Odds of finding a mate...

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Was chatting with a lovesick friend last night, and we reached the following conclusion. The numbers are rough estimates only. And there are a lot of flaws in the logic/calculation, but just for fun:

Assuming you're a male atheist smoker, fluent in English, Chinese, and French, looking for a female mate who is able to tolerate your smoking, an atheist, and shares at least one language with you.

(5.5 billion people in the world, roughly half of which are females. 2.75billion)

Speakers of English, French, and Chinese combined, excluding overlaps: 79.6million

Say half of them are females: 39.8 million

Age within +/- 2.5 years of you, depending on your age, this might shortlist the number to about 5 million.

Of those, I suppose, 50k are atheists.

If you smoke, then maybe reduces number to 20k

(I realise that there are already a lot of mathetical/catergorical fallacies here, but bear with me, this is fun)

So in the whole world, there might be about 20k in 5.5billion people who meet the baseline requirements for a intimate relationship. (1:275000 against)

And assuming you meet 1 new person per day (that's a high number already),
assuming you still have 60 more years to live, you'll meet around 2.2k new people before you die. (I know I know... bear with me please...

Anyway, I give up, my maths fails me here... does anyone want to continue my calculations for me?

Either way I think I might go buy a lottery ticket.

Someimes the odds seem improbable, but the whole idea with odds is that there is a possiblity. There was a possibility that we would become autistic, there was a possibility that you would be male, there is a possiblity that you will die in a car accident tommorrow. All of these possibilities but only one thing happens one way or the other.

You're just forgeting one factor. You put yourself into situations of meeting someone like you described because that's the type of person you are. If you're looking for English, French, or Chinese speaking peoples, I highly doubt you would go looking in Germany or Russia.

Well, I am fluent in Chinese, English and French (among other languages), am not atheist but was brought up in an atheist family (so I love 'em), and can tolerate smokers as I live in NYC, so that makes your logic rather flawed, as you met someone like that already.
According to MY calculations, however;
6 billion people on the planet
50% are male
25% are male and Asian
15% are male, Asian, and Christian
about 1% are also vegan
about 0.001% are into underground metal
about 0.0001% are teens....
Makes you go Hmmmmm......

1:600,000. Not bad for someone with an Autism spectrum disorder. My odds are probably similar the best I can figure. I can't think of the popuation in NYC and the surrounding area off the top of my head, so just divide that by 600,000 and you will have the number of matches in your area.

Very good. Well, I guess being an atheist affect your chances drastically.

A few ways to improve them though:
1. Believe in God (as if you can choose)
2. Quit smoking (one day...)
3. Learn Spanish (but Catholicism is popular in South America?)
4. Turn bisexual (same as 1)

Anyway, I accept my that chances are miniscule, but that's fine with me I guess. If someone comes along, then great, if not, just as great. It's just that there's no point "checking out" potential partners that you come across, because it is highly unlikely and thence not really worth the effort and stress. I did have a girl that I like that I spent a lot of valuable time being obssessed about, but then now I realise the futility of it and I sort of feel free (as in "freedom"). (She's pretty in a simple sort of way, and apparently very intelligent, oh well... Not worth losing sleep over I guess)

I did neglect the fact that people of similar cultural background/interests tend to congregate in the same areas though, so that does skew my calculations somewhat.

Wow! We have 6 billion people already??

I can understand sexuality affecting the chances of a relationship (obviously!), but I don't think that smoking and religion would have as much of an effect as you are making them out to have.

Oh and going majorly off-topic here, I'd just like to say that I like to think of Tali as being like Jubilee from the X-Men

Interesting numbers though I think they should be more optomistic.

Seriously, the best way to dash your hopes of finding a mate is to obsess about it. The more time you find comfort being you, doing what you like to do, where you like to do it, the more likely you are to attract somebody who appreciates that quality in you.

I never found any women when looking but when i had my life together, they always found me. That was true when I was seventeen and it is just as true at 56.

Jerry Newport

I bet the odds get a lot higher when two like people start looking for each other instead of just one looking for the other. Try looking at it that way.

The odds of me meeting an AS girl in person are low, but if I did and she is available along with some other criteria, I think the odds of hitting it off and going out are fairly promising.

..... they are about 842% in favor of this statistical analysis being worthless

on a serious note, the chances seem rather sour... especially when there are compounding factors

Hang on, where'd you get this figure? I thought the US population was greater than that (something like 200 million?) and alone that would be predominantly English speakers. In any case, Australia is roughly 20 million, New Zealand is somewhere around 4-5 million, Britain would be 40-50 million. So already we have a figure of 64-75 million. Plus add Canada and other countries such as the Netherlands, where although not the native language, English is spoken fluently by almost everyone.



What country are we talking about here? In Australia, religions (at least those who follow it seriously) are a minority.

I don't like these math, they are so descouraging. Thats why friends of me and mine will build a - hopefully - very sophisticated dating service for people within the autistic spectrum. You can go on and calculate how long it will take if someone like your dream person is in this database, but if there is only one of them that fits, you will get to know it when it happens.

At the moment, this thing will be set up in Germany. So if anyone is interessted, you can help conecputaly or programingly on a English language user interface.
Or do some more math like this..

Who needs math? I only need to go with the realities of my daily interactions - or lack thereof - with guys, to know my odds. The only males who bother to talk to me in "real life", other than a couple of close friends, are random leering, revolting, middle-aged creeps. Great.

Well, a guaranteed way of increasing your odds of finding a mate is to look for high concentrations of the kind of people who closely match you. For example, people with AS are, as I remember, about 1 in 200 or something, but seek out places where you know there'll be aspies (like here, for example), and you'll find them.

EDIT- People->you
Second EDIT- Added EDIT notices

Last edited by Morlock on 01 Jul 2005, 2:31 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Ahhh, Morlock - there's just one problem with that. True, it's quite possible that I could meet a guy here at WP who's similar to me in interests, physical characteristics, personality, and the like. Unfortunately, this forum doesn't constitute "real life" face-to-face interaction. The odds that I'd be able to actually meet and hang out with the aforementioned hypothetical eligible WP guy *in person* are slim to none. *Sigh* Back to square one.

I dunno, how does a 75 mile distance sound to you?