I present to you a chart

Playing the Numbers Game

The latest episode of the NPR show This American Life leads off with a discussion of dating prospects. A group of physicists determined that out of the 600,000 people in Boston, they are approximately 2500 eligible women for them to date. The population was filtered by age, education level, relationship status, and likelihood of physical attractiveness to reach this number. The man interviewed found the final number depressing.

My response? Give me a friggin' break. These guys were college aged and have any number of venues to find dates. Parties, university functions, bars, festivals, church, grocery stores, bake sales, etc. Unlike most guys, gay men can't simply approach any random hottie off the street unless we're willing to risk an ass-whupping. When it comes to finding a spouse, the world is the straight man's oyster. Compare that to the plight of the average gay or lesbian and it's a virtual nirvana.

Living in the Raleigh-Durham area of NC, I decided to run some numbers of my own to see how a gay man might fare here. First of all, I decided to use the Census statistic for the Raleigh-Durham-Metropolitan area, 1,047,629, rather than simply the population total of any one city. Secondly, since the number of gays is difficult to determine (thanks to our old friend the closet), I settled on an estimate of 6%. Finally, my number accounted for gender, age, weight, education level, weight, and relationship status.

Obviously the percentage of gays ruled out a lot of the population. And since women are out of the question, that number is cut in half (actually there are slightly more women in Raleigh than men, but it's close enough). With an age range of 18-40, we have about 41.4% of the population to work with. The technology boom brought a lot of college graduates to the area, so 46.5% has a bachelor's degree or more, nearly double the national average. Then there's obesity, which cuts out 25.6% of the population (if you want to cut off overweight people shave off 62.3%). Finally, let's say that 40% of the guys are in relationships.

So let's take those numbers, add the 20% possibility (used on This American Life) of finding the other person attractive and see the final total:

1047629 * 0.5 * 0.06 * 0.414 * 0.465 * 0.744 * 0.4 * 0.2 = 360

Yeah you read that right. Keep in mind that NPR used just the population of Boston for their calculation. If they'd draw from the 4.4 million people in the Greater Boston area, as well as acknowledged that 40% of Boston residents have college degrees and cut off the obese population, then the number comes to 24,701.

This doesn't account for other factors like gay men in the closet (which is a lot in NC), serosorting, and the few spaces in which gay men can meet safely. So I don't think the future Phd holders of Harvard university have much to worry about by comparison.

I'm also aware that some of these factors are arguably superficial. A college degree doesn't mean the graduate is intelligent, a considerable age gap can be overcome, and obese people aren't necessarily undateable (as some of my former boyfriends can confirm). Still the numbers tell an interesting tale.