Single in my 30s, and some dating maths.

Nathan @ 21st Century Relationships has a piece (originally from 2 years ago) about the questions/accusations/comments he gets as a single person over the age of 30. I also am single and over the age of 30, and while I probably don't socialise enough to get these questions to the same degree, I am aware of the social assumptions and beliefs that lie behind them.

Here's the list of questions:

1. There must be something wrong with you if you're not coupled by now.
   
2. What about children? Certainly you want or have children, right?
3. Are you gay? Maybe even just a little bit?
4. Aren't you terribly lonely? How do you do it?

I want to focus on what #1 means to me, but for the sake of completeness, let's run through my answers to the others.

2/. Don't have children, kind of feel it would be nice one day to have a child. As Nathan points out in his remarks, "there 6 billion plus people on the planet, and hundreds of thousands of unwanted children languishing away in orphanages, group homes, and other places." Nowadays, they reckon the population has passed 7 gigapeople, and there are not enough resources to provide a decent standard of living for all of them. While I would very much like to have genetic offspring, adoption also seems like a rational approach, should I feel the urge to try my hand at fatherhood, and while some people say that there's a thing about protecting your own genes, I just don't see how I could love one child less than another based on whose sperm fertilised the egg, y'know? But for me, that's an endeavour to be undertaken as a team, not a solo effort - and preferably when my financial circumstances are rather better.

3/. Well, as it happens, I am a little bit gay - or rather, bisexual. But my preferences tend to be for women much more than men, so it's not a big whoop. Also: gay folks (male and female) get MARRIED these days. There's long-term pair-bonding between them, so being gay and being single is hardly a strong correlation. (Of course, they don't call it marriage legally here, they call it civil partnerships - I'm in favour of scrapping marriage as a legal instrument and going for civil partnerships across the board - marriage can be left to the churches.) It's not beyond the realms of possibility, if I fell in love with a guy and we liked each other enough and the sex was good and all, that I wouldn't go that route myself (but it might be deemed highly improbable).

4/. Yeah, I get lonely. I feel self-sufficient emotionally in my life, but equally, it feels like I'm missing something - not a part of me, not something essential, but that one piece of the story that makes everything make perfect sense, if you see what I mean. I feel like I'm designed to be pair-bonded, and when I'm not, although everything is right, it's somehow not quite. That is to say, I don't need someone. But I need (the right) someone. And that's how I do it (i.e. cope). I don't need someone to feel complete in my life, even though there's this pull that says I do. As Nathan says, the question assumes that, "people want to be coupled at all times, and can barely handle it when they are not." And that really doesn't reflect what goes on in my heart.

Okay, so... wrongness. Some things that definitely have been wrong with me for a good part of my teens and twenties: Suffering from depression. Cripplingly shy (which yes, I do see as being an illness in my case, though not for everyone). Some things that aren't wrong, but some people think indicate wrongness (or are a form of wrongness): Living with parents (until almost 27th birthday). Introverted (which is not the same as being shy). Sadist. But really, the big thing is that my field of choice is somewhat narrower than most. That's not something that's "wrong" with me, although some of those false wrongnesses key into this fact.

So I sat down and started figuring. First up, as noted above, I am "a little bit gay", but mostly attracted to women. I'd say that as a proportion of people I find attractive/would like to have sex with, it's probably something like a 90:10 or 95:5 split in favour of women. Now, in 2000 the NATSAL survey showed "8.1% of (UK) men have felt a sexual attraction towards the same sex at least once in their lives." The Office of National Statistics in 2010 reported that 2% of the adult UK population self-identified as either lesbian, gay, bisexual or "other" (although only 95% said they were heterosexual - 3% either didn't answer or said they did not know - and it's worth noting that some groups dispute the figure on various grounds) Given an even distribution of men I find attractive across the population, the chance that a given man would be gay or bi, and also attractive to me, is between 0.25% and 0.81% (and that's assuming that all the people who didn't tick "heterosexual" are gay/bi in some form or another). That's between 1 in 400 and 1 in 124. Let's call that a negligible quantity for the time being, and focus instead on my dating women.

Now, according to local government statistics, there are roughly 25,000 women between the ages of 25 and 44 living in my local region (give or take a few because my local region doesn't really match exactly the boundaries of their survey areas). I set my dating field age range as about 24 to 42, so we can take that 25,000 figure as a fair guess. Not all of them will be within reasonable travelling distance of where I live, but let's keep that figure for now.

The biggest limitation on my dating field has to be the fact that she must be kinky, or at least, open to exploring kink, as the submissive partner. In fact, I pretty much need my partner to be submissive most of the time (although still regarded and treated as an equal, with an equal say in shaping the relationship). Orlando C. at Kink Research Overviews has collated some evidence on the prevalence of BDSM in the wider community, concluding that:

• about half the population, regardless of gender, seems to incorporate some kind of mild pain play (e.g. biting) into their sex lives
• roughly 15%-35% of the population (or one in three to seven people) has some recurring fantasy or erotic impulse about BDSM
• Somewhere in the neighborhood of 10%-15% of the population has at some point acted on these desires in a way that is more extreme than biting or, probably, spanking.
• between 1.5% and 3% of the population (or one in about thirty to sixty people) acts on these fantasies with some degree of frequency.

Now, looking at the figures on the link, the tendency to submit/bottom is split somewhere between 50:50 and 65:35 in favour of women bottoming. Let's go with the latter figure, to improve my chances somewhat. Let's also look at people who have thought about or fantasised about, BDSM, as being those who may not be kinky now, but have the potential to be with the right partner. so, that's 65% of 35% (again, giving me the best chance possible, here). That comes to roughly 23% of the population of women might be compatible on a BDSM level with Yours Truly. My suspicion is that there will be an age-related dimension as well there, but I wouldn't have a clue how to correct for it.

Next, my biggest deal-breaker is tobacco smoke. The Cancer Research Fund in 2009 reported that roughly 20% of women in the UK smoke, which leaves 80% who don't. In the south east region, the figure is slightly better: 18% smokers meaning 82% non-smokers. The probability of a woman in the south east being a (potentially) kinky non-smoker is therefore roughly 19%.

Next, there's political views. It's obviously very hard to judge what proportion of the population holds a particular mindset about politics, but going from the 2010 election results, and saying that people who voted for the Tories, UKIP or the BNP are not going to be compatible with me, it turns out that in the south east, 49.9% voted Tory, 4.1% voted UKIP and a disturbingly high 0.7% voted BNP. That comes to a total of 54.7% whom I would not be happy dating or being in a relationship with. Or, potentially, 45.3% whom I would date. The proportion of women in the south east who are left or centre politically, kinky, non-smokers is now roughly 8.6%

According to the most recent available census information (2001), roughly 40% of people were single, divorced or widowed in the areas I'm looking at (i.e. "available to date" or "already dating but not officially tied to a partner"). So, the best estimate now of the proportion of women who live in my area who are single, left/centre politically, kinky, non-smokers is now 3.4%

So the best guess is that around 1 in every 29 women I meet (or see on a dating website) might get past these deal-breakers. That's before we get to "physically attractive", "good/compatible personality", "shared interests" and all the other stuff that most people seem to use to decide whether they want to date someone. So it's not that I have anything wrong with me, it is just that my field is maybe 10-15% of what other peoples would be (I'm allowing for other people's dealbreakers there, and assuming others are also looking for single people to date).

Now, remember that 25,000 figure I mentioned before? The good news from my perspective is that 3.4% of 25,000 is still 850 so there might be well over 500 women out there who would be good potential partners for me and within a reasonable radius of where I live. Out of whom, I need to find someone with compatible interests, a good personality, and I find attractive - and she thinks I have the same. The big catch is that 1 in 29 sounds good until you remember that I'm an introvert and it's questionable whether I've spent any time at all talking to 30 people in the past 5 years (extended family excepted), let alone 30 women between the ages of 24 and 42! I'm not really sure where I would go to do so, either. That said, it brings home quite clearly why it is that talking to people is pretty much going to be essential for me to take any value at all from the PUA advice, dating advice and so on that's around. (Of course, I have been sending out messages on dating sites - over 300 in the past 3 years, in fact).

So, what's wrong with me? Nothing, it's just there aren't as many people out there for me to choose from.