You’ve noticed it. Maybe you haven’t said it out loud yet, but you’ve noticed.

The young adults who were there two years ago aren’t there now. The ones who are still showing up aren’t going deeper.

They’re friendly, they’re occasional, and they’re quietly drifting toward the exits, not in anger, not in rebellion, but in a kind of slow disconnection that’s harder to name and harder to address than outright conflict would be.

You’ve preached well. You’ve launched a new series. You’ve rethought your small group strategy. And something is still missing.

A major new study suggests you may have been looking in the wrong place.

The problem isn’t your pulpit. It’s their relationships, or the near-total absence of them.

A Dating Recession Nobody Saw Coming

In February 2026, researchers from Brigham Young University and the University of Virginia published findings from the 2025 National Dating Landscape Survey, a nationally representative study of 5,275 unmarried adults ages 22 to 35.

What they found was striking enough that they gave it an economic name: a dating recession.

Three-quarters of young women and nearly two-thirds of young men hadn’t dated at all, or had dated only a handful of times, in the past year. Only 31% were dating with any regularity. That means roughly seven out of ten unmarried people sitting in your pews on Sunday are largely on the sidelines of romantic life, during the exact years that should be forming them for marriage and family.

Before you assume you already know why, the study’s most important finding is probably not what you’d expect.

They’re Not Checked Out, They’re Stuck

The easy narrative is that young adults today don’t want commitment, that they’re chasing experiences, avoiding responsibility, or simply content to swipe indefinitely without actually connecting. The data says something completely different.

In this study, young adults strongly endorsed dating aimed at serious relationships, emotional depth, and genuine self-knowledge. Less than a quarter said they date for social reasons or to fit in. Most aren’t afraid of commitment. Fears about losing personal freedom or derailing their careers ranked near the bottom of their concerns.

What’s Actually in the Way is Confidence

Only one in three expressed real faith in their own dating skills. Only 37% trusted their judgment when it came to choosing a partner. Only 34% felt capable of having an honest emotional conversation with someone they were dating. Only 36% felt they could read basic social cues on a date.

The researchers named this the “marital-expectations vs. dating-skills gap.” The values are there. The longing for love and marriage is there. What’s missing is the practical formation to act on either.

And here’s where it gets more complicated, because the skills gap isn’t the only thing in their way.

The Wounds Most Pastors Never See

Beneath the surface of young adult disengagement, the study found something with serious pastoral weight.

Nearly half of young adults said that past relationship wounds have made them more reluctant to try again. Half said painful breakups left them with broadly negative feelings about relationships in general. More than half, 52%, said they simply can’t afford to date, because modern dating culture has organized itself almost entirely around expensive experiences.

So what you’re actually looking at, in the young adults filing into your church on Sunday, is a generation carrying financial stress, relational wounds, low confidence, and no real community telling them what the healthy pursuit of love even looks like.

That’s not a preaching problem. That’s a formation problem. And it raises a harder question: Is your church actually structured to address it?

Here’s why that question matters more than most pastors realize.

The Upstream Crisis Nobody’s Addressing

Our research at Communio identifies four cultural forces quietly dismantling the relational foundation of the next generation. We call this the Four Decoupling Trends: intimacy stripped from covenant, commitment replaced by convenience, parenting decoupled from marriage, and an entire generation growing up without a compelling vision of what marriage is even for.

Young adults who have absorbed those messages don’t just need encouragement to date more. They need a rebuilt framework for what dating is pointing toward, and a community that embodies it.

This is where the Church’s unique advantage comes into focus. Dating apps offer algorithms. Social media offers advice. The local church offers something neither can replicate: real, intergenerational community where people actually know each other, where older couples can model what staying married through hard things looks like, and where love is understood as a vocation rather than just a feeling.

The IFS researchers acknowledged this directly. In their conclusion, they call on “talented relationship educators” to rise to meet this moment, assisted by parents, social media influencers, religious leaders, and others.” Religious leaders, named explicitly, not as an afterthought.

But knowing the Church has a role is different from knowing how to fill it. That’s where most pastors get stuck.

Dating is Discipleship, It’s Just Discipleship We Haven’t Built a Ministry Around Yet

Here’s the reframe that changes everything about how you think about your ministry calendar.

Dating isn’t a secular activity that the Church tolerates until couples are ready for pre-marital counseling. It’s the on-ramp to the vocation of marriage. If young adults can’t navigate it, if they don’t have the skills, the confidence, the community, or the vision, they never get there.

The skills the IFS researchers describe, expressing genuine interest in another person, communicating through vulnerability, processing rejection without shutting down, and learning to discern who is actually a good fit, are the relational muscles that lasting marriages are built on. Forming them is discipleship. It’s just discipleship that the Church hasn’t organized into a ministry yet.

And when churches do organize around it, the results are measurable in ways that go far beyond the couples who show up to a workshop.

What Happens When a Church Actually Does This

In Jacksonville, Florida, once ranked among the worst cities in America for marriage health, a church-led relational renewal effort we coordinated helped drop the divorce rate by 24% over three years. That shift saved taxpayers an estimated $65 million and stabilized thousands of families in the process. Churches in Dayton and Phoenix that joined our accelerator program saw a net increase of 10,000 new attendees and over $370,000 in additional weekly giving.

Pastor Curtis Barnes put it plainly: “I heard a quote that said more churches have divorce care than they do marriage care. That really impressed upon me the need to build strong, healthy marriages before they get to crisis. We prayed and shortly after were introduced to Communio. Now we have a strategy and consistent rhythm of offering couples a pathway for marriage enrichment.”

The dating recession is that upstream moment. Getting to young adults before the wounds compound, before the patterns calcify, before another generation concludes that love isn’t really for them, that’s the work.

It’s also the work most churches don’t have a structure for. Yet.

A Strategy Built for the Full Picture

What the IFS data and our own research together make clear is that relational health in a church can’t be addressed piecemeal. A marriage retreat here, a pre-marital class there, these help individuals, but they don’t shift a culture.

What shifts a culture is a ministry strategy that addresses the full arc of relational life. Singles learning to pursue relationships with clarity and confidence. Dating couples building on a solid foundation. Engaged couples preparing for covenant with eyes open. Married couples sustained and equipped over decades. And couples in crisis are given a real pathway toward healing rather than just a referral.

We call this Full-Circle Relationship Ministry®. It’s data-informed, gospel-centered, and customized to the size, culture, and goals of your specific church. It’s not a curriculum you buy. It’s a partnership that helps you build something that lasts.

Because here’s what the IFS researchers want pastors to hear: the barriers young adults face are not permanent. They are not a generation lost to individualism or screen addiction or the collapse of courtship culture. The researchers close their report with genuine optimism, writing that many of these challenges “can be surmounted with better knowledge and concrete skills.”

Young adults want love. They want marriage. They want, as the researchers put it, the connections that prime their souls for one of the richest experiences humans can have.

They’re not giving up.

But they’re waiting for someone to show them the way.

In most communities, the only institution with the relationships, the theology, the community, and the long-term commitment to actually do that is the local church.

The good news is that this is solvable. Churches that have leaned into relational ministry haven’t just seen couples strengthen their marriages. They’ve watched their entire congregation come alive. If you’re ready to explore what a proven strategy could look like for your church and community, we’d love to help you build it. Reach out to Communio today.

This article draws from “Today’s Young Adults Are in a Dating Recession,” published February 10, 2026, by the Institute for Family Studies and The Wheatley Institute, based on the 2025 National Dating Landscape Survey. Read the full article at ifstudies.org.