Blogtrek

Dear Abby advice

This morning I saw a case of a 33-year-old reader who wrote to Dear Abby about the difficulty she was having in finding a mate. She lived in a small town and she had already considered all the eligible men in her town. There was a singles club, but that was 30 miles away in the city. She had tried the Internet but she got men in their 50s where she had stated that she did not want anyone over 37. Dear Abby said she should go to the city and hunt for her man there.

I agree with her. To me a small town means one of population 10,000 or so. Therefore the best she can do here is a person who is one in 10,000. In my web page Logarithms Keep Dr. Brown in Perspective, I describe such a person as an L4, where the 4 is the number of zeroes after the 1. If it were me, I would find an L4 unacceptable as a partner, since one can easily find an L6, a person who is one in a million, as I show in that web page.

However, to find an L6, you need to be in a P6 place - a place with a population of 1,000,000, with six zeroes after the one. This means at least a moderate-sized city. So yes, I would say she should go to the city to find her partner. A singles club is not the best place, since people there are random. If there are 100 people there, the best she can hope for is an L2. Instead she should go after men who share common interests with her. She could go to a birding club if she enjoys birding, for instance. The most important common interest by far is religion, so the best place for her to find her mate in the city is a church. She needs to choose a church in the city which corresponds most to her beliefs, not necessarily that of her family or the one she has been going to all of her life.

There is one problem with this advice that needs to be mentioned. If she goes about getting a partner in this manner, she will be using a lot more gasoline. Many experts feel that petroleum will run out soon, around 2010. Alternatives are being developed, but still one should try to minimize the amount of gasoline one uses. The Dear Abby reader could take care of this problem by moving to the city. Also why did she get men in their 50s when she went to the Internet? She is 33 years old so she is a member of Generation X and born in a time when births were de-emphasized; a scarce generation. 50-year-olds are in the Baby Boom generation, which are numerous. Further, these men want women who are younger than them, perhaps because they may want to start a family. These two things outweigh the scarcity of older men due to men dying earlier than women.

I wish her luck in finding a partner.