Friday, September 27, 2002
British government helping out with the mating game
A story published today by the Guardian reports that men and women having difficulty finding a partner received advice from government statisticians yesterday in a paper that has revealed the biggest concentrations of eligible singles of each sex.
Unmarried women were urged to go beyond London and head for rural areas and market towns in the south Midlands and south-east. By contrast, men were advised to go hunting in inner London, particularly if aged mid-twenties to late forties.
Other good mating grounds for men included outer London boroughs and university towns such as Aberdeen, Brighton, Cambridge, Edinburgh and Oxford.
The calculations came from the office for national statistics in the latest volume of Population Trends. Researchers took data from a computer dating agency about customers' age preferences.
The findings came in a paper by Maire Ni Bhrolchain, of Southampton University, Tom Wilson, of Queensland University, and Wendy Sigle-Rushton of the London School of Economics. They found no evidence of a national shortage of either men or women in Britain.
Younger men, though, might have difficulty because their contemporaries are looking for slightly older men.
