Lack of unselfish attractive women driving force behind being single

A female friend of mine and I were talking about dating in broad terms and she mused upon the fact that one often sees an 'attractive' girl on the arm of an 'average' looking guy. She says its really rare to see a really good looking guy with an average looking girl. Her reasoning was that women are a lot less picky about a guy's looks. Guy's on the other hand, she claimed, are extremely picky and care more about the girls looks. We may argue as to what the reasons for this are, but one can't argue against this observable trend. Her observations are quite on the spot.

Of course, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and these are subjective terms of description, but one can make a few assumptions, build a simple model and see what the conclusions are. And if I offend anyone along the way...too bad.

Assumptions:

1. Attractive women prefer attractive men and average men equally
2. Assume a global scale of attractiveness, with attractive and average the only two categories
   
3. Random mixing of both sexes
   
4. Complete mixing towards a steady state
5. Maximum likelihood estimates of probabilities at equilibrium
6. Let attractive girls be the driving force behind dating
   

Method and Results:

• Let x be the proportion of attractive girls and y be the proportion of attractive boys
• Upon complete mixing, x/2 attractive girls will be with attractive boys and x/2 with average boys.
  
• y-x/2 attractive boys remain without a partner
• y-x/2 average girls remain without a partner
• If y-x/2 = 0, (i.e. no attractive single boys remain or no single average looking girls remain) x = 2y

Conclusions and discussion:

According to this model, if one wants the entire population to have a partner, then there needs to be twice as many pretty girls as attractive men. It seems that this inherent lack of 'pickiness' in girls is keeping average looking girls from finding a partner. If attractive girls were as selfish as attractive boys, then there wouldn't be any single people left over.

So where do homosexual people fit in to this model? Well, they don't really but one can see where they might be involved. According to this model, the only groups of people not with someone of the opposite sex are average looking girls and good looking men. And you know what they say about gay guys and lesbians. Maybe this model is on one extreme end, but reality is somewhere closer to this model than to a model which includes only dating within your league.