Mapping the way through the drought

Stories about the man shortage in Sydney have been cropping up in the media for a number of years. As a single woman with many female friends in the same situation, I followed the stories wondering if a religious vocation was a good alternative to living alone and keeping an unreasonable number of cats. 

Then in 2008 Bernard Salt’s Man Drought was published. Hurrah, I thought, finally some insight! Instead I found it contained helpful information like ‘try hanging out at Auburn Bunnings, or better still, Auburn Home Mega Mall.’ But instead of panicking as I ran my eye over the statistics Salt presented, I felt optimistic. All the articles in the media seemed to be missing the point. Ok, there are less single men than women out there but there are still about 352,000 bachelors in Sydney alone.

This figure played on my mind for some time. These single men must be doing something when they’re not working. Surely they shopped, ate, played sport and socialised like the rest of the community. So where were they? My friends and I never seemed to meet any single guys when we were out.

Then I realised the underlying problem. My friends and I generally socialised in the same places, with the same groups of people. We’d already met all the regulars and nothing had eventuated. Surely if we shifted our social patterns, we’d be more likely to meet new men. We just had to work out which locations gave us the best odds.

And so my ManMap mission began. I’ve been spending my weekends hopping from bar to pub to park to festival to market to gallery on the hunt for locations with high percentages of single men. My goal is to create a handy little guidebook to Sydney for single women looking for single men. I hope that by recording my adventures on this blog, single women will feel more positive about their situation. After all, there’s 352,000 single guys out there. Most of us are looking for just one.