Best Dating Podcasts for 2026: 6 Picks Worth Your Time

From expert advice and relatable stories to hilarious takes on modern romance, here are the best dating podcasts right now that are absolutely worth a listen. Whether you’re single, mingling, or somewhere in between, there's something on this list for you.

Last First Date Radio: Best Dating Podcast for Daters Over 40

Host: Sandy Weiner, dating coach

Format: Interviews with guest experts, plus solo coaching episodes

Cadence: Twice weekly

Best for: Anyone over 40 who wants a committed partner and is tired of advice that assumes otherwise

Weiner has been publishing since 2015 and has passed 750 episodes, which means whatever you are dealing with, she has probably covered it twice.

She emphasizes readiness: the patterns you carry into dating, the standards worth holding, the difference between designing a relationship and hoping one shows up. Recent episodes have covered attachment patterns, red flags, and why casual dating tends to stall out when you actually want a partnership.

If you subscribe to one show from this list, subscribe to this one.

 

Ask a Matchmaker: Best Dating Podcast for Understanding How Dating Works

Host: Maria Avgitidis, fourth-generation matchmaker and founder of Agape Match

Format: Listener questions plus guest experts

Cadence: Weekly

Best for: Listeners who want the practitioner's view rather than the participant's

Avgitidis works as a matchmaker for a living, and it shows. She answers listener questions with the specificity of someone who has watched thousands of introductions succeed and fail, and she is willing to tell a caller that the problem is the caller.

The show has passed 290 episodes and brings in outside experts regularly, which keeps it from becoming a single point of view. Recent episodes have gone well past dating mechanics into demographics, technology, and why partnership patterns are shifting.

This matchmaker-hosted show tells you how the professional side of this industry thinks, which is a different perspective than just hearing how other daters feel.

 

Where Should We Begin?: Best Podcast for Understanding Why It Ended

Host: Esther Perel, psychotherapist

Format: Real, anonymized couples sessions

Cadence: Weekly

Best for: Anyone carrying a divorce, a long relationship that ended, or a pattern they cannot name

This is not a dating podcast, but it's worth a listen anyway.

Each episode is a single therapy session with real people, edited for time and anonymity. Perel works through what is actually being fought about underneath what is being said. The subjects range across breakups, infidelity, family fractures, and long marriages that have quietly stopped working.

For a reader in their forties or fifties who is dating again after a divorce, this show does something no dating advice can. It explains the last twenty years before you go build the next twenty. It's emotionally heavy, so fair warning. It's designed to help you reflect and build healthier relationships moving forward.

 

Modern Love: Best-Produced Podcast in the Category

Host: Anna Martin, The New York Times

Format: Essays from the Modern Love column, read and discussed, plus interviews

Cadence: Weekly

Best for: Listeners who would rather feel something than be advised

Adapted from the New York Times column, running since 2015, with top production quality. Martin reads or hosts a personal essay, then talks with the writer or a guest about it.

There is no framework here and no takeaway to apply. What there is: other people’s love lives rendered with enough honesty that you recognize your own in them. That has its own value when you are deciding what you actually want out of the next relationship.

 

Jillian on Love: Best Dating Podcast for Breaking Your Own Patterns

Host: Jillian Turecki, certified relationship coach

Format: Solo teaching episodes and listener Q&A

Cadence: Weekly

Best for: Listeners who keep ending up in the same relationship with different people

Turecki has coached for twenty years and the show reflects it. She is direct without being harsh, and the subject is almost always the listener rather than the listener's dates: attachment style, the reasons you choose who you choose, what you tolerate and why.

The episodes are roughly 45 minutes and largely self-contained, so you can start anywhere. Titles are descriptive, so you'll know within ten seconds whether an episode is about you.

 

Dateable: Best Dating Podcast for What Is Changing Right Now

Hosts: Yue Xu and Julie Krafchick

Format: Interviews, cultural analysis, listener Q&A

Cadence: Weekly, plus Sunday listener questions

Best for: Listeners who want to know what has changed in dating since they were last doing it

Running since 2016 and past 700 episodes, Dateable treats dating as a cultural phenomenon worth studying rather than a problem to solve. Recent episodes have covered AI’s arrival in dating, economic pressure on relationships, and how therapy language has reshaped how people talk to each other.

The hosts skew younger so some episodes will not apply daters over 40. But with its emphasis on reporting the trends, this show is the fastest way to understand what the rules are now if you've been out of the dating scene for a decade or two.

 

Four things separate a show worth a standing subscription from one you try and abandon.

The host does this professionally. Matchmakers, therapists, and working coaches have a sample size. Commentators have opinions. Both can be entertaining. Only one changes your results.

The episodes stand alone. You should be able to start at episode 400 and get full value. Shows that require sequential listening are asking for a commitment your calendar will not honor.

It is still publishing. A show that stopped a year ago is a library, not a subscription. Several frequently recommended matchmaker podcasts have gone quiet since 2025, but lists across the web still recommend them as current.

The advice is specific enough to act on. "Communicate better" is not advice. "Say the thing you are avoiding in the first ten minutes of the conversation, not the last ten" is advice.

Listening feels like progress, which is the problem: you can spend six months well-informed and no closer to a partner. You need actual intervention.

Five steps that convert episodes into outcomes:

1. Pick one behavior per episode. Choose one thing you will do differently, stated as an action you could describe to someone else.

2. Write it down where you will see it. A note on your phone under the podcast’s name. A post-it on your bathroom mirror. If you cannot remember what you were working on, you are not working on it.

3. Run it for four weeks. A single date is not a test. Four weeks of the same changed behavior tells you whether it works for you.

4. Notice what you skipped. The episodes you close early are usually the relevant ones. Go back to the one that annoyed you and dig deeper.

5. Stop listening when you are avoiding. If your queue is full and your calendar is empty, the podcast has become the activity instead of the preparation.

A podcast can change how you think about dating. It cannot search for people on your behalf, screen them, or get a compatible person in front of you on a Thursday night.

That gap is the whole reason matchmaking exists. VIDA has been making introductions since 2009, and 82% of clients are introduced to someone special within 90 days. Clients approve every match before they meet anyone, so no blind dates.

Click here to schedule your complimentary matchmaking consultation.