Somewhere between the third engagement photo dump and the fifth “hard launch” on Instagram, it’s easy to start wondering whether everybody else got handed a dating manual you somehow missed.
For plenty of Gen Z adults, that feeling is more common than social media makes it seem. A 2024 report from the Survey Center on American Life found 44% of Gen Z men reported no relationship experience at all during adolescence. Pew has also found that among never-married single adults under 40, roughly 42% say they’ve never been in a committed romantic relationship. In other words: if you’ve never had a boyfriend, girlfriend or anything that made it past “maybe we should hang sometime,” you are very much not alone.
Still, statistics don’t do much when it feels like everyone around you is pairing off while you’re trying to pretend you’re totally fine hearing the phrase “my person” for the thousandth time.
Debra Fileta, a licensed professional counselor and relationship expert, says part of the problem is that modern dating has trained people to think about relationships less like connection and more like shopping.
“The online world has definitely caused a shift in relationships,” Fileta says. “There’s just a whole new way of doing relationships, and a lot of times it’s from behind a screen.”
Fileta says dating culture can start to feel eerily similar to scrolling through products.
“We almost have a tendency to view relationships in that way because it’s the same gesture,” she says. “I’m swiping, I’m reading up, I’m clicking. It’s like a consumer approach to relationships. What do they offer me? What am I going to get out of this? What do I need?”
She isn’t wrong about the scale of that shift. Pew Research found in 2023 that about 53% of U.S. adults under 30 have used a dating site or app, making online dating far more common among younger adults than older groups.
Fileta says the danger is not just that apps exist. It’s that they can quietly train people to focus on finding the perfect person while ignoring the less glamorous work of becoming a healthy person.
“But the problem with that mentality is it doesn’t do justice to the equation of a healthy relationship,” she says. “The equation of a healthy relationship is that when you’re healthy, you attract healthy relationships, because you’re 50% of the equation.”
For people who’ve never been in a relationship, that can actually be freeing. It means singleness is not evidence of failure. It can be a season that reveals what needs healing before another person gets pulled into the mix.
Fileta puts it bluntly: “The focus these days is so much on what I can get rather than who am I standing alone? How healthy am I standing alone?”
That question can feel annoyingly introspective at first, especially if what you really want is for somebody to text you back. Still, Fileta argues it’s the better question.
“The word relationship means how we relate to people, how we engage with people,” she says. “But a huge portion of how we relate has to do with how healthy we are — emotionally healthy, mentally healthy, spiritually healthy. How do I relate to the world? What patterns do I bring to the world of relationships?”
So what do you do if your romantic résumé is basically blank?
Fileta’s first answer is not “put yourself out there more.” It’s community.
“Having community is so helpful, but not just any community — honest community who’s going to speak into your life and reflect to you how you’re doing,” she says. “If you don’t have a friend who you can sit down with and say, ‘Hey, what do you think I’m struggling with? What do you think I need to work on?’ then you’re missing an important aspect of health.”
That advice lines up with what public health experts have been saying more broadly. The U.S. surgeon general’s advisory on social connection warned that loneliness and weak social ties carry real consequences for both mental and physical health, while strong relationships and support systems are protective.
If you want to build a healthy dating life someday, start by building a healthy relational life now. Close friendships, honest conversations and people who know you well are not consolation prizes until romance shows up. They are part of the foundation.
Fileta’s second recommendation? Stop acting like emotional maturity is supposed to happen automatically.
“These conversations of becoming healthy — emotional health, mental health — this isn’t stuff you’re born knowing how to do,” she says. “You’ve got to develop and train and practice.”
For some people, that might mean finally paying attention to patterns they’ve brushed off for years: shutting down when conflict shows up, craving approval, avoiding vulnerability, confusing chemistry with safety or assuming every awkward interaction means rejection.
Fileta says there’s no shame in getting help with that.
“There’s everything from books to podcasts to therapy,” she says. “This is a process of being intentional about getting healthy.”
Then she makes a point that might surprise people who think therapy is only for emergencies.
“I actually would even recommend a season of therapy before you start dating,” Fileta says, “just to be on top of things and just to get an idea of your past patterns and habits and maybe unhealthy patterns that you have that you don’t even recognize.”
For a lot of Christians, therapy still gets treated like the last stop before disaster, when in reality it can simply be a tool for wisdom. Not because you’re broken. Because self-awareness is helpful, and dragging unexamined wounds into a relationship rarely ends well.
Fileta’s third recommendation is journaling, which sounds basic until you realize how many people are trying to understand themselves without ever slowing down long enough to notice what they actually feel.
“There is so much power in expressive writing and facing your thoughts, putting them down on paper, being a witness to what’s going on in your head by writing it down,” she says.
Reviews of expressive writing studies have found it can support psychological well-being for some people, and a 2025 systematic review found positive expressive writing interventions may benefit subjective health and well-being in nonclinical populations.
For Fileta, journaling is not about producing profound insights every morning before coffee. It’s about learning to track your inner life honestly.
“It helps you track the process of healing,” she says. “It helps you track how you do relationships, because human nature, we have a tendency to forget if we don’t write things down.”
None of this is especially glamorous. No one is making a rom-com about a person who got emotionally healthier, built honest friendships, spent six months in therapy and started journaling instead of spiraling. But maybe that’s the point.
If you’ve never been in a relationship, the goal is not to panic and manufacture one just to prove you can. The goal is to become the kind of person who can recognize something healthy when it comes and participate in it with honesty, steadiness and self-respect.
“We tend to have that consumeristic approach,” she says, “instead of really digging deep and looking at our own personal health and what we have to offer in relationships.”
