Rich or poor, famous or not, singles are often looking to meet “The One.” But how best to go about it?
If you know people who know people (especially interesting and attractive ones), you might just stumble upon love. It also helps to be gorgeous and know accomplished and interesting people, even if they are not so gorgeous. Take the first lady of France.
In the mid-1980s, Eric Clapton fell in love with an Italian model-singer-centerfold named Carla whom he’d met through his girlfriend’s friend. After a few romantic dinners in New York, Clapton took Carla to a Rolling Stones concert and Carla promptly fell for his friend, Mick Jagger. Today, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy is the wife of the president of France, the result of a whirlwind romance that began when she was seated beside President Sarkozy at a dinner party hosted by a mutual friend. Lesson: even for rock stars and glamorous beauties, new romantic relationships can be built on relationships that already exist.
Career building can also lead to love. The odds an adult who is in a relationship met his or her partner at work are 1 in 5.56, making the office the most popular breeding ground for romance. Tied for second place as fruitful hunting grounds are school (1 in 7.14) and (like the infamous Carla) through friends (1 in 7.14).
A random, cinematic meet-cute is by no means impossible, of course, and neither is the old standby, meeting in a bar, though that one seems to be on the decline; 1 in 10 non-single adults forty to fifty-eight met his or her partner at a bar or club, compared to only 1 in 25 non-single adults eighteen to twenty-seven. Restaurants and cafés are most likely to have spurred relationships among adults twenty-eight to thirty-nine, but even then the odds are just 1 in 50.
The Internet Age hasn’t yet been able to eliminate the need to learn to hone your pick-up lines, but it’s working on it. An adult nowadays is as likely to have met his or her partner through an Internet dating service (1 in 33.33) as in their own neighborhood. Just make sure that online cutie is actually available.
The odds a married adult thinks about leaving his or her spouse every day are the same 1 in 33.33. And some of those folks are already trolling the waters.
Originally published on Book of Odds
