THE NUMBERS

What Do the Stats Say about Romance in Portland?

Good for fetishists. Bad for 20-something women.

By Ramona DeNies April 22, 2016 Published in the May 2016 issue of Portland Monthly

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Image: Shutterstock

By one recent calculation, this is the third-best American city for college-educated 20-something straight men to find a date, with a 100:156 ratio of men to women in that category. While that might paint a sobering picture for young, straight single ladies, conditions are more promising for others. According to a recent Gallup poll, PDX boasts the nation’s second-highest percentage of LGBT-identifying residents (5.4 percent).

But we’re free and easy no matter the orientation: 15.5 percent of Portland’s OkCupid users are in the market for casual sex, and, says one survey, we’re America’s kinkiest city per capita—home to the original “health goths,” the “influential” blog Leatherati, and also the nation’s most active fetish community on website Fetlife.

Cheap romantics will delight in a 2015 Match.com-funded study that names Portland America’s most cost-effective city for a date—$43.53 for dinner and a movie. (Cinema pub, we’re guessing?). But perhaps there’s a dark side to our low-budget, “open to experiences” ways: from 2009 to 2011, Portland millennials (born in 1980 or later) dissolved 3.9 out of every 100 marriages—the nation’s highest rate for the age group.

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