OP, start a new thread:
“Women Dopers: How Many Potential Marriage Partners Have You Met in Your Life”
This is going to give a better answer than any of the previous 20 posts in this thread. (and could be better if you ask for the age and come up with some kind of extrapolation for a full lifetime).
Thanks for your replies, everyone.
Let me try to re-phrase my original question.
Consider the 42 years of woman’s life, from 18 to 60. Suppose we want to estimate how many single men, who are themselves beween 18 and 60, she is likely to meet during these years?
Suppose that ‘meet’ means they have at least one conversation that could potentially be followed up if she were interested.
Q1. Is there any meaningful way to arrive at an ‘average’ or ‘typical’ value?
Q2. Can we at least arrive at meaningful estimates for the lower and upper boundaries more specific than 1 and 3.5 billion respectively?
Q3. Even if you can’t suggest good answers for (1) or (2), what strikes you as a reasonable guesstimate: 100? 1000? 5000? Or what?
That still isn’t a good way to phrase the question because almost everyone has stricter criteria than just meeting someone of their own sexual preference who is alive and willing to talk to them in any meaningful capacity.
However, if you want to make ether requirements that low, I would guestimate that the number is in the few thousand range for meeting unique people that meet some roug set of demographic requirements over a 40 year span.
Marriage partners don’t work that way in real life though. The true number of potential marriage partners is going to be in the hundreds down to the single digits once you factor in all of the other criteria that most people require and those requirements are reciprocal.
For example, you could meet me and we could have a great time together and you could view me as a potential marriage partner when that isn’t the case. I am not getting married again because I don’t believe in it so I would be a false positive and I am certainly not the only one.
I know. I have deliberately modified the question and deleted the reference to getting married.
I know that too.
I’m 55 years old. In my lifetime, I’ve met 3 men that I would seriously consider marrying.
But I’m rather picky.
One of the big variables here is going to be, to what extent is this woman disposed to have conversations with people she encounters? Or, in English, how chatty is she?
And since that’s a very big variable, it seems to me what you’re measuring here, more than anything else, is her social extroversion or introversion.
Are we requiring that the men be of roughly the same age as the woman, or just that they’re both somewhere in that window at the time they interact?
I think this is going to depend a lot on the job of the woman in question.
The problem isn’t the number, it’s the variability. A woman working in retail or fast food is going to encounter a huge variety of men of the right age range and marital status. The file clerk in accounting will meet the same bozos day after day. The McDonalds counter girl in downtown New York will meet a lot more than the one in Lower Podunk, who will see the same people day after day.
Throw some numbers out. If you live in a town of 50,000 - that’s 25,000 men, say 13,000 in the right age range who probably all at one time or another are single, plus people passing through, plus turnover. Let’s assume your goal is reproduction, and being generous at both ends of your eligible age (15-45), you have 30 years to meet, say, 15,000 guys. That’s 500 a year or around 2 a day. That’s do-able.
From the other direction -If you’re a waitress in a diner in a much bigger town, talk to say 10 different single men a day, 250 days a year, 30 years - 75,000 guys. However, people are creatures of habit. Even in New York, what are the odds that a single workplace would get 10 new single guys coming in every day and sit in your table section (300 new customers every month). Odds are after a few months the majority are repeats.
I was going to say “in a tourist place like Orlando the math is different” but the odds are the majority of visitors to Disneyland and similar attractions are married with kids. Maybe if you were a bar girl in Vegas, you could not only meet a lot of different single guys each month, but it could be very lucrative.