Amanda Hess questions the assumption that cities like Los Angeles and New York are great for dating:

A closer look at the studies shows that they’re often measuring the best cities for single people to stay that way—depending on your perspective, the worst cities for singles. In New York, Kiplinger’s 2012 count notes, over half of the metro area’s 18.7 million households are unmarried ones (the national average is 28 percent), and one in five people fall between the ages of 20 and 34. Of the Los Angeles metro’s 12.7 million people, 54 percent of households aren’t hitched. ... Forbes and Kiplinger present volume of daters as a positive, but the research of Sheena Iyengar suggests otherwise.