Love, 45 Minutes Away

Why dating in L.A. feels hard

Angelenos say finding love here is hard. Surveys agree. Rent, freeways, apps, a city of transplants and a Black community that moved east each offer part of the answer.

Words: Onome T, Chief Writer · Photographs: Illustration generated with AI for The Content Campus

Photograph: Illustration generated with AI for The Content Campus

Girl A came to Los Angeles from the Midwest expecting a better social life. She says she has been single for about four years since the move. She is one account, not a survey. The surveys exist, though, and they agree with her.

Time Out asked more than 18,500 city-dwellers around the world about their dating lives for its 2025 Best Cities survey. Only 26 percent of local respondents said it is easy to find love in L.A. That tied the city with New York for fifth-worst in the world. Time Out's writer offered one consolation: most of the city thinks the scene "kind of sucks too."

So why? The explanations on offer disagree. Rent, distance, apps and a city of people passing through each have their own advocates and their own numbers. For Black Angelenos there is another layer: much of the community has moved out of the city.

Start with rent, because everyone does. Apartment List put the city's median rent at $2,075 in August 2026, about 49 percent above the national median. RentCafe's average rent is $2,765. Splitting a two-bedroom saves each renter about $673 a month, which may be the most romantic number in the city. Still, rent alone cannot be the whole story. Numbeo's crowdsourced estimate puts L.A. rent 37.3 percent below New York's, and New York tied L.A. anyway.

The second explanation is the map. Crosstown, citing the Texas A&M Transportation Institute, reports that Greater Los Angeles has ranked first in the nation for congestion in each of the past 43 years except 2020. In its latest count, the typical freeway commuter lost 137 hours to gridlock, almost six days. Relish says a first date here routinely means 45 minutes to an hour each way before the date even starts. Plan accordingly.

Third come the apps. Pew Research Center's 2022 national survey found 53 percent of adults under 30 had used a dating site or app. Among recent online daters, 54 percent of women felt overwhelmed by the number of messages, and 64 percent of men felt insecure about how few they got. It is one market with two opposite complaints.

Fourth, the city keeps changing hands. The website WashedUp describes L.A. as a transient place where people arrive for careers in entertainment, tech, fashion and music, and many leave within a few years. That, it argues, makes people slow to invest in anyone new. The churn lands in a country already short on company. Harvard's Making Caring Common found in 2024 that 21 percent of U.S. adults feel lonely, and respondents named technology, at 73 percent, as the top cause. The U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory on loneliness in May 2023, and the World Health Organization called it a global public health concern that November.

For Black Angelenos the trouble shows up in census counts. The city had 495,292 non-Hispanic Black residents in 1980, 16.69 percent of the population. By 2020 that figure had fallen to 322,553, or 8.27 percent, according to the census table compiled on Wikipedia. Census Dots counts 311,633, down an estimated 3.4 percent since 2020. Our Weekly, a Los Angeles Black-community newspaper, put the 2020 figure at 360,000. The AP reported that the Census Bureau undercounted the Black population by 3.3 percent in 2020.

Why people left depends on who you ask. L.A. Focus News says the main cause was housing costs. Our Weekly named housing costs and low wages, citing county data: a 10.6 percent Black unemployment rate, the county's highest, and 65 percent of Black Angelenos paying more than 30 percent of gross income in rent. An AP report pointed to worries about crime and the search for good schools, affordable housing and amenities. It described the move south as a reversal of the Great Migration.

The destinations are specific. A 2001 Los Angeles Times report followed Black families to outlying suburbs in the 1990s. Moreno Valley alone gained 27,500 Black residents that decade. "The main thing I heard from blacks who moved out here was affordable housing," Hardy Brown, co-publisher of Riverside-based Black Voice News, told the paper. Lyndsey Wilson told L.A. Focus News that "the costs were just too high," so she and her husband moved 45 minutes out to Jurupa Valley.

The 2001 Times story also found that many people who left kept jobs, family and churches in the city, which filled the 5 a.m. freeway into L.A. In a Harvard Gazette interview, Benjamin Goldman noted that dating apps, now the most common way young people meet, make users set a search radius that limits matches to people nearby. Put the two facts together and they suggest a dating pool that moved 45 minutes east can drop out of the search.

National marriage data add a wider frame. A Brookings analysis found that 60 percent of Black college graduates ages 25 to 35 had never married, against 38 percent of college-educated white women. It also found that 49 percent of college-educated Black women married a well-educated man, compared with 84 percent of their white peers. Those figures describe a national pool. The census counts describe a local one that moved farther away. Both may matter, and these figures do not settle it.

As for what helps, the ideas on offer try to shrink the distance. GRASS, a competing outdoor-dating app with a stake in the answer, citing Newsweek and Tawkify, says active first dates such as hiking, pickleball and run clubs are 25 percent more likely to lead to a second date than coffee or drinks. On housing, the county's Board of Supervisors launched a Land Bank Pilot in June 2022 to fight displacement. L.A. Focus News says such efforts have had limited impact.

Then there is the explanation people reach for first: Angelenos are just flaky. Jonathan W. Stokes, who has lived in both the New York and L.A. areas, tested the stereotype by tracking his messages with friends in each city for 10 days. The Bold Italic warned that even future best friends here "are going to flake on you multiple times." WashedUp blames geography, not character. And the Los Angeles Times reported in 2025 that canceling plans appears to be getting easier, even as American loneliness runs high.

Girl A came west for a better social life and has been single for about four years. The numbers say she has company. Some of it is 45 minutes away.

“Splitting a two-bedroom saves each renter about $673 a month, which may be the most romantic number in the city.”

Sources

Love, 45 Minutes Away

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