Jonathan Soma, a programmer from Brooklyn built an amazing interactive map using American Community Survey data from 2012 showing the size and gender breakdown of the unmarried population in various cities across the country:
All the single ladies (and gentlemen, too) mapped
Jonathan Soma
“I get emails every couple weeks asking for suggestions on where someone should move if they’re looking for love,” Soma said via email.
East Coast cities tend to have more single women than men, whereas the reverse is true for the West Coast. Soma argues that southern cities like Durham, Savannah and Jackson are the best places for straight men searching for straight women, given their very female-skewed single gender ratios. One caveat with the gender ratio numbers: they don’t account for LGBT people, meaning the actual ratio of straight or bi men to straight or bi women could be slightly different. And of course, many single people are in monogamous relationships, limiting the ratios’ usefulness for the purposes Soma suggests somewhat.
Breaking down the results by age, most big cities — including New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago — have more single men in their twenties than single women in their twenties. However, as the single population pushes past 50, the tables seem to turn, and single women start to outnumber their male counterparts, as this GIF of Soma’s maps shows:
Jonathan Soma
The single American population is bigger than ever and the Census reports that there are 105 million single adults in the country, accounting for 44 percent of the adult population. Overall, single adult men are outnumbered by single women, with 87 of the former for every 100 of the latter.
Data set sorted by the Washington Post
While married people outnumbers singles nationwide, in about 27 states single adults make up the majority of the population.
Unsurprisingly, residents of college towns are especially likely to be single, while people in heavily Mormon parts of Utah and Idaho tend to be coupled up. The chart below considers a larger range of Americans than Soma’s chart does, as it starts from the age of 16:
City Lab/Atlantic
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