Seaver

I couldnt determine if this belonged in Sexuality, Humor, or here, so bear with me. I was thinking the other day, that how the percentage of the population we would consider date'able is extreamly low. So I started going over some estimations in my head and I was astounded how low it was.

Here's my estimations I came up with, of course it'll vary from person to person, but I think the majority of the people will agree with it. Now keep in mind these are my estimations.

First thing is age. The average age difference lays between 3-4 years. So lets figure that's about 10% of the population.

Now is sex, we're only doing heterosexuals here (homosexuals have it bad). Because I'm keeping this forth both men and women, we figure 50% of the previous number.

Now for those already in relationships. Lets take a guess and figure around 50%. So that's half out of the previous.

Now for intelligence. I'm going to be pretty broad here and say 30% difference is acceptable. So that's 70% of the previous one out.

Now for socio-economic status. I know, it shouldnt matter, but you're not going to find supermodels dating package boys. So lets be broad again and say 40% spread. So that's 60% of the previous out.

Now for social courtesies. This is things that gross you out such as bad hygine, nose picking, etc. The average person is pretty good, so lets only dump half the people. So that's 50% of the previous out.

Now for preferences. Some people like blondes, some like brown hair, etc. Most people this isnt a big deal, but for many it is. Lets drop out 30%, so only 70% of the previous stays.

Now for height. Much more important to women, but a 7' man probably wont date a girl who's 4'8. Lets drop out 40%, leaving 60% of the previous.

I could keep going but you see how quickly the numbers drop. I know this isnt good math because it's not taking into account the bell curve and stuff, but I dont want to actually sit down and do it.

Now it's interesting that I've mensioned this math to people at work and school, and the reaction is based solely on sex. EVERY SINGLE girl has replied something to the sort of "what brought this on, cant find a girl?" (I have one just FYI) and continually injects parts with boys of her past (though quickly admit they didnt stay with them long). Every guy just laughs and for the most part agrees.

Anyways this is just a rambling I thought I'd amuse yall with as I'm waiting to get off work.

jizzmasterp

0.1*0.5*0.3*0.4*0.5*0.3*0.4=0.036% of the population is eligible to date. So in a city of 300,000, there are only 108 eligible people according to your theory. Still very interesting though.

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TM875

So that means that, at the college that I went to, there was only a half of a person that I could date?

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JamesB

Actually .. the math seems somewhat valid. This is a HIGHLY interesting topic - I wonder if it has been studied at the intellectual level (uni.).

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spectre

I don't think so. The first part was eliminating 90% of the population based on the difference in age. Assuming that you were about the average age of the other students at your college, the number should increase quite a bit. If you were more than 4 years older than the average age, then this estimation would be true for you.

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FlunkedFlank

Well the concept is very reminiscent of "Drake's equation" for determining the chances of intelligent life existing somewhere else in the galaxy:

http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclo...D/DrakeEq.html

a pretty cool concept.

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Rodney

First of all, availability varies by age. You'd have to get a standard age distribution for the U.S. population by age -- not that hard to get -- and base your calculations on that, by decade. Certainly, the prospects are better in the 20s, when more of a particular generation is alive and also single, than in the 40s or certainly the 60s. I suspect that in the 20s, many fewer than 50 percent of everyone is married -- certainly under 25.

As for hair color, I've found relatively few people who fixated on it much; and besides, there's Lady Clairol. So I think this metric is overweighted.

Socioeconomic status is also overrated in your system. You may not find supermodels dating package boys, but you may well find executives dating (maybe not too seriously) secretaries and waitresses. Here's a clue -- women don't want to marry men who are beneath them socioeconomically, but a lot of men don't mind at all -- especially when their idea of a relationship is a free servant with sex.

Frankly, the biggest issue for dating is the balance or imbalance between men and women in the active dating groups. I've been told that in NY there are more eligible women than men, but out in the SF Bay Area, there are many more eligible -- nay, desperate -- men than women. NY attracts a lot of young and youngish career women, the SF Bay Area attracts a lot more nerds.

Min

Even if a few of those factors are ignored, that still gives the average person a very small pool of candidates to work in to find someone worth dating, much less marry.

Yakk

Actually, not really.

If you have a bunch of percentages multiplied together, it gets very small if you make the percentages smaller than they should be.

If you have 10 selection criteria, and underestimate each one by 20% (ie, instead of 50% you say 40%), it drops the number of elegeable people by a factor of 10.

If you are overly picky (and want someone with the same socioeconomic level, attractiveness, education, intelligence, age, and you are picky about hair colour and the like), it is hard to find a mate.

Duh.

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Last edited by JHVH : 10-29-4004 BC at 09:00 PM. Reason: Time for a rest.

TheFrogel

I think he has an interesting point there. A bit too specific (eliminating 60% based on socioeconomic status (SES) is too much, and the height issue I don't think merits throwing out 40%, too much), but I can see the point. Although the thing is, people who meet these criteria will be spending time together one way or another; at college, people from the same age group and SES are together anyway; if you hang out at bars, different bars attract people from certain age groups and SES's; if you're in a church group, likely there will be people like you there.

My point is, while this equation might in some ways hold true for the general population, there is a much higher chance than 0.036% of each person you meet being a possible mate.

Rekna

did you make the assumption that half of the population is gay? That seems a bit of an overestimate.

For those of you that are depressed about the numbers here realize that first most of the percentages are grossly overestimated and also that the percentage of running into someone you will like is much higher than is given here because you will run into people you like while you are doing things you like. For instance a hard core Christian isn't going to spend their days running into hard core partiers, no they will run into other hard core christians because that is what they do. People going to school are around people going to school, ect. So the population is already clustered into like social groups naturally which increases the odds of running into people you like (unless of course you are like me and going to grad school in computer science, there are no women in that field at all haha).

Gilda

No I think Seaver assumed that half the population is one sex, and half the other, which for heterosexuals, eliminates half the population (or actually, a little less, as 2% of that 50% is going to be homosexual). For homosexuals, this eliminates roughly 97-98% of the population which would seem to put us at a greater disadvantage, but because of the way the permutations work out, a group of homosexuals has twice the possible number of mating pairs as the same number of heterosexuals.

However, there is a flaw in the assumption of how people are eliminated. Some things are hard and fast. Sexual orientation is one of these--no matter how well he stacks up in every other category, no man is going to be an accepatable mate for me. I would venture that the same is true of heterosexuals. Bisexuals have it a little easier, as they have about 50% of the population available based on orientation.

The other percentages are iffy. For example, I think your age difference is much too low, and doesn't take into account that men of all ages tend to be most attracted to young women, while women tend to find men from their own age to quite a bit older acceptable. Men being 10 or even 15 years older doesn't usually cause problems, while the reverse often isn't true. This becomes more pronounced as you add in socioeconomic factors. The more financially successful a man is, the less important his age. A 50 year old millionaire can, and frequently will, have a girlfriend / wife 20-25 years younger.

The point is that a person who posesses high marks in one area can easily be forgiven for being lower in another.

Also, except with orientation and sometimes race, there's seldom a hard elimination level. It's more of a sliding scale, with people more attractive towards one end, and less attractive towards the other. I find tall girls more attractive, but there isn't a height, either too tall or too short, at which height would be an automatic deal breaker.

Most of the other factors work the same. Age is a sliding scale. I'd prefer a partner about my age give or take 3 or 4 years, and as she gets older than that, the age would make her marginally less attractive. But even at, say, 10 years older, it wouldn't be enough to eliminate a potential partner by itself. On the other hand, as you get younger, I think I'd be more tolerant of an age difference. I 'm not interested in dating an 18 year old, but in say, 10 years time I don't think I'd have much problem being with a 28 year old, or even a little younger than that.

Plus, there's the social grouping thing that someone mentioned earlier.

And then there's random chance. I met my SO at work, where threre were maybe 50 or 60 adults working, and neither of us was out at the time, so the odds of either of us finding another single, homosexual woman to date were very, very, low, yet it happened.

One more thing. If you think of it from the sociological perspective, the odds go up. Take a hypothetical party with 10 men and 10 women. For each individual man, there are 10 potential mates (let's assume everyone is heterosexual). If the odds of finding someone of acceptable dating quality work out to, say one in 100, there's a small chance, 1/10, that this man will hook up.

However, looking at the group as a whole, there are 100 possible matches, which means the odds of someone hooking up are pretty good (about 64.4%).

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Yakk

Even if he's stacked?

And, if you had 20 equally-picky homosexuals, the chances of a pair being good enough is about 87%.

Sometimes, it just doesn't pay to breed.

Hmm. Interesting math problem:

Given two parties, one homosexual and one heterosexual, where the homosexual party is uni-sex and the heterosexual party is male/female, and where the heterosexuals and homosexuals are equally picky/monogomous/etc...

What is the difference in party sizes such that both parties have the same chance of a pair forming?

Assume attendees at the heterosexual party are randomly male or female.

=)

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Last edited by JHVH : 10-29-4004 BC at 09:00 PM. Reason: Time for a rest.

Suave

ROFL.

Just by an educated guess based on my own personal preferences, I'd say about 7% of the females I meet I might have an interest in. This is mainly because I'm in university where there is a large pool of people who all fit similar criteria. Overall, in the "real world", it probably drops down to about 1% of them, or 0.5% of people in total. Then you'd have to factor in how many are in relationships, which we'll say is half for ease (0.25%), and lesbians at 10% of the female population (0.2475%), and for random factors (and because I like more "round" numbers), we'll chop it down to 0.20%.

So, through the use of loosely empirical "data", I get about 2 of every thousand people as being possibly romantically interesting with my standards. That's completely ignoring how interested they might be in you, which is a whole other set of BS to screw around with. So basically, about 14 million elligible persons of the opposite sex on the planet, give or take. I'm definitely underestimating though.

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Gilda

It's not a difficult calculation. Let's start with the heterosexual party being 10 males and 10 females. This is 100 potential matches.

The formula for a single sex environment is x (x-1)/2. Using this, we get 45 potential matches at 10 people. To equal the 100 matches at the hetero party, you need 15 people 15(7)=105. If you up the hetero party to 20 of each sex, you get 400. To equal this, you need 29 at a single sex party 29(14) = 406.

So the answer is a little under 3/4 of the number at a hetero party, assuming the hetero party is equally split male/female. If that ratio is off any the number of matchups goes down.

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iccky

A crucial element that has been touched on but not said explicitly is that while only a small portion of the total population is datable, a much larger portion of the people you run into on a daily basis are datable because you tend to run into people similar to you.

This is especially true for the age, intelligence and socioeconomic status issues. People tend to work and socialize with people of similar age, intelligence and who make similar money. College is a great example, but even after college you probably go to bars attended by similar people your age, have hobbies that people your age have, etc. People who make similar amounts of money shop in the same grocery stores, buy houses in the same neighborhoods, take the same kinds of vacations and income is highly correlated with intelligence (or at least formal education).

In statistical terms, there is considerable selection bias in the people you have a chance to meet and therefore date; it is not a random sample of the population.

There is, of course, a great Seinfeld about this, but I think they come up with 5% of the population.

Yakk

It gets hairer if you assume that each attendee has a 50% chance of being male or female, instead of an even 50-50 split, and more in favour of the homosexuals.

I can't think of an elegent way to solve that, without just crunching out the numbers.

I saw a good website about this, where he worked out that in his state there where approximetally 0.3 people who he could have a satisfactory relationship with. So he stopped trying. =)

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Last edited by JHVH : 10-29-4004 BC at 09:00 PM. Reason: Time for a rest.

snowy

Wow.

This math makes me realize how lucky I am to be at college right now.

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