Loading ...So I have Omar to thank for the following bit of information below, check this out. A map showing what areas/cities have more single men or women in them. This is pretty crazy, apparently I need to go to Newark/New York to find a woman and import her:
After seeing that map it started the gears turning in my head, and being the naturally curious type I decided to do a little digging myself to come up with some numbers on this. Interestingly enough the California Department of Finance has a Demographics Research division that does a lot of work with Census data and other demographic sources. One of these sources was the “An Overview of Californians” PDF using the Year 2000 Census Bureau data. In that lovely document we find this table:
A more recent document called the “California Population Survey: Extended Report March 2005″ has updated figures shown below:
So overall, there are 1 million more single males in the state of California then single females. Not exactly stellar odds if you ask me. Just how bad are the odds for a single guy in say Los Angeles or Orange counties? Well, looking at the more detailed Year 2000 Census data we have the following data on household composition:
Los Angeles
Orange
But this doesn’t really give us the full picture unfortunately since a woman living alone, or not isn’t necessarily single per se. So while the number of women vs men living alone show that there are more single women households in Orange County and Los Angeles County than men, it doesn’t accurately reflect what percentage of those households are not in some form of current relationship.
And this whole entry is a stunning example of the kind of spare time I now have to blow on looking up census data to explain why its so damn hard for me to find a nice woman.
The other thing you don’t have access to is a breakdown by age. For the “Younger than 65″ values the numbers are roughly the same; however, you’d have to break that down into finer-grained age categories, especially if you follow the ±20% rule.
A real geek (like one that wasted three years doing probabilistic pattern recognition) would calculate the probability of encountering someone desirable as a ratio of desirable_persons to total_population, and condition that on the likelihood that said target would be mutually attracted.
Of course, the conditional is extremely low because most women do not like to be objectified, and especially do not want to be objectified into a statistic. Pray they do not do a Google search and find this entry.
Still, one has to relish the possible pick-up lines: “Hi baby. According to my calculations, we have a 76.4% chance of being mutually compatible. Wanna check my figures?”
Okay, you have failed to account for some critical demographic data.
Half your charts have the ‘over 65′ crowd seperated, that means the remaining are 64 and under. The other chart has people from 15 on.
This does not mean that there are 40,000 more ‘Dan’ class individuals looking for love. Some are 15, some are 64. That means there’s a wide range of ages in the single men (and women) categories. You have the raw data, but don’t let it discourage you.
Just keep doing the things you like, but keep an eye out for a woman who meets your standards (breathing, no obvious feathers) and is enjoying something you also like. Go up, strike up a conversation, and BAM, instant restraining order! That’s how it always worked for me!!