Single, Looking to Mingle? Where to Find Valentine’s Day Love in 2016
- Density of single residents of a given sexual orientation, cash for dates, a high number of date spots and an area’s walkability all help determine the best places to find love.
- Overall, Boston is the best city to find love in 2016.
Nobody wants to be alone on Valentine’s Day. But if you do find yourself alone this weekend, take heart: The problem might not lie with you; it could be where you live. Because let’s face it – some metro areas are just better than others at helping us find exactly what our hearts are seeking.
Finding the best places to move to and live for singles seeking love depends a lot on what those singles are looking for in a partner. Metros that are great for single men seeking single women, for example, may be terrible for men seeking men. We crunched the numbers and found the best places for singles seeking love, overall and for women seeking men, women seeking women, men seeking women and men seeking men.
There’s a number of important factors to consider when measuring a city’s success at fostering love connections. We looked at:
- Density of singles in an area, by sex and sexual orientation
- Density of date spots in an area
- Disposable income available for dates in an area
- An area’s walkability
When looking for love, one needs to ensure the odds are good they’ll be able to find the kind of person they’re looking for. Men seeking women, for example, will want to find a city with a high share of single, straight ladies. And once you’ve mustered up the courage to ask that cutie across the room out (and assuming they said yes…), you’ll need to find a place to go. So the number of date spots in the area is also very important. But dinner and a movie are not free, sadly, so you’ll need some disposable income. On this measure, places with relatively high incomes and relatively low rents (a combination that typically leads to at least some date money left in your pocket at the end of the month, especially assuming most singles split the rent with at least one roommate) will do well. And once the movie is over and you’ve eaten the last bite of dessert, there’s nothing more romantic than an intimate stroll around the neighborhood. Here, you’ll want a place that’s walkable, and a good proxy for measuring an area’s walkability is determining the share of local residents that own a vehicle, but walk to work.
After factoring in all of these requirements, we determined the best places to find love. The best metro overall for finding love is Boston, thanks to very high scores on three of four indexes, and a middle-of-the-road score for men seeking men (figure 1). Riverside, Calif., was the worst overall area to find love (which isnt’t to say there still aren’t plenty of lovable, loving people there!).
For men seeking men, San Francisco is by far the best place to find love, thanks largely to an above-average number of single men seeking other men. The best place for women seeking women is on the opposite side of the country, in Boston: High disposable incomes and a relatively high number of single women seeking women makes Beantown hard to beat for this crowd. For women seeking men, San Francisco is best again because of a strong showing across all our metrics. For men seeking women, New York tops the list on the strength of its large proportion of single women seeking men and a large number of potential date spots.
Heed our advice and your odds of finding true love will likely get better. And if you do follow our guidance and still find yourself alone next Valentine’s Day, well, then yeah – it may just be you.
Methodology
The four Valentine’s sub-indexes (women seeking men, women seeking women, men seeking women and men seeking men) are based on four variables:
- Disposable Income. This is calculated by taking the monthly income of a single person[1] in a given area, minus half the area’s Zillow Rent Index (assuming most single people likely live with roommates/family).
- Share of single population of a given sexual orientation[2]
- Number of date spots per 10,000 residents[3]
- Share of population that owns a vehicle, and walks to work (walkability)[4]
We then take the z score of each of the variables, scale it so there are no numbers zero or less, and are bounded above by 10. We then take a weighted geometric mean where all variables get a weight of 1, except for of the share of single population measure which gets a weight of two.
In order to create the headline, overall index, we take a weighted geometric mean of the four sub-indexes, with weights assigned based on the number of singles of a given sexual orientation in a given area. All indexes are then scaled to be between 0 and 10.
[1] Zillow analysis of data from the U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2014, made available by the University of Minnesota, IPUMS-USA.
[2] Zillow analysis of data from the U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2014, made available by the University of Minnesota, IPUMS-USA.
[3] U.S. Census Bureau County Business Pattern 2014
[4] 2014 American Community Survey