Plenty of Fish, which bills itself as “the world's largest online dating site” with 55 million users, claims to have crunched data collected from Southern California singles to come up with various best places for the unmarried to go love hunting.
Break out the gold chains and Binaca, Orange County, our cities land on many of these Top 20 lists.
But the identities of many of those OC cities are quite curious indeed.
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Take, for instance …
7. Laguna Woods
8. Newport Beach
9. Laguna Hills
10. Aliso Viejo
15. Tustin
16. Laguna Beach
19. Huntington Beach
There are certainly a lot of singles, widowed singles, residing within the four square miles of Laguna Woods, the former Leisure World retirement community that someone had the bright idea of incorporating as Orange County's 32nd city in 1999. Desperate loneliness is surely rampant there. Unfortunately for Plenty of Fish, no one living in Laguna Woods uses online dating services because they can't get their great-grandchildren on the phone to come over and show them how to tune in their dial-up AOL with the TV remote.
6. Yorba Linda
20. Orange
Yorba Linda, meanwhile, is the definition of Orange County suburban living … married suburban living. I'll defer to our ripping nightlife staff, but I cannot think of a single nightclub in Yorba Linda. Not with the Foxfire only a freeway exit away. Married Yorba Lindans don't even spend their “date night” in town. Orange makes sense because it's a college town (Chapman University) but the campuses in Irvine (UCI) and Fullerton (CSUF) are larger so where are those towns on this list?
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6. Laguna Woods
8. Laguna Hills
10. San Juan Capistrano
11. Mission Viejo
12. Aliso Viejo
13. Laguna Beach
First off, Palms Desert and Palm Springs are tops? Everyone there who is not retired is gay, not that there's anything wrong with that. They must be like Cam and Mitchell on Modern Family (which visited Palm Springs this past season; the plot thickens!). As for Laguna Woods, I think I have it figured out. That data had to be collected by phone, and when researchers asked the hearing-impaired elderly if they want children, they answered, “Yes, I want my children … to call.” As for the other OC cities in the top 20, don't the majority of households in those places already have buttloads of rug rats? Hell, put that giant playpen known as Rancho Santa Margarita on the list then.
Plenty of Fish also analyzed the data collected from 5 million singles, supposedly, to make these OC-tinged observations (with my thoughts in italics):
- Single guys looking for serious commitments should head to Laguna Beach or Irvine. (And hope to heck the honey you snag can actually afford to live in either.)
- The closer you live to the beach, the more likely single women and men are to find a partner who wants a serious relationship. (Ditto.)
- Single men in Newport Beach and Huntington Beach do not want to travel more than five miles to meet a love interest. (Too much goddamn traffic.)
- Roughly 40 percent of single women in Huntington Beach won't travel more than five miles to meet a single guy. (Not when 85 percent of the single men are already boozing it up on Main Street.)
Email: mc****@oc******.com. Twitter: @MatthewTCoker. Follow OC Weekly on Twitter @ocweekly or on Facebook!
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.