Dating Pool
by submission
Image text: The full analysis is of course much more complicated, but I can't stay to talk about it because I have a date.
This submission is from Aaron Hill. Aaron lives in the finger lakes region of NY, where he works as a web developer in higher ed. He has a blag (http://blog.amhill.net) and is on the twitter (@aaronmhill).
A "Dating pool" is a colloquial term referring to the set of people that are "single and looking" to date other people and pair off.
In this comic, Cueball and Megan are having a discussion over her fears of diminishing available partners to date, since, at the time of this comic, the median marriage age is 26. Her fears seem rooted in the notion that she is limiting her dating pool to people roughly around her age.
As Cueball explains, if you abide by the "Half your age plus seven" rule, your dating pool widens as you become older, so the number of potential partners reaches its maximum around middle age. He alleges to have compiled this information through analaysis of Census Bureau figures.
Megan's criticism of Cueball is that someone who spends an awful lot of time making graphs may be less likely to have a date, which is somewhat dismissed by the image text.
April 27th, 2012
Okay, I went to the Census Bureau website and found the data. The Census only shows the populations by age group (20-24, 24-29, etc.) so I had to extrapolate from within those to find populations for each exact age. So, while the specific populations I present below aren’t exact, my conclusions should be.
First let me state categorically that the United States Government does not collect data on sexual preference, and assumes everyone is either male or female, no “other” categories. That said, for the purposes of this study, everyone who is in the opposite category from you is a potential mate.
The census divides people by marital status into Never married, Now married, Widowed, and Divorced categories (for both males and females). (Now married is further divided into Married-spouse present, Married-spouse absent-separated, and Married-spouse absent-other.)
Again, my numbers are approxmiations, but I am not going to say “approximately” hereafter for each number.
Using the “half plus seven” age dating rule, the age range for males with the greatest population is 19-34 (for a 24-year-old woman) for never married men (23,085,292); 36-102 (for a 58-year-old woman) for widowed men (3,035,171), 31-82 (for a 48-year-old woman) for divorced men (10,911,495), and 26-62 (for a 38-year-old woman) for total unmarried men (29,017,187). So, the pool peaks for a woman at age 24 if she only wants men who have never been married, but at 38 if she also includes divorcees and widowers in her dating pool.
For men looking for women, here are the age ranges with the highest available populations: women who have never been married, range 19-34 (for 24-year-old men) (19,415,238); widows, range 36-102 (for 58-year-old men) (11,756,172); divorcees, range 32-86 (for 50-year-old men) (14,261,697); total unmarried women, range 33-90 (for 52-year-old men) (35,766,912).
Comparing these two sets of values is interesting: whether you are looking for a partner who has never been married, is widowed, or is divorced, there is about the same peak in the pool (if you are 24, 58, or 48-50, respectively.) However, if you are looking for any unmarried partner, if you are a woman your peak is when you are age 38, but if you are a man your peak is not until age 52. The reason for this is that there are more divorced women and more widowed women at every age 18 and over, but for people who have never been married, there are more men than women until age 65.
I hope somebody reads and enjoys this.
April 30th, 2012
one small error in my above post: for people who have never been married, there are more men than women until age 60, not until 65.