6 ms·

The problem with using government statistics (including the American Community Survey, as far as I can tell) is that "single" is roughly equivalent to "anyone w

by e_y_ 5y ago

The problem with using government statistics (including the American Community Survey, as far as I can tell) is that "single" is roughly equivalent to "anyone who is not married", which is very different from "willing to date". That means that people who are in a committed relationship but haven't gotten married yet, or perhaps never want to get married, are considered single. There are also people who are simply not interested in dating or relationships. Consequently, the dating pool is even smaller than the statistics would suggest (assuming we're not counting currently-married people who are in the dating pool due to separation, infidelity, or being in a poly/open relationship).

watwut 5y ago
That is not true for governmental statistics in general.
- e_y_ 5y ago
  Could you be more specific or provide examples of a government census that asks about relationship status beyond legally recognized partnership situations? I'm only familiar with the US and that data seems to be hard to come by. In the EU the European Social Survey seems to have pretty comprehensive questions although it's not from a government agency.
  - watwut 5y ago
    I just put "unmarries partnership" or couples and "cohabitating partners" into Google and there was tons of it. Census itself seems to answer questions like these. I followed quite a lot of sociology lately for fun and they play with these a lot too.
    - e_y_ 5y ago
      Ah, that's reasonable. One issue with with the census questions is that they're mainly focused on defining a "household" and ignore situations like being in a relationship but living separately. But married + cohabitating should give a good first-order approximation of the non-single population overall. Unfortunately, non-scholarly articles about dating pretty much always use the legal definition of "single", probably because deciding who is single in the dating sense is so tricky.

by e_y_ 5y ago

watwut 5y ago

That is not true for governmental statistics in general.

e_y_ 5y ago
Could you be more specific or provide examples of a government census that asks about relationship status beyond legally recognized partnership situations? I'm only familiar with the US and that data seems to be hard to come by. In the EU the European Social Survey seems to have pretty comprehensive questions although it's not from a government agency.
- watwut 5y ago
  I just put "unmarries partnership" or couples and "cohabitating partners" into Google and there was tons of it. Census itself seems to answer questions like these. I followed quite a lot of sociology lately for fun and they play with these a lot too.
  - e_y_ 5y ago
    Ah, that's reasonable. One issue with with the census questions is that they're mainly focused on defining a "household" and ignore situations like being in a relationship but living separately. But married + cohabitating should give a good first-order approximation of the non-single population overall. Unfortunately, non-scholarly articles about dating pretty much always use the legal definition of "single", probably because deciding who is single in the dating sense is so tricky.