Yesterday a writer for Vox looked at the number of Craigslist Missed Connections — that glorious corner of the Internet where anyone can anonymously deposit their daydreams about the girl on the train who, swear to God, gave you more than one furtive glance yesterday — for each of the country’s nine biggest cities.
He declares that Dallas put up the most posts (12) per 10,000 residents during his sample period (January 2015), leading one to believe that ours is a city replete with lonely hearts. However, I must question his method, since the population figure he credits to Dallas is for only the city proper while the “Dallas” Craigslist draws posts from throughout North Texas. This matters because while the city of Dallas is only the 9th-largest in terms of population in the U.S., the Dallas-Fort Worth metro is the country’s 4th-largest. So his per capita figures are way off.
If you refigure things based on the latest U.S. Census numbers for metro area population, Dallas is only the fourth-most desperately-seeking-Susan city in the country, with 2.3 posts per 10,000 population. It’s San Diego that most needs to screw up the courage to just go ahead and talk to the cute guy reading Dostoevsky in the coffee shop. Phoenix and San Antonio are also ahead (behind?) Dallas in this department.
What’s more interesting is the writer’s heat map of days of the week and times of day when a Missed Connections post is most likely. Monday is the big winner across the board, but Dallas’ pattern stands out:
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.
Props to us for our consistency, I guess.
