Looking for a Date? This Map Can Give You a Sense of Your Romantic Odds

Marriage might be on a decades-long decline in the U.S., but if you're planning to buck the trends and get hitched, technology can offer a helpful tool.

Call it a mating map.

Produced and released last week by Pew Research, the map below offers an interactive look at the gender balance across the country, identifying places where women might have an easy time finding a man (such as Clarksville, Tennessee, where single men outnumber single ladies nearly two-to-one) and places where the reverse might be true (such as Rocky Mount, North Carolina, where single ladies outnumber single guys).

The map also breaks down the employment status of single people across the nation, though as previous Pew analysis has shown, that's far more important to one gender than the other: finding a man who has a job is important to almost 80 percent of women, while less than half of single men care if a potential mate is employed.

It's worth noting that Pew's analysis is not exhaustive.

"Unfortunately, we were not able to calculate ‘marriage market’ statistics for roughly a third of U.S. metro areas," the think tank notes, citing a "mismatch" in government record systems for the exclusion of many rural areas.

It's quite possible that some unanalyzed areas would have a larger gender imbalance than the analyzed areas, particularly in male-dominated oil boomtowns of North Dakota.

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