Last week the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University published the 15th edition of its annual survey of single Americans, roughly 5,000 adults aged 18 and over, fielded in the spring of 2026. It is funded by a dating app company, which is worth saying out loud, and it is still one of the longest running data sets on how single people in this country actually behave.
Most of the coverage went to the fun numbers. Love at first sight is up. Gen Z runs background checks.
Two other numbers moved in opposite directions, and nobody seems to have put them side by side.
The two numbers
Checklists are up. Some 34% of singles now say they keep a list of the traits they want in a partner, up from 25% in 2021.
Deal breakers are down. Some 57% say they are open to dating someone of a different religion, up from 43% in 2019. On differing social and political views, 56%, up from 44%. On different approaches to money, 56%, up from 49%.
Put those together and a strange shape appears. People are getting stricter about the specification and looser about the terms. More precise about what a partner should be like, more relaxed about the things that decide how a marriage is actually run.
The research on both halves says that is backwards.
What a list of traits can actually tell you
Start with the checklist, because there is a long and genuinely contested body of work on it.
In 2008, Paul Eastwick and Eli Finkel ran a speed dating study with 163 young adults at Northwestern and published it in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Before the event, participants described their ideal partner. Then they met real people, briefly, and reported who they were drawn to. The stated ideals and the live attraction did not line up. People did not appear to have reliable access, in advance, to what would actually move them in the room.
That was one study, at one university, with students. The field spent the next 15 years arguing about it, which is what should happen.
The argument got a serious answer in 2025. A registered report run through the Psychological Science Accelerator tested the question across 10,358 people in 43 countries and 22 languages, and it found that preference matching does predict something. People do rate partners who match their ideals more positively. The size of that effect was small to medium on the strongest measure, and close to zero on another.
So the honest summary is not that your list is worthless. It is that the list is a much weaker instrument than the confidence people place in it. It does a decent job of predicting how you will rate someone on paper. It does a poor job of predicting who you will want once a real person is sitting across from you.
And the survey’s own respondents keep proving it. Nearly half, 49%, say they have fallen for someone they were not initially attracted to, up from 30% in 2010. Another 41% say they would take a second date after a first meeting that was not exciting, up from 35% in 2021.
Their own biographies contradict their own lists.
Why the list keeps growing anyway
It would be easy to call this vanity. It is closer to self defence.
The same survey found that half of Gen Z singles research someone online before meeting them, 60% through social media, 37% through a search engine, 29% through an actual background check. That is not pickiness. That is risk management by people who have been lied to, wasted, or made to feel unsafe often enough to build a process around it.
A checklist does the same job. It converts a frightening, unpredictable decision into something that looks like a procedure. Every criterion you add feels like another layer of protection against being fooled again.
The trouble is where the protection is aimed. A list of traits guards against the wrong disappointment. It screens out the person whose job you find unimpressive, and it waves through the person who wants a completely different life from yours, because nobody puts how money will be decided on a checklist. It feels like caution while leaving the actual exposure untouched.
What has to be negotiated every week for 40 years
Now the other half, where the evidence points the opposite way.
Money. In 2012, Jeffrey Dew, Sonya Britt and Sandra Huston published a study in Family Relations using longitudinal national survey data from 4,574 couples, with answers from both husbands and wives. Among the common things couples argue about, financial disagreements were the strongest predictor of divorce. The detail that matters most: once financial disagreement was in the model, financial wellbeing itself no longer predicted divorce.
Read that twice. It was not being short of money that predicted the marriage ending. It was disagreeing about money. Which is precisely the thing 56% of singles have decided they are relaxed about.
Faith. This one is harder to measure honestly, and it deserves care rather than a slogan. One of the larger pieces of evidence comes from a 2017 study in the European Journal of Population by David Wright, Michael Rosato and Dermot O’Reilly, which followed 19,791 married couples in Northern Ireland from 2001 to 2011. Marriages between a Catholic and a Protestant made up 5.9% of the sample, and they carried a higher risk of dissolution than marriages where partners shared a faith.
The limit is obvious and worth stating plainly: that is Northern Ireland, where that particular line carried a social weight it does not carry in most places. It is not a universal law about faith. But it points the same way as the broader research on couples who differ on something structural, and it is the opposite direction from the survey’s cheerful 57%.
Before this becomes an argument it is not
There is a version of this piece that says openness is a mistake, and that version would be wrong.
Marriages across faith and across politics work all the time. Plenty of them are excellent. What the research suggests is not that they fail, but that they ask more of the couple. The ones that do well are generally the ones who negotiated the differences explicitly and early, rather than assuming the subject would not come up.
A survey answer is also not a life. Saying you are open to dating someone of a different religion may only mean you will happily meet them for coffee, which is a perfectly healthy answer to give in a questionnaire. The real question is what that openness turns into in the eighth month, when the conversation stops being about whether you like each other and starts being about how a home will run, what the children will be taught, and which grandparents get which holidays.
That is the actual risk here. Not open mindedness. Flexibility that is never examined, which is not really flexibility at all. It is a postponed conversation, and it gets more expensive every month it is postponed.
Load bearing and decorative
Standards are not the problem. The placement is.
A decorative standard is one you can imagine breaking cheerfully. Height. A particular profession. Whether they like the music you like. Whether they are funny in the specific way you are funny.
A load bearing standard is one that determines how your weeks are spent for decades. Whether faith is practised and how. Whether there will be children. How money gets decided. How close family will be, and how much say they get.
Two questions sort them:
Would you still care about this in 20 years? A partner’s job title in 2026 is not the job they will have in 2046. How they handle a disagreement about money is.
Have you already broken this rule for someone you liked, and been glad? If yes, it was never a rule. It was a preference wearing a rule’s clothes, and it is now doing the work of a filter it was never qualified for.
There is a mirror image failure too, and it is quieter. It is the person with a long, specific list who has never once said out loud that they want to marry inside their faith, or that they want children, because those feel too serious to raise early. We made the case for saying them early in clear coding: the terms that matter most are exactly the ones worth stating first, not last. The money version of the same argument is in can you afford to get married, and the family version is in your family wants a say.
Where this leaves VOOWA
A platform cannot tell you who you will love. Given what the research actually shows about trait matching, any product claiming otherwise is overselling.
What a platform can do is stop hiding the load bearing half until month 8.
On VOOWA, marriage intention is stated before the first message, and the things that decide how a life is built, faith and how it is practised, family involvement, what someone is actually looking for, sit at the front rather than surfacing after a season of getting attached. Every member is verified. The list of traits is yours to keep or drop, and it will do what lists do, which is help a little.
Be as picky as you like about the things that matter. Just check, honestly, which ones those are.
VOOWA launches on Google Play on November 11, 2026, at 11 AM. The waitlist is open below. Once you are in, invite friends with your personal code: when 11 of them join and get verified, you get a month of Basic free, and at 22, a month of Premium.
