Looking for love in all the wrong places?
Enter your dating preferences and find out which cities have the highest percentage of people who match them. The results are based on over 15 million individual records from the U.S. Census. You can start with your current city to see how the local single population measures up. Or let fate decide. Your responses never leave your computer and are not monitored.
Of course, we all are looking for things in potential mate that go beyond the sort of demographic information that the Census collections. There’s no field for religion, for example, much less for sense of humor or affinity for dogs.
Since the Census Bureau’s annual survey does not ask about sexual preferences, this interactive groups all single people together. Given that the quiz primarily deals with the percent of the single population that matches your specifications, not the raw number, the premise is equally relevant for those seeking same-sex and opposite-sex partners. (This assumes that the gay and straight populations have roughly the same distribution of income and education.)
Like all surveys, things can get wonky when you’re looking for a very specific and uncommon combination of traits. Then again, if you are certain that your perfect mate is a divorced 18-21 year old with a professional degree, your problems dating probably extend beyond statistical aberrations in Census data.
Methodology
The raw data comes from the American Community Survey, the Census Bureau’s annual survey of 1 percent of the population, via the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series. To gather a sufficient sample for a granular analysis of the data, this project combines and averages the surveys from 2009-2013.
Source
Steven Ruggles, J. Trent Alexander, Katie Genadek, Ronald Goeken, Matthew B. Schroeder, and Matthew Sobek. Integrated Public Use Microdata Series: Version 5.0 [Machine-readable database]. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2010.