Dating self-help sells tactics. Better photos, better opening lines, better apps, better “attraction” frameworks — the whole genre assumes the gap between single and partnered is a skills gap. A new study out of the University of Toronto, published in Social Psychological and Personality Science and covered by PsyPost on September 7, 2026, says the tactics aren’t the variable that matters. The reason you want a partner is.

Laura Hawkins, Serena Thapar, Will Ryan, and Geoff MacDonald surveyed 4,019 single adults ages 18 to 39 and asked them to write down what they actually wanted from a relationship — not a checkbox, an open-ended goal in their own words. Roughly 12,000 goals came back. The team sorted them into 41 themes, then checked in six months later with 3,176 of the original respondents to see who’d made progress and what “progress” actually looked like for them. What predicted quality connections wasn’t effort. It was motivation — specifically, whether the wanting came from inside or from somewhere else entirely.

Quick Verdict

Question	Answer
Who ran the study?	Laura Hawkins, Serena Thapar, Will Ryan, and Geoff MacDonald, University of Toronto
Sample	4,019 single adults ages 18-39, with a 6-month follow-up of 3,176
What did they measure?	~12,000 open-ended relationship goals, sorted into 41 themes, matched against each person’s underlying motivation type
What predicted quality connections?	Intrinsic and identified motivation — wanting a relationship because it genuinely appeals to you or fits your values
What predicted worse outcomes?	Introjected motivation — wanting a partner to boost your self-worth or avoid guilt
The counterintuitive part	Amotivated singles (little real desire for partnership) posted the highest technical “progress” rates — because staying single needs no cooperation from anyone else
Average goal completion rate	41.7% across the full sample

Bottom line: How hard you’re trying to date isn’t the mechanism. Why you’re trying is.

What the Study Actually Tested

This is grounded in self-determination theory, the framework that splits motivation by where it comes from rather than how strong it is. Two people can want a relationship equally badly and still be running on completely different fuel. One might want it because connection itself sounds good — intrinsic. Another might want it because a partner would prove something about their life going right — identified, values-driven, but still more instrumental. A third might want it because being single feels like failing at something, and a partner would make the guilt stop — introjected. A fourth might be dating because their parents keep asking — external. And some people just aren’t that motivated at all — amotivated.

Self-help mostly treats all of that as the same input: “wanting a relationship.” This study is built on the premise that it isn’t, and it had the sample size to actually test it. Nearly 12,000 individually written goals, sorted into 41 themes rather than a handful of pre-set categories researchers guessed at in advance. That’s a meaningfully more granular approach than asking people to rate “I want a relationship” on a 1-5 scale, which is closer to what most relationship surveys actually do.

Why Does Your Reason for Wanting a Partner Matter?

Because it shapes both the goals you set and whether you make real progress toward them, according to this research. Three findings carry the study:

1. Intrinsically and identified-motivated singles pursued higher-quality connections. Their goals skewed toward emotional intimacy, compatibility, and relationships worth having — not just relationships, period.
2. Introjected motivation correlated with less progress. Singles chasing a partner to silence self-doubt or guilt made less headway over the six-month window than singles chasing connection for its own sake.
3. Amotivated singles posted the highest technical completion rates on their stated goals — not because avoidance beats desire, but because a goal like “stay single” or “don’t actively pursue anything” requires zero cooperation from another human being. It’s the easiest goal in the dataset to hit.

That third point is worth sitting with before anyone turns it into “wanting less works better.” It doesn’t. It means the researchers were measuring goal completion, and goals about not partnering are structurally easier to complete than goals that depend on someone else showing up and being into it too.

The Part That Should Bother the Dating-Advice Industry

Here’s the uncomfortable bit for anyone selling a framework to “attract the right partner.” If introjected motivation — wanting a relationship to fix how you feel about yourself — correlates with worse outcomes, then optimizing someone’s profile, opener, or “market value” while that motivation sits underneath is optimizing the wrong layer entirely. You can get someone matching on more apps and still not move the number that predicted quality in this data.

Per PsyPost’s coverage, Hawkins pointed to self-worth as the likely mechanism: singles high in introjected motivation are “fundamentally pursuing partnership to improve their self-image,” which may work against actually forming the connection they’re chasing. That’s a specific, testable claim, not a vibe. Wanting a partner to feel better about yourself and wanting a partner because connection appeals to you produce different search behavior, different standards, probably different desperation levels on a first date — and this study is evidence that the difference shows up in outcomes six months out.

It also reframes a phrase this site keeps running into in book reviews: “get right with yourself first.” Secure and most attachment-style books gesture at something like this already — that how you relate to your own worth shapes who you’re drawn to and how the relationship goes. This study gives that gesture actual data. Not “fix your baggage before dating” as a platitude. A specific mechanism: introjected motivation, measured directly, predicting measurably less progress.

Not Every Single Wants to Partner — And That’s Not a Problem to Solve

The amotivation finding does double duty here. Hawkins put it plainly in the PsyPost writeup: “Not every single wants to partner!” That’s a direct challenge to a genre that treats every single reader as a partnering-in-progress case, one good framework away from a relationship. Some readers aren’t running low motivation toward a goal they secretly want. They’re running low motivation because the goal isn’t theirs.

That distinction matters for how a book should even be written. Advice aimed at someone with genuine desire but introjected motivation needs to address the self-worth question underneath the search. Advice aimed at someone who’s actually amotivated needs to stop pathologizing the disinterest and ask whether “help them date better” was ever the right brief. Most relationship self-help doesn’t sort readers this way. It assumes desire and prescribes tactics.

Where This Fits With What This Site Keeps Finding

This is the same shape as the research on why single adults’ relationship futures don’t sort into a marriage-track majority or a happily-single majority — a population self-help treats as one audience actually splitting into several distinct groups that need different advice. That study was about what single people want long-term. This one is about why — different question, same underlying lesson: singlehood isn’t one experience with one fix.

It also lines up with the research on self-doubt not being the same thing as humility — another case of a self-focused psychological stance (there, doubting your own knowledge; here, chasing a partner to patch your self-worth) correlating with worse outcomes than its other-focused counterpart. And it complicates comparing yourself to your partner research in a useful way: that study found comparison splits into two types with opposite effects depending on mechanism. This one does the same move to “wanting a relationship” itself. It was never one thing. Kristin Neff’s self-compassion work is the other half of this picture — if introjected motivation runs on low self-worth, the fix isn’t a better dating strategy. It’s the thing self-compassion research already targets directly.

What This Doesn’t Mean

A few things worth naming before this gets flattened:

• It doesn’t mean effort doesn’t matter at all. The study measured motivation type, not whether trying hard versus not trying at all makes a difference within a given motivation type. Effort and motivation quality aren’t the same variable, and this research isolates the second one.
• It doesn’t mean amotivated singles are secretly better off. Their higher completion rate reflects easier-to-complete goals (often “stay single” or similarly low-friction targets), not superior outcomes or happier lives. The paper doesn’t claim otherwise.
• It doesn’t prove introjected motivation causes worse relationships. This is correlational, six-month-follow-up data. People already dealing with low self-worth may simply face more obstacles generally, independent of dating behavior specifically.
• It doesn’t mean you can diagnose your own motivation type from a single gut check. Motivation isn’t always consciously accessible — someone can genuinely believe they want a relationship “for the right reasons” while an introjected pattern runs underneath. That’s a limitation of self-report research generally, not just this study.

What Actually Holds Up, Given This

• If a dating book’s entire pitch is tactics — profiles, openers, “market value” — treat that as addressing the wrong layer. This data says the more load-bearing variable is why you want a partner in the first place, not how good you are at the search mechanics.
• Notice whether wanting a relationship feels more like relief-seeking (make the loneliness/guilt/inadequacy stop) or interest-seeking (this sounds genuinely good). That’s roughly the introjected-versus-intrinsic split this study measured, and it’s a distinction worth sitting with honestly before the next dating attempt.
• Don’t treat low desire to date as a bug to fix. Per Hawkins, not every single person wants to partner, and that’s a legitimate answer, not a symptom of low confidence or fear of intimacy that a book needs to talk you out of.
• Be skeptical of any relationship framework that never asks why you want what you’re chasing. This is now direct evidence that the “why” isn’t a soft, secondary question. It’s the variable that predicted quality outcomes in a 4,019-person sample.

The Bottom Line

Nearly 12,000 goals, 41 themes, a six-month follow-up on over 3,000 people, and one finding that undercuts a lot of what gets sold as dating advice: the reason you want a relationship predicts whether you get a good one more than how hard you chase it does. Intrinsic and identified motivation tracked with higher-quality connections. Introjected motivation — wanting a partner to fix how you feel about yourself — tracked with less progress. And plenty of singles in the sample weren’t actually trying to partner at all, which the data treats as a legitimate stance rather than a problem waiting for the right book. If dating advice skips the motivation question and goes straight to tactics, it’s optimizing the part of the equation this study says matters less.

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Hawkins, L., Thapar, S., Ryan, W., & MacDonald, G., “Does Why You Want Partnership Shape What You Want? A Self-Determination Perspective on Singles’ Relationship Goals,” Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2026. Additional coverage from PsyPost. Related reading: Being Single Isn’t a Waiting Room for Marriage, Self-Doubt Isn’t Humility, Study Finds, Comparing Yourself to Your Partner Isn’t Always Bad, Secure by Amir Levine Review, and Self-Compassion by Kristin Neff Review.