I heard about and read this funny paper called “Why I Don’t Have a Girlfriend”
The idea is novel, apply the Drake equation (the equation for estimating the probability of alien life) to create a realistic estimate of romantic possibilities. Although strange, i thinks it’s actually very insightful to apply probability theory to finding a girlfriend,
Essentially, if you estimate the many small factors instead of making one giant guess, you’ll be in the ball park. When estimating the number of alien civilizations, the factors involve the number of planets with stars, the percent of planets with water, the fraction of those that could sustain life, etc. When applied to girlfriends, you can start with the general population, and narrow it down to the number of women, women in the right age range, women who are single, etc.
I decided to make a spread sheet to calculate how many potential girlfriends are out there for me. Feel free to check it out here. You can punch in your own numbers and see what your chances are too.