We had begun to suspect my friend Elsa was dating a “player” because he didn’t seem to have a lot of time to see her in spite of his very 9-to-5 job, and when he made plans with her, he was constantly juggling them around, cutting them short, and taking an awful lot of phone calls. This past weekend, to her horror, she discovered that he wasn’t merely a player—the schmuck is married (and still, we think, a player, too). This led to a brunch with much sisterhood-ly talk and bolstering of egos and “Where have all the good men gone?” talk and that kind of thing.

A little bit of sleuthing tells me that we’re all set to go right here in Manhattan! A company called Meet Market Adventures issued a press release listing the cities with the most single people in the US aged 24-55.

Right here in New York City, we have 1.9 million single people to play with. Yay! But wait: we have some things we have to factor into (or out of) that figure:

• Slightly more than half those single people are ladies, since the population as a whole is 51% female, so that cuts our 1.9 million to roughly 931,000
• 55-year-olds are a bit out of our league, as are 24-tear-olds; between us, our age range in which we date is normally 28-45;
• The study doesn’t separate out gay singles, or, for our purposes, the men who aren’t datable (the “players,” the ones who like to indulge in drinking games and then throw up, the marginally-employed or unemployed, etc).

Nevertheless, in a city of eight million people, that’s still a lot of potential dating material right under our noses. Now we just have to find ‘em! Looking at the table, it looks as if a weekend trip to Washinton, DC, is in order to cheer Elsa up!

But then on the other hand, a chart at CNN purports to list “the cities with the highest percentage of singles,” and in their list of 25 cities, New York doesn’t appear anywhere on it! Bloomington, IN wins, with 58.2% of their people being single!

(Yes, we could take the PATH train to visit all the single men of New Brunswick, New Jersey, but we’re New York snobs, and that’s pretty much off the table.)

The CNN table says only that its source is “Census, OnBoard projections,” but otherwise has absolutely no information on the page to explain how it was tabulated, or anything giving any sort of clue. For all I know, the writer is from Bloomington, IN.

I like the other table better, since it bodes well for my friends and me!

Are you surprised to discover how many singles there are in your area?