Wanting a Relationship Badly Might Be Why You Don't Have One

Photo: Good Faces Agency, via Unsplash

The single people who most want a relationship are the ones least likely to get one soon

Here's a finding that should needle anyone who's ever declared, out loud or to themselves, that they're "really trying to find someone this year": wanting a relationship badly, as a goal in itself, appears to predict making less progress toward having one.

That's the headline result from a new study out of the University of Toronto, led by PhD student Laura Hawkins with Serena Thapar, Will Ryan, and Geoff MacDonald, published this month in Social Psychological and Personality Science. It's one of the larger studies of its kind: 4,019 single adults aged 18 to 39 answered a baseline survey and wrote up to three personal relationship goals for the next six months. Researchers sorted the roughly 12,000 resulting goals into 41 themes, then followed up six months later with 3,176 of the original group, asking them to rate their own progress on a 0-100% scale. The average completion rate across everyone: 41.7%.

Not all "I want a relationship" is the same motivation

The team leaned on self-determination theory, which splits motivation into several flavors depending on where the drive actually comes from:

• Intrinsic and identified motivation: wanting connection because it's genuinely meaningful to you. These singles tended to set goals around relationship quality and emotional intimacy, not just landing a partner.
• Introjected motivation: chasing a relationship to avoid feeling like a failure, or to shore up self-esteem. This group focused on getting into any relationship, not a good one.
• External motivation: dating because of outside pressure (family, friends, a wedding season that keeps making you feel behind).
• Amotivation: genuinely not wanting a relationship right now.

The counterintuitive part is what happened to the introjected group. Despite (or maybe because of) being the most singularly focused on just getting partnered up, they made the least progress toward that goal. Meanwhile the amotivated group, people who'd basically stopped chasing it, reported the highest success on whatever goals they had set, which were mostly about being content single rather than about dating.

Hawkins put it plainly to PsyPost: singles who simply wanted to enter a relationship, full stop, tended to make less headway than people motivated by wanting a good relationship. Her read is that when the goal is really about proving something to yourself, self-image concerns start working against the behaviors that actually build a connection: being present, being curious about another person, tolerating the ordinary awkwardness of getting to know someone.

What this doesn't prove

The study is correlational, not experimental, so it can't establish that introjected motivation causes worse outcomes. It's entirely possible the causality runs partly the other way: a string of rejections or slow matches nudges people toward more anxious, avoid-failure motivations in the first place. The researchers also didn't break results down by age, gender, sexual orientation, or cultural background, and all progress data was self-reported, which is a real limitation, "progress toward a relationship" is a fuzzier thing to self-rate than, say, steps walked in a day. Read the finding as a solid, well-powered signal worth taking seriously, not a verdict on any one person's love life.

Why this is hard to see from inside your own dating life

Motivation is invisible to the person doing the motivating. Nobody thinks "I am currently driven by introjected self-esteem preservation" while swiping; it just feels like wanting a relationship, same as everyone else claims to want one. The distinction only shows up in behavior over time, which is exactly why a 12,000-goal dataset can surface a pattern individuals can't easily see in themselves.

It's also why raw activity numbers alone won't tell you which camp you're in. If you use RizzStats to look at your own Tinder or Hinge export, match rate and reply rate describe what's happening, not why you're doing it. But the activity timeline can be a decent proxy: a pattern of frantic swiping bursts followed by long silences looks pretty different from steady, spaced-out use, and it's worth asking yourself honestly which one your own timeline resembles, and whether it lines up with wanting connection or with wanting to just be done being single.

The practical takeaway from Hawkins and her colleagues isn't "want it less." It's that the goal worth setting probably isn't "get a partner" at all. It's "have good conversations with people I'm curious about," which, unlike the first goal, is fully in your control and doesn't come loaded with a referendum on your self-worth every time it doesn't happen this week.