Dating · City markets
Light Trading Terminal
Your dating market isn't bad. It's illiquid.
Singles supply, the sex balance, rent, and the price of a date vary wildly by metro. I priced ten cities like a trading desk and most of them are thin, not broken.
The finding
On a liquidity-vs-affordability board, DC is the only city that is both deep and affordable. The tech metros (SF, Austin, Seattle, Denver) are cheap but thin and male-skewed, and Miami is thin and expensive at once.
The breakdown
- 1Liquidity here means two things a market needs: depth (lots of never-married people) and balance (close to 50/50). A city can be cheap and still be a bad market if the book is thin or lopsided. Census ACS 2024.
- 2The tech cities are the trap. Austin runs 118 single men per 100 single women, Seattle 123, Denver 119. Rent is low and a date is $80 to $95, but for straight men the supply just isn't there. Cheap, thin, illiquid.
- 3New York and LA are the opposite: deep, near-balanced markets where everyone competes on price. NYC is 103 men per 100 women but rent is $3,503 and a date for two runs $150. Liquid and brutal are not the same axis.
- 4Miami is the one to feel bad about. Lowest income on the board at $80.6k, rent near $2,700, and a thin singles pool. Expensive and shallow at once. That's the only real bear market here.
How it's built
- 1Pull four real metro figures: never-married share and the never-married sex ratio (Census ACS 2024 1-year, table B12001), median household income (B19013), typical rent (Zillow ZORI, May 2026), and the price of a mid-range dinner for two (Numbeo, Jun 2026).
- 2Build a LIQUIDITY index (0-100, constructed): 55% from singles depth (never-married share) and 45% from balance (how close the sex ratio is to 100, so 50/50 scores highest). Both min-max scaled across the 10 cities, then banded to 8-96.
- 3Build an AFFORDABILITY index (0-100, constructed): take annual dating overhead = 12 months of rent + 26 dates a year at the listed date cost, divide by median income to get a burden, then invert and scale it.
- 4Split each axis at its median to place every city in a quadrant: BULL (liquid + affordable), VOLATILE (liquid + pricey), THIN (illiquid + affordable), BEAR (illiquid + pricey).
- 5Liquidity and affordability are composite scores I built, not measured quantities. The four underlying numbers are real and sourced; the two indices are a model.
Sources
Caveats
- —Liquidity and affordability are constructed indices, not measured facts. Different weights move the quadrants. The four inputs underneath them are real and sourced.
- —Sex ratio is metro-wide never-married, so it misses the famous within-city tilt: Manhattan skews female even though the NYC metro is near 50/50, and it does not split by orientation or age.
- —Never-married excludes the divorced and widowed who are back on the market, and counts everyone 15 and up, so it overstates the teen end of the pool a bit in every city equally.
- —Date cost is a standardized dinner for two from Numbeo, not a real average first-date receipt, and rent is the metro typical, not the young-singles slice.
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