www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2003/10/20/state2135EDT0153.DTL
And if youre really playing the game, go to Orange County or Silicon Valley - two areas with cities where, in an unusual twist, single men outnumber single women. Nationwide, there are millions more women than men who have never married, or have divorced or been widowed, the Census Bureau reports. That held for most of California, where there were 61 million single women and 56 million single men, according to Census 2000. But Californias ratio of 92 single men to every 100 single women was closer to parity than the national average of 86 single men for every 100 single women. And California had half of the nations top 10 places with more than 100,000 people where single men outnumbered single women, according to the census. Topping Californias list was Sunnyvale, where the census reported 113 men for every 100 women. But in the suburb noted for male-heavy technology firms, dating can fall victim to a culture where working into the night may be favored over a night on the make. Rik Wehbring, 33, rode the dot-com roller coaster as a hardware engineer and suggested simple numbers partly explained the imbalance - one startup company he helped found had 50 employees and only one woman. There was a sort of a married mind-set, so even though there were single people, they wouldnt would say Lets meet at a bar, said Wehbring, who after retiring from Silicon Valley moved to livelier San Francisco. Ive almost given up in Sunnyvale, and I cant get anyone to even come down and visit me here anymore, said Jim Oddson, 28, a telephone line repairman who one night took out-of-town friends to three local bars but found not a single woman - single or otherwise. The relative dearth of Silicon Valley single women has been the subject of everything from academic papers at nearby Stanford University to bachelors plaintive wails. The other four California cities were immigrant magnets - Santa Ana, Salinas, Oxnard and Costa Mesa - which naturally attract male laborers, many of them single, foreign-born Hispanics. Cynthia Centeno, 22, lives in the Orange County suburb of Santa Ana and said she has no problem meeting single men. The dating prospects were far less attractive, she said, in nearby Irvine or Newport Beach. Two other places among the national top-10 were around Las Vegas, including the unincorporated area of Paradise, which might seem more like purgatory for men on the prowl. With 118 single men for every 100 single women, it had the greatest gap in the United States. That closer-to-even ratio was reflected in many Western states, most of which had a closer gender balance than the national average, according to census data. Back in Silicon Valley, some suggest the women were out there - but the men were still learning how to find them. Courtney Johnson of the San Francisco-based social networking company Emode, which launched an online dating service in the spring, recently gave a public talk on meeting your match. Theyre saying, I moved here because I know theres all these geeky guys who are waiting for the right person, but they cant find anybody, Johnson said. Associated Press Writers Chelsea Carter in Orange County and May Wong in Silicon Valley contributed to this report.
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