Pseudo-accurately calculating how many potential partners live near me.

What some of you might not know (even though I randomly blurt it out constantly), is that I have a master’s degree in psychology. Psychology isn’t all that much about learning how to help people cope with their problems. For the most part, you spend your time categorizing people based on statistics. Since I am currently not using my psychology degree in any productive way (other than feeling cool about it), I thought I’d rekindle my love for statistics by calculating how many potential partners live nearby. For some reason, I feel like this is not the greatest idea. What the hell.

I am currently living in Graz, the second largest (but still pretty tiny) city of Austria. Important side note: Austria is not Australia (so, no kangaroos!). If you have no idea what Austria is all about, let me quickly jog your memory: Mozart, Hitler, Schwarzenegger, Red Bull, Conchita Wurst. What a colorful mixture (and also quite the accurate reflection of Austria’s current political situation). Btw, if you think of the Sound of Music let me just tell you that no Austrian ever has seen that movie. Graz has 269.997 inhabitants. In the near zone around Graz, 151.100 people live, making a total of 421.097 people.

About 1/6 of the people living in Graz are students, around half of them not staying here permanently, which means there are 398.597 people left.

51% of the general population are women, so about 195.312 are male.

Let’s estimate that a generous 10% of these men are gay or bisexual (or somewhat open to trying it). 19.531 guys left that I could have a meet-cute with any second now.

An underwhelming 26 of these men are gay-married. In my master study, I also asked my participants if they’re in a relationship. For the sake of this bullshit statistic, let’s just pretend my numbers are representative and subtract the average 53.4% of people in a relationship from this sample. 9.089 dudes remain.

As for the age, I will keep anyone between the ages of 20 to 40 in my sample (=28.23%). This means I still have 2.566 bachelors to get a rose from.

The political landscape in Austria is kinda scary at the moment. 46.2% of Austrians preferred a far right-winged candidate to our current president-elect. You may assume that gay people are more liberal than the general population – but for the sake of this experiment, I will roll with it, meaning that 1.381 of the blokes are no assholes and potentially dateable.

Out of these 1.381 guys I have probably already dated about 10% – just kidding! But I estimate that I wouldn’t enjoy a conversation with about half of the guys. Out of the half remaining, there probably wouldn’t be a great connection with about three-quarters of the guys – again, I’m talking about personal experience here, not ‘hard’ statistics.

The grand total states that I live nearby 173 guys I could potentially fall in love with.

Thank you, psychology, for making this nonsense-calculation possible. I’m gonna go look for a date now. Or 173.

Title photo gratefully stolen from the Ellen Show (pls don’t sue me)

BenLeander