New York has an Ambassador to Loneliness.
That is not a metaphor or a headline writer's flourish. In November 2023, Governor Hochul formally appointed Dr. Ruth Westheimer to the role, and New York State has issued public loneliness advisories in her name every winter since. It is, as far as we can tell, the only U.S. state with a named, sitting loneliness official. Whatever else that says about New York, it says the state has decided this is a real problem worth an actual title — which makes it a strange omission that almost nothing written locally about loneliness connects it to the specific, heavily documented mechanics of how New Yorkers date.
That's the gap worth closing here, with New York-specific numbers rather than national averages standing in for them.
What's actually different about New York's numbers
Start with the myth almost every single New Yorker has heard at a party: that the city is drowning in single women and starving for single men, or the reverse, depending on who's telling it. The real numbers, drawn from Census data on never-married singles aged 20 to 34, complicate both versions. City-wide, men in that bracket slightly outnumber women — roughly 742,400 to 729,500, per NYC Economic Development Corporation's analysis of Census figures. A more recent SmartAsset analysis of the city's overall single population puts New York and Chicago at almost exactly even, around 99.5 single men for every 100 single women — nowhere near the lopsided ratio the local mythology assumes.
What the city-wide number hides is that the ratio swings hard by neighborhood. On the Upper East Side, young single women have outnumbered young single men by nearly two to one; in Jackson Heights, the ratio flips to 1.7 men for every woman. New York's dating math isn't one number. It's dozens of different local markets stacked on top of each other, each with its own odds, which is part of why two New Yorkers three subway stops apart can have completely different opinions about whether the city is "impossible."
What isn't ambiguous is who finds the city harder going. A Time Out survey of New York daters found 61.3% of women describe dating here as a challenge, against 50.8% of men — and yet, on the specific question of happiness being single, the same survey found men and women statistically about even, with New York ranking as the unhappiest-to-be-single city among the twelve surveyed globally. Almost 45% of unpartnered New Yorkers said they were sad about it — the highest share in the survey. New York, in other words, is a city where a large share of both genders would rather not be single, dating harder than most other cities, at a cost most other cities don't have to absorb.
The cost layer is not incidental
That cost is worth being specific about, because New York's is not comparable to most of the country's.
An analysis of the 50 largest U.S. cities by MoneyLion found New York tops the list for the price of a standard night out — dinner, drinks, and an activity for two — at roughly $351, the highest in the nation and well above the next-most-expensive metro. A separate, more conservative estimate using OpenTable receipt data put a typical New York first date, two entrées and two cocktails, at $122 before tax and tip. Nationally, the picture is already straining: BMO's 2026 Real Financial Progress Index put the average American date at $189, up more than 12% year over year, with 47% of single Americans now saying dating isn't financially worth it and 86% saying money concerns have delayed their dating lives altogether. New York sits at the expensive end of a national trend that was already bending against daters before it reached the city.
This matters for the loneliness question specifically because of who it hits hardest. In the Wheatley Institute and Institute for Family Studies' 2025 National Dating Landscape Survey — a nationally representative sample of over 5,000 unmarried adults aged 22 to 35, released February 2026 — money was the single most-cited barrier to dating, named by 58% of men versus 46% of women. New York doesn't just have a loneliness problem or a dating-app problem. It has the national dating-affordability crisis running at its most expensive local rate, hitting a population that the national data says is already more likely to cite cost as the reason it isn't dating.
What the same national data says about men, applied here
The most counterintuitive finding in the IFS survey is one worth restating in a New York context specifically, because it cuts directly against the story New York tells about itself. Single men nationally reported meaningfully more interest in starting a relationship than single women — 60% versus 47% — and more confidence approaching someone they're interested in. That's not a population of men who have quietly opted out. It's a population whose stated appetite for dating outpaces the format currently available to satisfy it.
Layer the dating-app math on top of that appetite and the New York version of the mismatch comes into focus. Across the major apps, men outnumber women by wide margins nationally — roughly three to one on Tinder, three to two on Hinge and Bumble — and aggregated swipe data puts women's match rate at roughly eight times men's. New York, with its dense, professionally saturated single population and its famously high app usage rate among the more than three million single adults the city carries, is about as concentrated a version of that math as exists in the country. A city with an official loneliness ambassador and the most expensive date-night economy in America is also, structurally, one of the worst dating-app markets in the country for the gender the national data says wants it most.
What the AIBM data adds to the local picture
None of this means New York men report feeling lonelier than New York women in the moment-to-moment sense — the national research the American Institute for Boys and Men has compiled consistently shows men and women self-reporting loneliness at close to even rates, generally within a percentage point or two of each other. What differs, and what the loneliness-ambassador framing tends to miss, is structural: the same national research finds men's support networks are measurably thinner and less resilient, more likely to collapse to a single confidant, in a city that runs on precisely the kind of packed, socially thin schedule — long hours, long commutes, expensive everything — that erodes exactly that kind of network fastest.
Put the local numbers next to the national research and the shape of New York's version of this problem is fairly precise: a population of men who want to date more than the local women's survey responses suggest women currently do, running that desire through the single most expensive date-night market in the country and one of its most lopsided app economies, with less of the ambient friend infrastructure around them to absorb a bad stretch than the loneliness-ambassador headlines would suggest the state has already solved.
What a room does to New York's specific version of the math
A structured, in-person format changes more of these specific New York variables than it might in a cheaper, less app-saturated city. It replaces an eight-to-one match-rate gap, engineered by a photo-and-swipe interface, with a room where everyone present has already agreed, by buying a ticket, to have an actual conversation with everyone else in it — no algorithm deciding who gets seen. And on the cost math specifically: a Relish evening runs in the range of the city's own single average OpenTable first date, but produces eight to twelve real, in-person conversations across a single night rather than one $122 dinner with a single stranger who may or may not be a match — a materially different cost-per-conversation than New York's own restaurant-based dating economy produces on its own.
New York is not going to stop being the most expensive city in the country to date in, and its Ambassador to Loneliness is not going anywhere. What the local data suggests is a narrower, more solvable version of the problem than either fact implies on its own: not that New Yorkers, or New York men specifically, have given up on connection, but that the format the city's dating culture defaults to — expensive, app-mediated, one-on-one, high failure rate per attempt — is a particularly bad match for a population the national numbers say wants this more than the mythology gives it credit for.
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