The Dating Pool

I estimate that there are 850,000 unmarried white women aged 32-52 within a 60 or so mile radius of my home. I'm ruling our married women as part of my Don't Be a Douchebag commitment. And I'm ruling out ethnicities other than white because I am physically attracted only to white women, and I want my next relationship to be physical to make up for the virtual sexlessness of the last 15 years of my loveless marriage.

Of the SWFs, I reckon 42,500 are lesbians, leaving 807,500 in the pool. I'm going to want to date someone from the right side of the bell curve (although exceptional hotness may be substituted for smartness up to a point), so the pool of potential partners is reduced to 201,880 women.

Then I have to figure in my subjective preferences. I have a type (Catherine Zeta Jones, Tanya Memme, Nigella Lawson, but a woman doesn't necessarily have to be a curvy brunette to be attractive to me. Hell, I was married to a scrawny blonde woman for 26 years. Based on a very unscientific survey consisiting of my keeping loose track of the times I have thought to myself "I'd tap that" compared to the total number of women who come into my field of vision, I figure that I could be attracted to no more than 20% of women. I'm not saying 80% of women are unattractive, just that they don't do anything for me. This gets me down to 40,376 women whom I would consider dating.

Of these demographically and subjectively qualified potential partners, I reckon that about half of them will have dealbreaking personality or character flaws. They may have voted for McCain/Palin, for one example. Or their kids could be such unbearable shits that I'd have to question their mother's judgment as a human being for letting them get that way. Now I'm down to 20,188 women who might be acceptable to me.

Of these acceptable women, given that they are intelligent and attractive, at least half of them will be in committed relationships and therefore unavailable. That leaves 10,094 ladies.

By far the largest winnower of remaining potential mates will be whether they will want to have anything to do with me. Will I meet their criteria? I'm guessing that at least half, especially on the younger end of my acceptable age range, will not be able to get past the fact that I'm 52 years old. That leaves me with 5,047 ladies. I'm not a bad looking guy, and I won't always have the paunch I'm sporting now, but I figure at least half of the remaining ladies will not be attracted to me in the least for one reason or another. I'm not their type; they like long hair or beards; whatever. They'll take one look at me and say "hell no". So, I'm down to 2,523.5. Half of these ladies just plain won't like my personality after talking to me for two minutes. Now I'm down to 1,261.75 potential mates.

I will encounter only a small fraction of these remaining ladies. They'll be on an on line dating site, or they'll be members of my church, or a mutual acquaintance will introduce us, or I'll pick them up in some singles venue. Most of the potential mates will never even know I exist. I'll probably encounter no more than 50 women in the next six months.

Maybe I should look into those Russian women who are so keen to meet me.