Over the course of January, I collected more than 10,000 missed connections from New York, LA, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego, and Dallas. I analyzed the language, the people who looked and whom they looked for, the days they posted, the words they used, their ages, and a dozen of other points of comparison. And so, without further ado: the missed connections. [...]
To get a sense of the true likelihood of landing a missed connection in the cities I’ve mentioned, I worked out the number of postings for every 10,000 inhabitants. The news for lonely New Yorkers isn’t especially heartening: New York City sits on the tail end of the rankings, with just over three missed connections per 10,000 inhabitants; Los Angeles comes in dead last. The cities whose residents are most likely to seek out that alluring stranger are Dallas, Phoenix, and San Diego, but even with Dallas’s first-place ranking of some 12 missed connections for every 10,000 people, things are pretty bleak. Still, it could be worse: The Whitlams, an Australian indie-rock band, once pronounced, “She was one in a million, so there’s five more just in New South Wales.” Against that backdrop, your chances of a missed connection are orders of magnitude more promising. [...]
The times and days when people post, depicted in the heat map above, suggest that they do. Throughout the US, the most lovelorn days seem to be Mondays, from early to late evening. There is, nevertheless, a good deal of variation from one city to another: Angelenos hardly post, and the few relative spikes in postings occur almost exclusively toward the start of the week. Houstonites, meanwhile, try their hand at romance on early Tuesday afternoons; Dallas, with the highest concentration of missed connections, has an impressive spread from Monday to Friday, with its inhabitants posting throughout the workday and late into the evening. Those solitary nighttime yearnings strike me as the most genuine and unadorned, bringing to mind the words of Philip Larkin, that eminent English chronicler of death and loneliness, who writes of waking up “in soundless dark” and thinking: “Most things may never happen: this one will, and realisation of it rages out in furnace-fear when we are caught without people or drink.” Who better to reach out to, in those desperate moments, than an idealized stranger representing the sole bulwark against the hereafter? [...]
While women tend to post missed connections less frequently, the posts they write are often longer than those of men. From the scatter plot above, you can see that women’s posts, regardless of whom they’re directed at or what city they’re in, are lengthier. Men looking for men write the briefest messages, with straight men writing slightly more verbose ones; straight women write more still. Women looking for other women seem to write the most. It’s key to note, however, that whereas all men are fairly consistent regardless of their location or sexual orientation, women in different cities can differ by significant amounts, and are much less uniform in the amount they write.
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