A Look at the Best and Worst US Cities for Single Women

"Where is my John Wayne
Where is my prairie son
Where is my happy ending
Where have all the cowboys gone?"

- Paula Cole

Apparently there's a reason Sex and the City was filmed in New York and not Kansas. And it's not just because there was a shortage of Jimmy Choo shoe stores in Wichita. No, the reason New York made such a perfect setting for a show about attractive, successful women who have trouble finding eligible bachelors is because well, there are none. Eligible bachelors in New York, that is. Or at least not very many.

According to book, "Who's Your City?" by Richard Florida and The Singles Map, which was first published in the National Geographic in February 2007, there are 165,000 more single women in New York than there are single men. In fact, New York comes in at the top of a the long list of cities in the US with dismal dating odds for single women. The other cities include Boston, Washington DC, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Miami, Chicago, Detroit, and St. Louis. That's nearly all of the major cities in the Northeast and Midwest!

And this pandemic (or rather, mandemic), isn't limited to the United States, either. Lena Edlund, a researcher at Columbia University, published a study entitled "Sex and the City" that proved that "women outnumber men" in every urban center across the industrialized world. Apparently, the Carrie Bradshaws' and Bridget Jones' of the world aren't just crying into their cocktails in New York or London but in Stockholm and Rio de Janeiro, as well.

In 2006, Forbes magazine conducted a survey that found that 23 percent of recent grads consider "the number of single people" in a particular city to be the most important factor in deciding where to relocate after college, above "great career prospects" or even "wild nightlife". This begs the question: If finding a mate ranks high on the priority list for both genders, then why is the gender ratio of singles in cities so disproportional?

Edlun suggests a possible explanation. In her "Sex and the City" study, she theorizes that educated men gravitate towards cities in search of better-paying jobs, while their non-educated male counterparts stay behind in rural areas. Both educated and non-educated women, on the other hand, gravitate to cities for the better paying jobs as well as the better-paying marriage prospects. Thus, cities have a surplus of both educated and non-educated bachelorettes all competing for the same, small pool of talented, desirable bachelors.

So what's a single ubranista to do? Should all the sexy singles in the city swap their apartments in Greenwich for farms in Green Acres? Well, that's one solution. There's certainly no shortage of single men in Alaska, Colorado or Utah.

But there are actually a few cities in the US where women outnumber men. Based on data from The Singles Map, most of them are on the West coast (like San Diego, Portland, Oregon and Seattle) but a few of them are in Texas (Austin, Dallas and Houston). Surprisingly, the U.S.'s second largest city, Los Angeles, ranks first on the list of cities with a surplus of single men. The greater Los Angeles area actually has 40,000 more single men than single women.

Why the West Coast seems to be the favored stomping grounds for bachelors has yet to be studied. Richard Florida suggested in "Who's your City?" that there might still be a 'Gold-rush' mentality associated with the West. Young, adventurous, risk-taking men are drawn to the the West coast to seek their fame or fortune, whereas the trend with young women is to remain a bit closer to home.

For whatever reason, if you find yourself dateless, lonely and wondering "where have all the cowboys gone?" then perhaps you should head West, sister. Head West.