Top cities for singles

Top cities for singles

Travel Channel / Bullz-Eye Home

Traditionally, the singles scene is the gap between adolescence and marriage. But, today, the median age of marriage for the American male and female has risen substantially. Singles constitute 41% of all adults over the age of 18. The fact is that most Americans can now expect to live half their adult lives unmarried.

Singles are a sundry group. Unmarried singles may be cohabiting with an opposite sex partner, or becoming a single mother by choice. About a third of America’s 90 million unmarried adults live alone. Fourteen percent of singles are above the age of 65. The growing economic clout of singles implies that no city can afford to lose this group.

 The Forbes magazine has listed the best cities for singles to live in. They compiled a list of 40 urban centers that are liked by singles for certain qualities.

Culture: Forbes looked at the number of cultural events in the city. It also listed the number of live theaters, concert venues, sports teams and museums. The number of colleges and universities is also counted.

Online dating: The number of online dating companies and forums were determined by the number of active profiles for each city as listed on the dating site Yahoo! Personals.

Night life - The number of restaurants, bars and nightclubs per city were listed.

Cost of living: For this, Forbes averaged the cost of rent, pizza, beer and price of a movie ticket. Salary based on entry level remuneration was also considered.

Job growth: Forbes estimated the potential job growth over the next five years.

Coolness:  A non quantifiable quality.  A polling company conducted a poll on which city is considered the coolest.

The top winner is San Francisco. It got the first rank for culture and good marks for number of singles, cool nightlife and online dating. New York, the city that never sleeps, came in for the second place thanks to its top score in night life.  Los Angeles, the entertainment hub, came in third with Atlanta, Fourth, and Chicago, fifth.

Rounding off the top ten are Washington D.C., San Diego, Seattle, Dallas- Fort Worth and Philadelphia. Rent for a Philadelphia apartment, especially, is great for singles.

San Francisco- Oakland: 34 % of its citizens are not married. It is a truly magnificent city. If you venture into the Bay area, including Berkeley, Oakland, San Jose and the valley, you may find more singles.

 New York-33% of the 14 million New Yorkers are single and there is a heavy dating scene on in this city. In terms of cool, it cannot get cooler.

Los Angeles: The city boasts of a 35% singles population. Top singles include George Clooney and Cameron Diaz.

Atlanta: Has much to offer, especially a substantially low cost of living. The city boasts of 32% singles.

Chicago:  33% of its 6,453,960 population is single. Cost of living is better than San Francisco and New York. Culturally, this is a happening place, and it is a cool place to live in.

Forbes’s change in methodology led to the dropping of certain cities off the 40 list. Their switch to the census bureau’s ‘Urbanized area definition’ meant that several cities like Charlotte and Greensboro have been dropped from the list as they do not have a large enough central population.



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