odds against our success. They’ve built a business model that profits from our loneliness. While we don’t have a Fed for dating (let alone a flurry of economists analyzing how to improve it) there is hope on the horizon. At Known, we’re asking a question “Big Dating” won’t dare answer: can you create a dating company that is purely motivated to help members meet the most compatible partner for them as quickly as possible?

We’re grateful to San Francisco for giving us the opportunity to try.