Why You Don't Have A Girlfriend?
And Probably Would Never Have One... Btw It's a joke don't take it too seriously :)
The easiest thing to blame the fact that you don’t have a girlfriend can be Math, if you could attribute some equation with the odds of you having a girlfriend and show that your odds are very slim or zero. And being quite accomplished in not having a girlfriend myself and refusing to admit that it has anything to do with some inherent problem with me, I found a paper which explained purely in scientific terms, using nothing more than demographics and some basic statistics why I might not have a girlfriend. So let us look at why you don’t have a girlfriend. Let us start with some basic assumptions, first, the potential girlfriend must be approximately your age — let’s say 21 plus or minus three or four years. Second, the girl must be beautiful (and I use that term to refer to both inner and outer beauty). Third, she must also be reasonably intelligent — she doesn’t have to be Mensa material, but the ability to carry on a witty, insightful argument would be nice.
The Drake equation is used to estimate the number of highly evolved civilizations that might exist in our galaxy. The equation was developed in 1961 by Dr. Frank Drake at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia.
The equation is generally specified as:
G = R . fp . ne . fl . fi . fc . L
where,
G = The number of civilizations capable of interstellar communication
R = The rate of formation of stars capable of supporting life (stars like our Sun)
ne = The average number of planets similar to Earth per planetary system
fl = The fraction of the Earth‐like planets supporting life of any kind
fi = The fraction of life‐supporting planets where intelligent life develops
fc = The fraction of planets with intelligent life that are capable of interstellar communication (those which have electromagnetic technology like radio or TV)
L = The length of time such communicating civilizations survive
Using this equation Prof Drake estimated that 10,000 communicative civilizations probabilistically exist in the Milky Way alone. Astronomers estimate that there are between 200 and 400 billion stars in the Milky Way. Let’s call it 300 billion. This makes the probability of a star chosen at random supporting life capable of interstellar communication 3.333e‐08 or 0.00000003%. Another way to think about this is that this is the probability of the conditions necessary for us to communicate with an alien civilization being satisfied. These seem like slim odds at best, but the probability is positive and this approach is widely accepted by astronomers.
While extraterrestrial civilizations may be rare, there is something that is seemingly rarer still: A girlfriend for you. What might the approach employed in the estimation of the number of alien civilizations tell us about the number of potential girlfriends for you? A somewhat less scientific question, I admit, but one of substantial importance. The parameters are re‐defined as follows with the values in parentheses:
G = The number of potential girlfriends.
R = The rate of formation of people in India. (not required, since we’ll be calculating the total Indian population)
fw = The fraction of people in India who are women. (0.484)
fl = The fraction of women in India who live in your immediate vicinity. (we’ll be approximating a radius of 20 km and approximating this to be higher than it might be)
fa = The fraction of women in India who are age appropriate. (0.087736)
fu = The fraction of women in India with university education. (0.393)
fb = The fraction of university educated, age appropriate women in India who you find physically attractive. ( 2 standard deviation from the mean or 0.05 or the 95%ile)
fe= The fraction of university educated, age appropriate women in India who you find physically attractive and who you will encounter actually. ( 5% encounter rate for a year)
L = The length of time in years that you have been alive thus making an encounter with a potential girlfriend possible. (21)
N = Population of India (1,450,935,791)
To give you a slim non-zero chance we’ll not be factoring into account how many girls find you attractive.
With this simplification we can re‐specify the Drake equation as:
G = N . fw . fl . fa . fu . fb . fe . L
If we plug in the above values we get
or
G = 260
So, what this means is that there are 260 people in India that satisfy these basic criteria for being your girlfriend. That is 0.00003988341% of women in India and 0.08767009577% of women in your immediate vicinity, which doesn’t seem so bad. On a given night in your immediate vicinity, there is greater than a 1 in a 1,145 chance that you might meet an attractive woman between the ages of 18 and 25 with or pursuing a university degree. Of course this does not take into account the fraction of these women that will find you attractive, the fraction of these women who will be single and, perhaps most importantly, the fraction of these women who you will get along with. Including such factors might greatly reduce the above figure of 260 to double digit figures or maybe even zero.
I’m sorry if this depresses you (I am joking about you not having a girlfriend) but since we realise that the odds of meeting this special someone are so low we found some surefire mathematical strategies on how to find this special someone. We’ll be linking down the YouTube video that discusses these strategies.
Why I will never have a girlfriend by Tristan Miller
Why I don't have a girlfriend by Peter Backus