I couldn’t help but notice in Nancy’s Best Cities for Singles post, that my home town, San Diego, ranked number seven from the top (best). That didn’t surprise me much because San Diego is a great place for anyone to live, single or otherwise. This is a tourist town. I’ve lived in others from New England to Florida on the east coast and Chicago in the midwest. In the interest of full disclosure, I came here married in 1986 and acquired my single designation at the end of 1989.

Florida in the 1970s was the pits as a place to raise children. It might have been great for singles then, if all you wanted to do was get wasted and lie on the beach. Perhaps young singles still do that here on the west coast, but it’s getting more difficult. The city is passing an alcohol ban for parks and beaches, and it is difficult to find anyplace to smoke but your own home.

Some other rankings from Forbes about the city included:

Culture: 13
Nightlife: 11
Singles: 19
Job Growth: 17
Cost Of Living Alone: 15
Online Dating: 4

You can read how they determined these aspects, but I was glad to see they had some help from other organizations. Somehow I just don’t think of the staid investment journal when I’m looking for the best in anything human! The city scored highest in the Online Dating category. Well, it’s true the city’s pretty wired (most of us have cable modem service), but I wonder about the criterion for this measure:

Online dating rates are determined by the number of active profiles in each city listed on dating site Yahoo! Personals. Data was provided by Yahoo! Personals.

Yahoo? Who uses Yahoo? Personally, I beta-tested Match.com in its first year! Eventually I had to give it up because the rejection rate was so depressing (both being rejected AND rejecting others!) Is that why I’m still single? I hope not. It isn’t like I never had a chance to change my marital status again. But I learned to appreciate my “singularity”, as I call it. Solitude has many virtues, especially after spending 8+ hours with a bunch of yackety women, as my last job entailed.

Yep! San Diego is a great city for singles!

Georganna Hancock wrote this on November 20th, 2007 and filed it under Single Life |