Lies, D@mN3d Lies, and...

Disclaimer: this blag post is based on this essay.

Why I Will Never Have a Girlfriend

Reading this first will make this blag post make much, much more sense.

So inspired by the essay posted by one Tristan Miller, I have decided to do my own statistical analysis which addresses my perpetually single status. Unlike his essay, however, this post will be slightly less empirical with a few more anecdotal assumptions thrown in. The primary difference will be related to Miller's analysis of age groups which I found to be rather questionable. Thus, I will endeavor to make some more baseline assumptions concerning age groups.

Membership of the LDS Church (as of December 31st 2008): 13,508,509
Unlike Miller's essay, I will start off with a somewhat smaller demographic. Since I am Latter-day Saint myself, and therefore have a high standard of morals and virtue as well as a desire to be married no other place than an LDS temple, this is a proper way in which to start.

...who are active: 10,266,467
According to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, the activity rates of church members is around 76%. I have certain doubts that this number is quite this high (since these were self-identified) , but in this scenario it is a conservative estimate, so I will go with it.

...who are female: 5,133,233
Here I made the basic assumption that half of Latter-day Saints are female. There have been certain reports which have shown that it's more like 52-55%, but this would be a very specific assumption to make for such a broad problem as this. Thus I used a standard 50-50 ratio.

...who live in developed nations: 2,566,616
Like Tristan Miller, I have no plans of living in India or Outer Kreplakistan, so limiting potential mates to residents of North America, Canada, English Speaking Europe, and Australia. It is estimated that approximately 46% of LDS church members live in the US and Canada. I will also lump in with this the idea that any woman who I would want to have a romantic relationship with would also have to speak fluent English. Along these lines I'm assuming that about half of LDS women are English speakers who live in developed nations.

...who are (as of 2009) 18 to 25 years old: 384,993
In his essay, Miller ends up with about 10% of the populous which had not already been eliminated being with the proper bounds of age. I think that this is somewhere in the neighborhood, however I'd be will to bet that the distribution of ages of women listed are somewhat more right-skewed than he supposed, giving closer to 12-15% of women in the proper range. I have thus chosen a more conservative value of 15% of women who would be in the appropriate age range. It is also helpful to note that I am the exact same age now as Miller was when he composed this essay, which makes the transition quite simple.

...who are "beautiful": 61,098
As Miller stated in his essay, it is not necessary to define beauty in any anecdotal sense, save saying that whatever necessary traits would be normally distributed among the population. Seeing as the traits which I would find to be "beautiful" are somewhat more common among the population of LDS women than would be those of most men, I will say that a woman possessing such traits would need to fall above one standard deviation above average. This gives a value of approximately 15.87% of the populous which hasn't already been eliminated.

...and intelligent: 1393
Seeing as my intelligence is somewhere between 3 and 6 standard deviations above average, I would suppose that, in order to have any measure of happiness with a particular woman, she would need to also be at least 2 standard deviations above average in terms of intelligence. This gives a value of 2.28% of the population.

...and not already married: 418
Citing the same survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, approximately 70% of Latter-day Saints are married. These numbers might not be entirely homogenous between genders, but in all honesty, from what I've seen of Mormons, it seems about right.

...who are also interested in me: 66
For this calculation, I assumed that I was about 1 standard deviation below average in traits which LDS women find attractive. This is probably somewhat of a conservative assumption on my part considering that I'm a non-RM, Enginerd with mommy issues. In all reality this is probably somewhere between 1 and 2 standard deviations, but I'm giving myself the benefit of the doubt. As already mentioned 1 standard deviation gives a value of 15.87%.

Since it will general be quite apparent which people are LDS, English-speaking women who live in developed countries, I will take my base population pool out of 384,993 women. As was mentioned by Miller in his essay, the one of the best ways to get to know a potential partner is with a pre-planned activity which will generally occur about once a week; generally on weekends. (If you can't tell, I'm trying to avoid using the d-word.) If one of these occasions was to happen every week, it would take 5833 weeks or 112 years before I could be guaranteed to find a woman with whom I'd be mutually compatible. At the current rate of one of these encounters every 6 months, it would be in the neighborhood of 2917 years. So, I suppose that my odds of finding "The One" or perhaps, "One of the Sixty and Six" aren't very good in this life... and to tell you the truth, the millenium isn't looking too sure either. :P