Sex and the City Syndrome: Go West, Young Woman

According to the US Census Bureau, there are 86 unmarried men for every 100 unmarried women. This is not good news for those women looking for love in all the wrong places, namely the major metropolitan areas along the east Coast and in the Midwest.

New York boasts the largest number of unmarried women, which makes the Big Apple the wrong place to find a man to marry. The same trend can be found in nearly all the cities along the Atlantic seaboard, as well as just about every city in the South and the Midwest.

Where the Boys Are

National Geographic has recently plotted out a map of the Untied States with the largest differences of unmarried men and women shown in urban areas. You can almost draw a line right down the middle of the US, from the North Dakota-Minnesota border down to the Texas-Louisiana border, and on each side, you can see a marked difference in where the single people live.

In the western US, there is a consistent trend showing that more single men than women live in the western states, namely in cities like Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and Seattle. The Census Bureau reports that the cities with the largest ratio of single men to single women are Paradise, Nevada (a Vegas suburb), as well as Fort Lauderdale, Florida; Tempe, Arizona; and two cities in California, Sunnyvale and Santa Ana (suburbs of San Francisco and Los Angeles, respectively).

But Would You Marry Them

So if it is true that unmarried men are clustered in western towns, are these men marriage material. National Geographic reports that most of these areas attract a large number of illegal aliens, namely agricultural workers. In the case of Paradise, NV, the majority of the male population is employed in construction as well. If you are looking for doctors or lawyers, well, maybe those towns are really the place to visit the singles bars.

Another consideration is that many "unmarried" men may be elderly gents that have moved to warmer climates, as may be the case in Fort Lauderdale. In fact, the national geographic map shows that many Atlantic coastal communities in Southern Florida has a higher number of unmarried men, as well as a few of the towns that are on the Gulf Coast.

And if you consider unmarried elderly men as tipping the scales, you might want to factor in gay males. San Francisco is known for its large gay population, so it could be that a large number of those single men in the City on the Bay might not be looking to marry...a woman.

And then there is Alaska. Alaska has the highest number of single by far, but then Alaska also has a rape rate that is 2.4 times the national average. So maybe, in the end, it doesn't matter where you live, single girls.