The other day I was listening to NPR and they were talking about the science of meeting someone. Statistically the average person could work out the details of meeting someone with in their range of the human census.

It was an interesting discussion so I thought I’d put some math to it because I love math.

Milwaukee has (as of the last census) 628K people; US census say’s 51.3% of those are Female and 49.7% are male.

Let’s assume you are a Female trying to find an average white male in Milwaukee, with some college education, between the ages of 25 and 30 who makes about $40,000 per year (i.e. a good living).

Here’s the math.

There are 312K men in the city
49.5% of them are white

So your down to 154,000 potentials
16% of the population is between 25 and 35 years old

At this point you are still doing well but you need to now date 24,430 men (at this rate you would have a date every Friday, Saturday, Sunday for 156 years)

Now population states that people who make between $35K and $49K annually make up 18% of the population
So now bank statement trash digging is your new profession – you still have 4,307 people you can possibly date every day for the next 12 years (7 days a week every week).

Now lets assume all the men are reasonably honest and won’t cheat on their wives and that you don’t want any man who’s been married before or has kids from a previous relationship.
34.5% of these men have never been married (in the age range of 20 to 30).

So as a prowling husband hunter you would be down to 1486 potential men – if you spent 2 hours with each man it would take you 123 day’s to meet them all (this is the ultimate Bachelorette show)

Say you want someone who’s not religious (no affiliation 16%) Christians make up 33% so you may want to think that one out.

Okay now you’ve got 237 potential mates in Milwaukee the city if you want to do this in 1 year you’ll have 4.5 dates per week.

So this is the majority population. In other words the Average white guy.

If you wanted someone of a different age, race, or income your chances of finding love goes down even more.

It would be very hard if you lived in Milwaukee and wanted to date a Asian man, 20-25 who made $75K per year and had a college education, you would only find 17 men in the city with that statistic.

If you were to apply this logic to the world with some slightly simplified groupings here’s what that would look like. 6 Billion people in the world. 49% Female – ah a nice even 3 Billion people to date. If you just wanted Spanish speaking people you would cut this quantity of people by 24% of the population or 800 million people. Wow still a staggering amount of people.

Say you wanted to date someone who was also a Buddhist now this narrows the herd down to 6% of the population or 48 Million.

Let’s say you’re in your middle age 30-40 years old and you want to find someone in this range. Now this is a considerably harder statistic to determine and come by so I’ve taken some liberties here. But assume that between 35-59 years old makes up 18% of the worlds population. This means you have 8.8 million people still with in your criteria. So they speak the same language, are the correct sex and age.

If you wanted to date just on your continent then we see a pretty good adjustment to this massive amount of people. Assuming you live in Europe and would like someone from this continent that’s 11% of the worlds population or 995,000 people.

Now some quick on the spot made up statistics. You’ve heard the expression that 1/4 of the world are assholes/jerks, so lets assume that’s true. You can cut this population down to 240K people. If you want to figure that you have common interest with about 5% of the other people = 12,000 people.

Say you are only commonly attracted to 20% of these people that’s 2,400 people. That is still encouraging but staggering. Imagine 6 billion people and you may/may not be compatible with is reduced to 2,400 people that’s a 0.00004% of the worlds population.

Apply this to major cities like London this means you have a chance of love of 22 people out of 61 million.

Best of luck out there.