The Infinite Pussy Glitch (Part 2): The Census Data on Why NYC Dating is Broken

Are single women in Manhattan totally screwed?

I’ve dated in NYC for a long time.

To give you an idea of what dating in NYC is like, let me contrast it with a conversation I had with an attractive 30-something man who lived in the Salt Lake suburbs.

“You just run out of people,” he said, making a face.

“What do you mean?” I asked, baffled.

“You swipe and it says, ‘You’ve run out of profiles in your area,’” he said. “Then you have to wait for awhile and see if someone wanders into your geofence.”

I laughed. I had been swiping on apps for over a decade, and this had literally never happened to me, except when I put impossibly narrow filters like only men with graduate degrees between 30 and 34 who are over 6’4”.

As we are about to also prove with data, this certainly has happened to no man ever in NYC as well.

My first 6 years in NYC were in Manhattan, the last 2 in Brooklyn. I’ve dated men in both areas with the occasional Queens resident or New Jersey guy¹ thrown in for good measure.²

To date here is to run through a spinning vortex of a human catalogue so vast your brain has trouble coming to grips with what is happening. When people talk about NYC men having it so good, with so many beautiful, educated, interesting women, they always forget to mention the corollary: there are seemingly infinite blue chip bachelors as well. If the dating app algorithm gods are kind to you, you can spend your days swiping through not just square-jawed lawyers and doctors but also more exotic specimens like the Winklevoss twins³, reality stars, and the CEOs of companies you’ve heard of. It’s not like the women are drinking from a dry well. It’s more that the well gives you a hangover, never texts you back, and generates increasing thoughts that you should move to San Francisco.

To give some more color on the male experience, there was a reddit post of a 27 year old man who had been on 60 dates in 18 months with no relationship to show for it. He asked: what gives? I wrote in detail about the Hinge data of one eligible 35-year-old bachelor who received over 2,000 likes in 3 years on Hinge and has remained single.

Ultimately, even though men gatekeep relationships and women gatekeep sex as always, it’s still not actually easy to secure the most desirable women, who can afford to be choosy in a way that would be hard to replicate in a smaller pool.

Here are the raw numbers for unmarried men and women in different age ranges, broken down by general population and college educated.⁴

The big reveal:

There’s an excess of almost 20,000 20-something unmarried college-educated women compared to their male counterparts in Manhattan.

For some reason, I have a vision of Oprah screaming, “You get a college-educated young woman! You get a college-educated young woman! EVERYONE gets a college-educated young woman!”

“Unmarried” includes never married, divorced, separated, and widowed. You can see that the most pronounced gap in the college-educated 20-29 age set.

What this all means

From the female side, even though there are not enough men, there’s still 65,000 college educated ones alone from age 25 to 35. If only 5% of those meet your criteria, that’s still 3,000. If only 10% of them like you back, that’s still 300. 300 is still too many to know what to do with. So at the end of the day, it’s a game of being as appealing as possible to your compatible subset and as ruthless with filtering upfront as possible to make any headway in a pool this size.

From the male side, it’s an embarrassment of riches with the caveat that you could easily be lulled into a fantasy that fertile women will want you forever as you drift towards retirement age and compete against men 20 years younger with the same resources. This environment can lead to a certain complacency, leading to matchmakers sending me 60 year old men who are finally ready to settle down and start their families right as they start collecting social security checks.

The Gender Ratio, in Graphs

Represented more visually, here is the gender ratio of Manhattan compared to the overall USA, also broken down by education level.

With the dotted line representing a balanced gender ratio of unmarrieds, you can see that things are quantifiably Less Good for 20 and 30-something women of Manhattan, whether they hold a college degree or not, but particularly of they’re hypergamous college degree-holders.

Some interesting facts to note:

• In the USA as a whole, there’s a shortage of 20 and 30-something unmarried women compared to men.

• After 40, the gender ratio tips in favor of men everywhere.

• College-educated women who only date college-educated men have it tougher throughout life.

• The most intense gender gap is with 20-something college educated Manhattan women, only rivaled again by 50-something college educated women when all the men start dying off.

However, Unmarried =/= Actually Single

But not every unmarried/divorced/separated/widowed person is actually single, of course. How do we try to account for that?

Well, to try to answer that question, I used the Pew Research Center data and mashed it up with the census data. I adjusted percentages for Manhattan, in both the general and college educated, by scaling it to match the corresponding unmarried percentage for the USA as a whole.⁵ Their percentages often span 2 decades, so I also scaled the percentage to match the difference in unmarried rates for each decade for hopefully a little more accuracy.

The picture that emerges from this treatment is quite different.

So, I feel that this graph has to be made with a huge caveat that it’s quite speculative. I didn’t have actual single percentages for Manhattan so I adjusted the percentages to be scaled with unmarried percentage. Whether Manhattan women are a lot less likely to be both unmarried and not in a relationship compared to the average American woman is unknown; this is just my best stab with available stats! (I think they actually ARE more likely to be single, but I can’t quantify it with this data.)

Here’s the Pew Research Center base rates for the US as a whole:

• 18-29: 51% of men, 32% of women

• 30-49: 27% of men, 19% of women

• 50-64: 27% of men, 29% of women

• 65+: 21% of men, 49% of women (!)

The Nuance Pill does a good job of dissecting how accurate these numbers are, giving historical context and multiple polls. Basically - it might be a slight undercount of single women, but not horribly so; the figures I used aren’t as extreme as the 63%/34% split for 20-somethings.

I didn’t include the 60+ age set in my graphs because… I was more interested in the younger age set, but here’s a sentence with a great deal of statistical truth and no poetry: women outnumber men late in life because all the men die and the ones left are pretty much all taken and the women give up.⁶

Assuming that the Pew figures are true and applicable to Manhattan with my scaling assumptions, what we see is that it’s not that the average college-educated Manhattan man has it SO GOOD - it’s that men before age 50 have it bad everywhere else.

Before age 50, educated men in Manhattan have the only equitable bright spot, where gender ratio is about 1:1.

One thing that’s clear from the data is that men in their 20’s in the USA are in intense competition for a limited pool without much ability to extend their search if they want to start a family.

All the 25 Year Old Women Move to Manhattan: Or, Singlehood, Year by Year

What originally led me on this wild goose chase through the IPUMS USA database was a graph I found from an article originally linked by the absolutely delightfully autistic, previously mentioned The Nuance Pill, who writes the most deeply researched, utterly exhaustingly-exhaustive articles I’ve ever seen.

That article, about messaging strategy and desirability in different cities, had an appendix that had some really great extra tables and charts for the cities it studied, included New York circa 2018 or so.

So I graphed the actual number of unmarried people, year by year and found that the graph looked pretty similar in terms of slope, although the outsize number of women was apparent (since women use dating apps at lower rates than men).

In Praise of Slightly Younger Men, Redux

Here’s the central argument I want to make for NYC women:

When thinking of expanding your dating pool, you are better served by dating younger men rather than older men.

Let’s take a hypothetical 32 year old woman. Let’s say she sets her age filters to 32-37 and will only date men with a college degree in Manhattan, which is a maximum of 23,660 men. (Obviously, not all of these men will be to her standards, but we’re just doing a thought exercise here and the relative proportion will remain accurate.)

Let’s say you’re a 32-year-old woman and you only date college-educated men 32-37 in Manhattan. That gives you a maximum of 23,660 men.

Now let’s play with filters:

• Going two years up to 38-39 year-olds expands the pool by 4,657 men.

• Adding 30-31 year-olds, in contrast expands it by 11,381 men, 2.5x more than going two years up.

• Expanding down 5 years to 27 adds 30,434 potential partners.

• Going up 5 years with 38-42 year-olds? Only 10,549 more men.

In addition to that, age has an adverse selection effect on how many commitment-minded men are in the singles pool - over time, men who want to commit find partners and remove themselves, leaving an increasingly avoidant pool of men.⁷

Will a smaller portion of younger men be interested? Probably, but it’s unlikely to be 3x fewer, and if they’re interested in dating a woman in her early 30’s, it’s a positive signal he’s more likely looking for someone else who wants to settle down soon. And this is extremely easy to ask someone in initial dating app conversations - NYC is so awash in women that I’ve found men pretty forthcoming with what they’re looking for; there is less incentive to mislead when anyone can adopt an abundance mindset. (I guess that’s one upside to this gender imbalance.)

Men 5 years younger are also far more likely to respond if you message them first on dating apps than men 5 years older.

Gender Imbalances on Apps

There are varying figures on what percentage of dating app users are men. After pulling this data, the majority male figure makes perfect sense: the vast majority of singles are in their 20’s and 30’s. In these age groups, the rate of “actually single” women under paces men at about 5 men to every 3 women. And from that, women are less likely than men to use dating apps at all. That’s how you end up with 70-80% men on dating apps: it’s just an existing gender imbalance that was true without apps, exacerbated by usage rates.

There really just are fewer single women than men for those in their 20’s and 30’s, whether that’s counted by unmarried percentages or those self-reporting as single.

Except in Manhattan. That is the Valhalla of young, single men.

As an inverse of a common saying goes: if you’re a college-educated man and can’t get a date here, you can’t get a date anywhere.

1. A man from a dating app once told me that his New Jersey residence proved more of a difficulty in dating than his ex-wife and child.

2. There was once a man from Long Island, but we like to pretend that didn’t happen.

3. I have seen one of them on Raya, the League, and Hinge, but I guess I’m not their type.

4. I calculated this several ways. It was a mess. The American Community Survey weighted N values exceeded the total population of manhattan like by 5x so I scaled the percentages to match the top line population counts I found on the US Census website. It’s imperfect, the ratio of weighted Ns vs the scaled numbers are a little off but directionally accurate. If anyone has experience with this, let me know! The USA-level weighted N values were logical and fine, it was the NYC area that kept giving me weird results.

5. So if the USA percentage is 50% single in Pew Research Data for a particular age group and 70% unmarried in reality, but Manhattanites are 80% unmarried, I would scale up the 50% single figure in proportion. I have never done some much linear algebra in my life.

6. Senior women should really look into 20-something men for their hot girl summer.

7. Yes, this applies to women as well.