If you’re looking around for someone to stand under the mistletoe or ring in the new year with you, it turns out you’re in a city that’s absolutely pretty OK when it comes to that sort of thing.
In a ranking based on three dimensions, Milwaukee wound up 98th on WalletHub’s list of 182 Best and Worst Cities for Singles. While that puts us squarely in the middle of the pack, there’s a significant silver lining for those flying solo: You’re a 60-minute drive from the second-best city in the country.
While Seattle secured the top spot, Madison wound up number two and is the absolute best city when it comes to dating opportunities — one of the three dimensions used to calculate the overall score. Milwaukee is 87th for that metric, 79th for fun and recreation, and 119th for economics.
| Rank | City | Total | Economics | Fun & Recreation | Dating Opportunities |
| 1 | Seattle | 64.7 | 167 | 7 | 2 |
| 2 | Madison, Wisc. | 62.6 | 80 | 29 | 1 |
| 3 | Denver | 62.0 | 138 | 19 | 3 |
| 4 | San Francisco | 61.5 | 176 | 1 | 9 |
| 5 | Portland | 60.3 | 149 | 13 | 10 |
| 6 | Minneapolis | 59.2 | 122 | 33 | 5 |
| 34 | Chicago | 55.3 | 177 | 8 | 63 |
| 98 | Milwaukee | 50.2 | 119 | 79 | 87 |
Brew City’s fun-and-recreation ranking seems a little suspect considering it’s based on — among other things — restaurants, coffee shops and nightlife options (bars and clubs) per capita, as well as the presence of music festivals. Since those are some of Milwaukee’s strengths, single folks can feel pretty good about their odds of pairing up.
You can take a look at the full results here, dig into how they came up with the scores and find thoughts from experts that absolutely drip with romance, including my favorite from Mike Botwin, a professor in the department of psychology at California State University, Fresno:
“The strongest predictor of who you will marry is a variable called propinquity,” Botwin noted. “This is essentially a fancy word for geographical location. The odds are that the person you eventually marry will live within 65 miles of where you are living. Research with my colleagues suggests that we prefer individuals who have the same interests and values that we have. This is called ‘assortative mating.’ Colloquially, this is scientific jargon for the old piece of wisdom in mating, ‘birds of a feather flock together.’”
While there’s certainly some cold calculation to this approach, many of the experts involved offered solid advice we’ve heard a time or two before — get out of the house, do stuff you enjoy and be authentic.
Best of luck with your assortative mating.
