Folks might remember this rather startling map that criss-crossed the internet a few months ago. Using Census Survey data, it purported to show the imbalance in singles of both genders across the country. The East Coast, it turned out, was full of lonesome ladies. The West Coast was packed with unhappy bachelors. Folks had some methodological questions, but most read the map and moved on, or read the map and moved to a city with more hot, hot, singles action. But Great American Jonathan Soma decided to dig into the numbers and make a more manipulable map. And the main variable he let you manipulate was age. The original map counted all singles between the ages of 20 and 64. The new map lets you screw with some sliders for a data range. And the results are fascinating. On the young end of the spectrum, single men outnumber single women just about everywhere. If you hold the ages to 20-34, DC, for instance, has 27 extra single men for every 1,000 people. Shift the slider so it tracks folks from age 45 to 60, and DC has 48 more single women for every 1,000 folks. The reason for this, basically, is that women marry younger. About 1/3rd of women are married by age 24. Only 1/5th of men are. That creates some imbalance. "Guys," writes Soma. "Like suburban deer, there are too many of you in relation to your prey, and you're destroying each others' game. Older, wiser deer who don't spend their time doing kegstands are snapping up your lady-foliage." But the map is not tracking what happens to those early settlers. Single, in this definition, is counted as never married, divorced, or widowed, so you're missing a lot of folks, particularly in the upper ranges, who are on the dating market but not caught in this data. Even so, it's a fun way to waste some time. It's also a good reminder that data can be misleading if it's not appropriately sliced. The original map wasn't wrong, exactly, but a 23-year-old guy who read it and packed up for female-heavy New York didn't exactly mean to toss himself into the 45-and-over dating scene. "Singles" wasn't the relevant measure -- "singles like you" were. So see? Which is why I called Soma a Great American: He managed to hide a statistics lesson in a thicket of hot, sexy, singles. Dude deserves a medal.
