Recently, someone posted the following comment:

The problem with all this discussion of dating is that I recently came to the conclusion that an objective outside observer presented with all the evidence would come to the rational conclusion that I'm unlikely to find a girlfriend in say the next 3 years...The objective conclusion is that I'll be single for arbitrarily long no matter what I do.

After discussing this with Tamara in some detail, and reading some of the comments below, I've decided that this is simply incorrect. In hopes of preserving some of the group's insights for posterity, instead of losing them among the ephemera of the comments section, I'll try to assume the role of an objective outside observer, and point out why this "rational conclusion" doesn't hold water:

1(a). Because men are allowed, nay, expected to date women who are younger than they are, a man's pool of romantic prosects increases enormously every year, when a new crop of young women turns eighteen. Many of these eighteen-year-olds end up on our nation's college campuses, thus bringing them into greater proximity with the math department.

1(b). Because women are, with occasional exceptions, only allowed to date men of their own age or older, a woman's pool of romantic prospects only diminishes over time. Faced with this diminishing pool, single women of one's own age group become increasingly desperate, er, motivated to find a life partner. (It's true that the number of single women of one's own age is diminishing over time due to marriages, engagements, and the occasional heroin overdose, but the growing number of single women reaching the age of consent more than compensates for this.)

2. Ceteris paribus, as time passes, one's circle of friends either remains constant or expands. It rarely contracts, except in the traumatic post-college period. As a result, even if one makes no socially constructive efforts whatsoever, one's social network will inevitably become larger and more diverse over a three-year period, which leads to an enhanced universe of prospects.

3. As time passes, single women tend to begin looking for the "husband" type, rather than the "boyfriend" type. Qualities that the readers and authors of this blog possess in abundance, such as intelligence, success in one's chosen field or profession, sense of humor, and loveableness, thus become correspondingly more desirable.

In other words, even if a single male outside of college does absolutely nothing to make himself more desirable to the opposite sex, his odds of finding love become better and better with every passing year. If you're a man, the whole "immovable object" approach to romance makes a lot of sense.

Unfortunately, none of this applies to the heterosexual women in the audience. (Some of you, it seems, are already two babies behind schedule.)