Monday, October 18, 2010

The Romance Drake Equation

So I'm interested in the romantic aspect of life. This presents some difficulty to me, since I'm bad at meeting new people. There's also a demographic problem, which I can summarize in a formula similar to the Drake Equation*.

We take the current population of persons within a reasonable traveling distance,  let's say that's two million people. Then we divide that by the percentage of those persons that I would be compatible with. First, we have to eliminate all the dudes, so that's 50%, and we're down to 1 million. Then we have to eliminate all the ladies that aren't interested in dudes, that's another 10%, 900.000 left.

They'd have to be a High School graduate, minimum, but I'll use the statistic for "Attended College", which is 52.5%, according to the Wikipedia, leaving 472.500.

I'd like it if they were within 5 years of my age, which is about 27% of the population, 127.575 left.

Apparently 45% of people in my demographic are already married, so that's 57408. Then there's all the people that are in a relationship, but haven't married. That's a tougher number, so let's just say it's 50%, 28.704 left.

Religion is a tricky subject, since I don't mind if someone is mildly religious, but it would obviously have to be compatible with my Atheism, so I'll use the statistic for non-religious, which is about 15%, 4.305 left.

That's a pretty small number when you compare it to our initial number of two million persons, especially when you consider that I've essentially made no consideration for personality. How many of those 4305 could put up with my nonsense? I obviously can't assign it a number, but it's probably not encouraging.

Anyway, I guess what I'm saying is that I could use some help, so if anyone knows anyone that they think would work out, I'd appreciate the connection.

*I am aware that this approach is symptomatic of why I don't have any romance in my life right now, no need to point out the irony.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You could totally find someone at a convention. Anime, sci-fi, science whatever. I'm pretty sure your numbers are way off too. You're taking majority percentages off of minority groups. I don't think that works.

Blomberg

Carsonist said...

Taking majority percentages off of minority groups? What?