Good News, Guys: Boston's Single Women Outnumber You

A calculation by real estate trends site Trulia finds a ratio of single women to men.

boston single women

All the single ladies … live in Boston, via YouTube.

With Valentine's Day looming, the real estate website Trulia crunched some numbers to figure out the ratio of single women to single men in various cities and found that Boston has the third highest ratio of women to men in the U.S.. The site narrowed its focus to only those single men and women who live alone—apparently the data shows singles prefer this to those who live in groups, though we'd point out that this makes their findings far more relevant to an older set of singles, as many of the younger ones probably bunk together to save money. They also excluded the estimated same-sex population and people over 65 (because the gender ratio is skewed as women outlive men). Bethesda, Maryland and Washington, D.C. beat out Boston for the highest woman to man ratio. But Boston came in third, just ahead of New York with 1.09 single women for every single man. Ladies, if you're losing out in this game of musical chairs (yes, the men are the chairs in that metaphor), consider moving to Las Vegas or Honolulu, which had the highest ratios of single men to women. (Plus, it doesn't snow there.)

The methodology, by which Trulia took an entire population, then systematically eliminated ineligible categories, reminded us of a very funny (if depressing) episode of This American Life, in which NPR's David Kestenbaum described his conversation with a group of fellow Harvard physicists during which they attempted to take the population of Boston and systematically exclude all people they wouldn't date. Doing a sort of crude back of the napkin calculation, Kestenbaum took Boston's population, eliminated men, people more than 10 years older or younger, non-college graduates, non-singles, and an estimate of women who wouldn't find him attractive. (He went with a generous four out of five women.) Even before considering personality or mutual attraction, he had a pool of about 2,500 women in the entire city that he might be able to date.

So dudes, if you somehow haven't managed to take advantage of the surplus in single women, don't feel too bad. You've got the men of the Harvard physics department to keep you company and help you justify the difficulty of finding a soulmate in this big city of ours.