(NewsNation Now) — Dating is a long-term investment: your time, your energy and your money.
The average American spends $1,600 a year on dating, according to match.com.
If you choose to stay single instead, that amount of money could get you a down payment on a Ford Focus, a new Apple MacBook Pro or even a flame thrower.
Liberty Vittert, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis and features editor of the Harvard Data Science Review, says the cost of dating is increasing.
“With the invention of apps, people are going on more dates than ever,” Vittert said during an “On Balance” Valentine’s Day appearance. “The grass is always greener. We even have people going on two dates a night.”
She says people are spending four times more on dating than they used to.
“It’s not just men” paying more, she added. “It’s also women because a lot of times now, women are paying for half of the date, as well,” Vittert said.
The average American spends $121,000 on dating in their lifetime.
“Humans are like fish,” Vittert said. “So fish go through their lives, and they reject the first 37% of partners that they could be with. And then the next one that comes along that’s better than the rest of the fish they’ve been with … (that’s) the one they settle down with.”
Here’s how that translates to your love life:
“If you think you’re going to have 10 love partners in life, you’d reject the first four,” Vittert said. “And then the next one that comes along that’s better than the first four is the one that you settle down with. It’s a fine balance between having the patience to wait for the right one, and having the foresight to cash in before all the good ones are taken.”
Now, is all that time and money worth it?
“Married people are only slightly happier than divorced or single people,” Vittert said, adding that divorced people are in the lowest level of life satisfaction.
“Both divorced and married people go on these huge ups and downs, where … single people spend their life at a pretty good level of satisfaction,” Vittert said.
