and I sat around the table talking about all the freaky things we have in common. We’re both vegan, don’t eat sugar or refined flour, don’t drink, aren’t religious, etc. We knew that the odds of finding someone with so many similarities was rare, but just how rare was it?
Similarity #84: we’re both a bit geeky. We opened up Excel and started looking up the statistics for as many of the quantifiable similarities as we could find. Vegans make up 1.4% of the US Population. A surprising 46% doesn’t drink. We added a few modifiers in, taking out half the population for being below average intelligence, and another 85% or so because, like anyone, we’re not attracted to most people we meet.
If I had guessed before doing the math, I would have thought that there would be at least a hundred thousand girls out there that fit my criteria. I was WAY off.
Depending on just how picky I decide to be, there are only 10-25 girls in the United states that match my criteria. That’s not a lot. Annie’s was a bit more, mainly because she has a wider age range than I do.
Worse, there are a lot of criteria I couldn’t quantify. What percentage of the US can cook? There are also criteria I haven’t even though of yet, as well as dozens of things that individually aren’t worth looking up the stats for. In other words, the number may very well be even lower than I calculated.
To be fair, this is far from an exact science. A lot of the variables interact with each other in ways that I haven’t accounted for. Vegans are probably less likely to smoke, maybe less likely to drink, but more likely to smoke pot. Religious people might not drink as much as atheists. A serious statistician would take these correlations into account, but I’m happy to estimate that they all cancel each other out.
Curious how many people are out there for you to choose from? I asked you last week for your input and I have made an interactive calculator using a lot of your suggestions. I didn’t incorporate all of them, and some of them were too objective, but I was still interested to read all of your responses.
To calculate how many of “The One” are out there for you, visit the Perfect-O-Meter.
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