Amanda Hess questions the assumption that cities like Los Angeles and New York are great for dating:
A closer look at the studies shows that they’re often measuring the best cities for single people to stay that way—depending on your perspective, the worst cities for singles. In New York, Kiplinger’s 2012 count notes, over half of the metro area’s 18.7 million households are unmarried ones (the national average is 28 percent), and one in five people fall between the ages of 20 and 34. Of the Los Angeles metro’s 12.7 million people, 54 percent of households aren’t hitched. … Forbes and Kiplinger present volume of daters as a positive, but the research of Sheena Iyengar suggests otherwise.
Back in the ‘90s, Iyengar noticed something odd about her local luxury grocery store. Though the shop was "renowned for its huge selection of produce, packaged foods, and wine," Iyengar "often walked out empty-handed, unable to settle on just one bottle of mustard or olive oil when she had hundreds of options." The experience fueled Iyengar’s research into the psychology of choice. What she discovered were "neurological limits on humans’ ability to process information" that meant "the task of having to choose is often experienced as suffering, not pleasure." Iyengar concluded that "the explosion of choice has made it more difficult overall for people to identify what they want and how to get it."
On a related note, Jon Millward conducted a four-month experiment on OKCupid, using ten dummy accounts. What he found:
The women as a group received over 20 times more messages than the men. The two most attractive women received 83% of all messages. The two most attractive women probably would have received several thousand more if their inboxes hadn’t have reached maximum capacity. It took 2 months, 13 days for the most popular woman’s inbox to fill up. At the current rate it would take the most popular man 2.3 years to fill up his.