www.nothingisreal.com/girlfriend -> www.nothingisreal.com/girlfriend/
I, for one, refuse to spend my life brooding over my lack of luck with women. While I'll be the first to admit that my chances of ever entering into a meaningful relationship with someone special are practically non-existent, I staunchly refuse to admit that it has anything to do with some inherent problem with me. Instead, I am convinced that the situation can be readily explained in purely scientific terms, using nothing more than demographics and some elementary statistical calculus. Lest anyone suspect that my standards for women are too high, let me allay those fears by enumerating in advance my three criteria for the match. First, the potential girlfriend must be approximately my age -- let's say 21 plus or minus three or four years. Second, the girl must be beautiful (and I use that term all-encompassingly to refer to both inner and outer beauty). Third, she must also be reasonably intelligent -- she doesn't have to be Mensa material, but the ability to carry on a witty, insightful argument would be nice. So there they are -- three simple demands, which I'm sure everyone will agree are anything but unreasonable. That said, I now present my demonstration of why the probability of finding a suitable candidate fulfilling the three above-noted requirements is so small as to be practically impossible -- in other words, why I will never have a girlfriend. I shall endeavour to make this proof as rigorous as the available data permits. And I should note, too, that there will be no statistical trickery involved here;
WP98, Table A-7 We now further restrict the geographical area of interest to so-called "first-world countries". My reasons for doing so are not motivated out of contempt for those who are economically disadvantaged, but rather by simple probability. My chances of meeting a babe from Bhutan or a goddess from Ghana, either in person or on the Internet, are understandably low. In fact, I will most likely spend nearly my entire life living and working in North America, Europe, and Australia, so it is to these types of regions that the numbers have been narrowed. This is where things get a bit tricky, for two reasons: first, the census data is nearly two years old, and second, the "population by age" tables in 11 WP98 are not separated into individual ages but are instead quantized into "15-19" (of whom there are 39 560 000) and "20-44" (population 215 073 000). Women aged 15 to 19 in 1998 will be aged 17 to 21 in 2000; Similarly, of 1998's "20-44" category, there are now 215 073 000 ((|25 - 22| + 1) / (|44 - 20| + 1)) = 34 411 680 females within my chosen age limit. The sum, 66 059 680, represents the total number of females aged 18 to 25 in developed countries in 2000. Unfortunately, roughly 1% of these girls will have died since the census was taken; Of course, beauty is a purely subjective trait whose interpretation may vary from person to person. Luckily it is not necessary for me to define beauty in this essay except to state that for any given beholder, it will probably be normally distributed amongst the population. Let's assume that I will settle for someone a mere one standard deviation above the normal; Accordingly, that portion of the female population must also be considered off-limits. Assuming, as previously mentioned, that personal attractiveness is normally distributed, there is a mere 50% chance that any given female will consider me even marginally attractive. In practice, however, people are unlikely to consider pursuing a relationship with someone whose looks and personality just barely suffice. Let's make the rather conservative assumption, then, that a girl would go out with someone if and only if they were at least one standard deviation above her idea of average. Conclusion It is here, at a pool of 18 726 acceptable females, that we end our statistical analysis. At first glance, a datable population of 18 726 may not seem like such a low number, but consider this: assuming I were to go on a blind date with a new girl about my age every week, I would have to date for 3493 weeks before I found one of the 18 726. As a North American male born in the late 1970s, my life expectancy is probably little more than 70 years, so we can safely say that I will be quite dead before I find the proverbial girl of my dreams. So there you have it, my friends -- finally, a cogent, scientific, non-self-deprecating argument for why I will never have a girlfriend. That said, if you happen to be a girl deluded enough to think that you and I have a chance together, feel free to 14 drop me a line, but I warn you, you face odds of 157 060 to 1. Update (2000-04-01): My sarcastic pleas for some e-mail have finally been answered. Take a look at this 15 letter from a hysterical female reader, which I think perfectly demonstrates the point of this entire essay. Bureau of the Census, Report WP/98, World Population Profile: 1998. Intelligence^1 This paper was written when the author was at Griffith University, Australia. They will consequently return to the dating scene, entering a sequence of blas relationships with mediocre girls for whom they don't really care, until they finally marry one out of fear of spending the rest of their lives alone. I am convinced that this behaviour is the real reason for today's alarmingly high divorce rate. Presumably, the death rate graphs as a bathtub curve, but in absence of any numbers supporting this hypothesis, and for the sake of simplicity, I will conservatively estimate the death rate among this age group to be 1% biennially. Perhaps attractiveness, being a largely subjective trait, does not lend itself to quantification. It is not unreasonable, however, to assume that like most other traits, it has a normal distribution. Indeed, this assumption seems to be backed up by informal observation and judgment -- in any reasonably large group of people, most of them will be average-looking, and a tiny minority either exceedingly beautiful or exceedingly ugly.
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