Dating odds, calculated.
If dating feels rigged lately, there's a reason. And it's not what the confidence coaches told you.
An economist once used the Drake equation, the one for estimating alien civilisations, to work out his odds of finding a girlfriend in London. He got 26. This runs yours.
Run the numberSet your filters. Watch the pool collapse. Try not to panic at the bottom.
No cities found
min
max
Single & available
Not currently in a relationship
You find her attractive
Physically attractive to you
She'd find you attractive too
This is the filter photos and bio move
~1 in age-appropriate single women
Photo and bio dependent. This is the lever.
Fraction of dates who could genuinely be the right one
The logic holds whatever you enter. The math doesn't care about my numbers.
Pool, step by step
Right age. Single. Attraction plausible on both sides. Candidates, not pre-vetted soulmates.
About women are worth a first date. Good matches will happen along the way. That's not the hard part. The hard part is the black swan. Not a good match. The one. Of everyone worth dating, this is how few could actually be her.
Honest estimate. Compatibility rate is about %, adjust it above if you think it's off. These are the ones who could actually be her, hidden somewhere in that pool of . You just can't see which.
Small local pool
has women worth a first date, and about in the local pool. That's geography, not failure.
The move is to widen the search.
Widen age range ±8 years →
Or look at a nearby larger city. Same filters, proportionally more runway.
You can't tell which one she is from a profile. Believe me, I tried. The only filter that works is first dates.
The search needs ~– first dates, but your local pool only has women. You'd run out of runway before finding the right one.
This is the geography problem. Not you. Widen the search (age range, nearby city) to give yourself enough runway.
At % compatibility, expect ~ dates on average before finding her.
Around 10 to 25 first dates per relationship, and a few relationships before the right one. That's real data, not a study average. Plan around the range, not the midpoint.
at the average pace. I didn't get that from a study. It's roughly the number I ran on my own dating life, and it wasn't a fun thing to look at. Years of the same uncertain first dates, the same dead-end matches, the same wondering what you're doing wrong. Or you fix the profile, actually go looking, and the same search takes months.
Brute force
~2 dates / month
years
Learning + profile
~2 dates / week
months
Profile → more dates, better pool
The photo is the filter she applies before she reads a single word you wrote. Get it right and you go from 2 dates a month to 2 a week. You meet in 3 months what used to take a year.
Experience → fewer dates needed
After enough dates you spot compatibility faster. You stop wasting both people's time on the wrong match. The dates-needed number drops. You can't skip this part, but you move through it quicker by showing up. There's even a name for the stopping point: the secretary problem. Calibrate on the first 37% of your dates, then commit to the first one who clearly beats them all. A decision rule, not a shortcut.
There are probably far more compatible people out there than you think. The problem was never whether she exists. It's meeting enough of them before you give up.
You're just one date away.
The method is on the blog.
Read the frameworkHow to move the number
And most guys are auditioning. The fish photo. The venue picked to impress. The bio playing the provider they think she wants. Stop performing and start filtering. You're interviewing her too, remember. Same pool, suddenly moving faster. The work was never winning her over. It's not getting filtered out before she decides.
She decides in about 0.3 seconds, before your bio or your opener ever load. Find out which of your photos is working and which one is quietly killing you. Not "looking good, king." The real read.
→ The biggest lever on whether you match at all
Matches don't die because of one wrong word. They die in a week of small talk that goes nowhere. Skip it. Go straight to a specific, low-pressure date, with an exit built in so it never feels pushy. Match to date in one message.
→ The biggest lever on turning matches into dates
Your bio has one job, and it's not listing hobbies. It's making the right person swipe right and the wrong ones keep scrolling. One honest, specific line that says who you actually are and what a night out with you looks like.
→ Better matches, more replies
Dating treated as a funnel. The one constraint that actually matters. How to calibrate faster so you stop wasting time on the wrong people. When to commit and when to keep looking. The math is the calculator. The thinking is here.
→ The framework behind the numbers
Two levers.
2 dates a week instead of 2 a month. About four years becomes three to six months.
Same women. You just stopped getting in your own way.
The thinking in full
The framework behind the calculator. The real numbers, the parts that go wrong, and what actually works. No coaches. No alpha. No fake odds.
Go to the blog