There is a word for the decision to stop dating and pour your time, money and energy into yourself instead: solo maxxing.
Go to the gym. Build the career. Save properly. See your friends. Take the trip you kept postponing for someone who never turned up. Treat being single not as a waiting room but as a project with a clear goal, which is the best possible version of you.
A lot of that is genuinely good advice. Some of it is the best advice a single person can get.
And some of it, for some people, is something else wearing that advice as a costume. This piece is about telling the two apart.
Where the word comes from
The suffix gives it away. “Maxxing” grew out of online communities in the 2010s built around optimising your looks, and it has since spread to almost anything: sleep, money, productivity, and now being single. Wherever it lands, it carries the same idea. You are a project, and the goal is to max out the numbers.
That framing is worth noticing, because it quietly shapes what solo maxxing promises. It is not only “enjoy being single”. It is “become better, and then”. Hold on to that “and then”. We will come back to it.
Why so many people are doing it
It is easy to sneer at a trend with a silly name. The reasons behind this one are not silly.
Dating costs real money now. An Ipsos survey of 2,501 US adults for BMO, fielded at the turn of 2026, put the average all in spend on a single date, grooming and gas included, at $189, up from $168 a year earlier. Almost half of singles, 47%, said dating is simply not financially worth it, and half said they had gone on fewer dates or chosen cheaper ones because of cost.
Stepping back is also not new, and it is not rare. When Pew surveyed single Americans in 2019, half said they were not looking for a relationship or even for dates. Asked why, the two biggest major reasons were having more important priorities right now (47%) and simply liking being single (44%).
Read those numbers straight and they describe perfectly reasonable people. Someone who is focused on building a career, or who is content on their own, is not broken. Solo maxxing, at its best, is just the honest version of that choice with a better name.
The case for it is stronger than the name suggests
There is real research that supports working on yourself before you commit to someone.
Psychologists Christopher Agnew, Benjamin Hadden and Kenneth Tan study something they call commitment readiness: how much a person feels that now is the right time for a committed relationship. It turns out to matter a great deal.
In a series of studies across 5 independent samples published in 2018, people who felt more ready were more interested in forming a close relationship and more likely to actually pursue one. A 2019 follow up tracked people in relationships over several months, and those who felt more ready were about 25% less likely to break up. People who were highly committed to a partner but did not feel ready were more likely to end things anyway.
These are correlations, not proof that readiness causes stability, and the researchers measured how ready people felt rather than anything objective. But the direction is clear. Walking into a commitment you do not feel ready for tends to go badly. Taking time to become ready is not avoidance. It is often the responsible thing.
So if solo maxxing means building the stability, habits and self knowledge that make you ready, it is not an excuse at all. It is preparation.
Where it turns
The problem starts with that “and then”.
Readiness, in the research, is a feeling. People vary in when they feel the time is right, and that feeling moves. It is not a level you unlock once and keep.
Solo maxxing, as a framework, quietly swaps the feeling for a finish line. Not “do I feel ready to share my life with someone” but “have I maxed out every number yet”. And maxing out has no natural end. There is always more fitness, more money, more career, more healing, one more year of becoming the version of yourself who finally deserves to be chosen.
We wrote about a close cousin of this in can you afford to get married: the finish line that moves as soon as you approach it. Solo maxxing can build the same trap out of self improvement instead of savings.
Here is the tell. Preparation has an end. Avoidance only has a next step.
The fear the project protects you from
Why would someone want a project with no end? Because while you are working on yourself, you cannot be rejected.
Every real attempt at a relationship carries a risk that no amount of optimisation removes: someone can know the best version of you and still say no. Improving yourself feels productive and it is fully within your control. Putting yourself in front of another person is neither.
So for someone who wants marriage but is quietly afraid of that risk, solo maxxing offers something very attractive: a respectable reason to never take it. It looks like discipline. From the inside it can even feel like discipline. But the effect is the same as avoidance, just better lit.
And remember who these people usually are. We covered in marriage is not outdated that most never married young adults still say they want to marry one day, while only a small minority say they do not. The person who has genuinely chosen a single life is not the one this is about. The person it is about wants marriage and has found a very convincing way to postpone finding it.
A test you can run on yourself
None of this means you should stop going to the gym. It means asking honest questions about what the gym is for.
Does your plan have an end? “I am getting my finances stable this year, then I start looking” is preparation. “I will look once I am the best version of myself” never finishes.
Would you still be doing it if you were never going to date? If yes, it is a life you actually want, and that is great. If the whole point is to become acceptable to a partner you are not looking for, notice that.
When did you last take a risk with a real person? Not a match you never messaged. An actual conversation where you could have been told no.
Is the goal to be ready, or to be guaranteed? Readiness is achievable. A guarantee that you will not be rejected does not exist, at any level of self improvement.
If your honest answers point to preparation, keep going, with a date on the calendar for when you start looking. If they point the other way, the fix is not to abandon yourself. It is to let working on yourself and looking for someone happen at the same time. You do not have to finish one before you are allowed to start the other.
Where this leaves VOOWA
To be clear about the limits: no platform can make you ready, and nothing on an app replaces the work of becoming someone who can build a life with another person. If that work is what you need right now, do it.
But one part of the fear behind endless solo maxxing is not really about you. It is the exhausting uncertainty of modern dating: not knowing whether the person you are talking to wants the same thing, investing months in someone who was never serious, being rejected in ways that feel random.
That part a platform can reduce. On VOOWA, every member states their marriage intention before the first message, and every member is verified. You are not auditioning for someone who might just be browsing. When you do decide you are ready, the risk you take is the real one, whether two people fit, rather than the pointless one of finding out too late that the other person never meant it.
Solo maxxing is good advice. Just make sure it is taking you somewhere.
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.
