Why are fertility rates at an all-time low? Since the figures for England and Wales were released last week, we’ve heard the same old theories. The cost of living means that couples can’t afford to start a family. Career-hungry women are eschewing children. Childcare and house prices mean that families are reluctant to expand.

Yet these analyses ignore a key group: those who would like to have children with a partner but are single. In a 2021 survey of women who were “childless by circumstance”, of those women who wanted children but had not tried to have them, four in 10 said this was because of the lack of a partner. Which leads us to a hidden factor in the decline in fertility: a crisis in modern dating.

That crisis is threefold. First, there are the apps, which many now depend on to find a partner. About 4.4 million people in the UK use them, up from 3.1 million users in 2017. Tinder, the world’s highest-grossing dating app, boasts of having created 55bn “matches” – but as I have reported, there’s mounting evidence that these apps are designed to be addictive – to retain users in order to create revenue and sell services to desperate daters. If they worked as they claim to, they would lose two customers every time a lasting relationship was formed. Instead, dating apps in 2024 have the same powerful siren call as any other endless feed of scrollable........

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