Photo by chip pyRemember a few weeks back when we told you that D.C.-based deal-of-the-day giant LivingSocial polled its customers around the country and ranked cities according to vanity, with Washington coming in at No. 8?
Well, The Daily Beast says we have new reasons to be even more pleased with ourselves. The news-ish site looked at data from the U.S. Census Bureau reporting age, marital status and income, mashed it up with a Gallup survey of mental and physical health, and because, you know, it’s the Internet, added in some Google Trends information about the local popularity of various dating sites.
Washington is No. 10 among the “Best Cities to Find a Date in 2012,” the NewsBeast says. How do Tina Brown’s number-crunching experts know this? By their research, 69 percent of men and 74 percent of women here are single, the median salary for the emotionally untethered is just under $52,000, the average movie ticket is $11 and our “well-being score” is 69.9.
So, maybe all that plastic surgery—LivingSocial said D.C. ranks near the top for nose jobs, collagen injections, facelifts and liposuction—is paying off. Or perhaps its unnecessary, though given some recent Newsweek stories, I’m guessing the NewsBeast falls more in line with Washingtonian’s “there’s-a-procedure-for-that” school of thought.
Still, it’s nice to know see that D.C. is among the best U.S. cities in which to find a date. We were beaten out by such banging places like Ann Arbor, Mich.; San Francisco; Madison, Wis.; Seattle; Minneapolis; Austin, Texas; Lincoln, Neb.; Gainesville, Fla.; and Atlanta. Yep, only San Francisco, Atlanta and seven college towns are better places to hook up than our city. Nowhere on the list? New York.
Thank you, NewsBeast, for such insight. One would never have known the District is such a great city for dating. Perhaps one of our leading news organizations should test the dating scene in some kind of laboratory environment.
