Single men really do outnumber single women here

Live in this city long enough (or even talk to ladies from here), and you’ll hear this urban legend before long: “single women outnumber single men by a lot.”

It’s not true. Though it was half true for a few years in the aughts (but never by a lot).

A cofounder of the Brooklyn Brainery and datahead, Jonathan Soma, spells all this out in a new project that lets you look at the overall counts of single people by age in cities across the country, using U.S. Census data. It is fair to say that the count is pretty close in New York. Closer than most places, where being a single guy is rough (except for in a few spots in the South).

Brooklyn Brainery also runs a paid-subscription email list that will teach you how to do a new thing every month, called Dabbler.