An interesting result. But now via Ezra Klein, a more interesting result — an interactive map of the same data that lets you examine particular age brackets. What it shows is that the age-linked variation is much larger than the geographical variation. Women tend to marry earlier than men, so in younger cohorts men outnumber women everywhere. Here’s the 20-34 bracket:

Single men outnumber single women everywhere in the young bracket. Fun fact: “The switchover from extra men to extra women starts at 35-39 for most big East Coast cities, but doesn’t hit New York until 40-44.” Of course in practice dating is rather socioeconomically bounded, and the number of number of single male high school dropouts in a given metro area has relatively little to do with a college educated professional woman’s dating prospects (though my dad didn’t finish high school and my mom went to Cornell so I’m well aware that there are exceptions), so even this more sophisticated model still leaves some real gaps in one’s understanding.

That seems backwards to me — long before there were personal trainers or wardrobe consultants, people were outsourcing the search for, if not love, then at least marriage. Arranged marriages being, of course, a very common practice historically speaking. And even as we moved into more love-and-romance oriented times, there continued to be a robust explicit infrastructure (often involving school- or church-based dances) to get people to date. Of course the “fix up” by friends is incredibly common. And even a person not interested in doing anything quite as heavy-handed as a fix up is still going to, if he knows two single people of appropriately matched genders and sexual orientations who he thinks might like each other, try to introduce them.

The strange thing isn’t the rise of businesses that cater to our strong need for third party support of romantic activities, the strange thing is the modern day convention of pretending to believe that people in some sense “should” get together through pure serendipity.