How Many Single Women Are in Manhattan?

Nobody can give you a reliable count of single women in Manhattan, and we do not quote one. The figures you find online come from different surveys, define single in different ways and change from one survey to the next. What the census does show is that women outnumber men across New York City, with 86 men for every 100 women among adults. It also shows that Manhattan is the most densely populated borough. For a man meeting women in person, that means more single women within a short walk than almost anywhere in the country.

Say someone handed you an exact number. It would still leave out what you need to know.

A survey that counts women who have never married includes women in long relationships. One that counts women living alone leaves out single women with roommates, which in Manhattan is a lot of them. And people move in and out of the borough all the time, so any figure starts aging the day it is printed.

More to the point, a total for the whole borough tells you nothing about the woman on the bench in front of you. The only count that matters on a given afternoon is how many women are near you with a free moment.

Two facts hold up.

First, New York leans woman. Wikipedia's page on the city's demographics, citing census data, reports 90 men for every 100 women across the city, and 86 men for every 100 women among adults. That figure covers all five boroughs, not Manhattan alone, and it includes married people, so it is a guide rather than a count of singles. People who search for the Manhattan women to men ratio usually end up at this city-wide number.

Second, Manhattan is small and crowded. It is the smallest of the five boroughs by area and the most densely populated. It is also the same place as New York County, the smallest county by area in the United States, and it has more people per square mile than any other county in the country.

Put those two facts together and you get the thing that actually matters: a lot of women, packed tight, in a place you can cross on foot.

In most American cities, meeting someone means driving to a venue and hoping the right crowd is there. In Manhattan, the next park, cafe and bar are a few blocks apart, and the sidewalks between them are full. a dating coach, who has lived there, singles out Manhattan below about 60th Street as the best part of the city for meeting women. He also notes that it is easy to get women to come into Manhattan and much harder to get them to leave it.

That is your edge. You do not need a perfect ratio when you can walk past more women in an afternoon than a man in a small town sees in a month.

Think in hours rather than places. At lunch on a weekday, the parks near offices fill up. Bryant Park in Midtown is the obvious one. In the late afternoon, Washington Square Park, Union Square and Madison Square Park hold women reading, eating and waiting for friends. a dating coach's point about parks applies to all of them: a woman who came out to sit in a park came out to be around people.

In the early evening, the after-work crowd moves into bars near offices and into neighborhoods such as the West Village. Later, the nightlife shifts downtown, to the Lower East Side, the East Village and the Meatpacking District. On weekends, the same parks and the paths along the rivers carry women with nowhere urgent to be.

You cannot tell who is single by looking. A ring is a clue, but most women in a cafe give you no clue at all. You also do not need to know before you say hello.

Start a short, friendly conversation. If she has a boyfriend, it will usually come up within a minute or two, often on her own initiative. If it does, thank her for the chat and go. Opening with "are you single?" puts her on the spot and makes the whole exchange about a yes or no, which is the fastest way to end it.

The census tilt and the density are already in your favor. What decides your results is how many of those women you actually talk to. Cold Approach runs its Bootcamp in New York and Miami. Each training day is two four-hour blocks in the field, daytime approaches and nightlife mixed to suit you, with a coach beside you on every approach. A Private Bootcamp is 1-on-1 for one, two or three days, and in New York the dates are arranged with you after you book. You leave with a written plan for what to work on next.