Online Dating Blog

Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital. ~Aaron Levenstein

From time to time, articles are published on the best and worst cities to live in if you are single or, maybe more specifically, dating. This year, of the top forty cities measured, my city, Pittsburgh, came in near the very bottom of the list. This is actually an improvement – I know Pittsburgh was dead-last two years in a row a few years back. Maybe we’re headed in the right direction. Slowly.

As interesting as I find statistics I rarely put much weight in them. For example, when looking at Forbes’ measurement system, I have to question some of the data points they deemed valuable for determining “good” or “bad” dating cities. For example: Coolness. What does coolness have to do with single life? Are people really willing to move to a city because it is considered cool? And if so, are those people single? Maybe, but that deserves a whole new study in itself! Also, for ranking online dating they used Yahoo! Personals. As I mention in my Online Dating Guide, Yahoo! Personals is a secondary service of Yahoo!, not their main purpose for existence. Because of its accessibility, I believe many people sign up at Yahoo! impulsively, not because they are really searching for someone. With this in mind, the Online Dating metric, which is based on the number of profiles at Yahoo! Personals, has more to do with population than anything else…so of course New York and Los Angeles will show at the top of that category. I think it would be better measured by pulling the number of active profiles from the top three dating services and comparing that with the size of the population for each city. With all that said, other categories such as Culture, Singles and Nightlife have obvious value.

Regardless of my reservations, statistics are fun and I loved using the “but Pittsburgh is the worst” line when I was single – I didn’t want to question the statistics then! Check out where your city falls but don’t let the results get you down one way or the other. As hard as it might be to conceive, everyone can find success, regardless of how many Yahoo! Personal profiles might exist in the area or how much a pack of beer might cost.