Where are all the good men/women?

Forbes magazine has published its annual ranking of Best Cities for Singles, and I'm sorry to say that Atlanta, so close to my heart, has fallen from No. 1 to 6th place. New York City tops this year's list. Atlanta can take solace in the fact that, despite all the opportunities Forbes says NYC offers, it is full of lonely people sitting in their closet-apartments wondering, "Where are all the good men/women?" (I know, because there was a TV show about it, and everything I see on TV is true.)

Seriously, single people all over the world are wondering the exact same thing - not that we lack magazines and ads and well-meaning parents telling us where to look. Often, their suggestions sound pretty plausible; someone's met their love that way, after all.
"Hmm, maybe I if move to a bigger city, it'll just rain men" or "Perhaps filling out this free personality assessment will, in fact, lead me precisely to my dreamgirl," or even
"Maybe my parents are right, and I should go with them to Vietnam to meet someone who will fall in love with me, because I'm a swaggering Viet Kieu...or something."

Though I love love, the cynic in me is reminded of a quote by Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, the well-read Prussian military officer: "No battle plan survives contact with the enemy." After trying speed-dating and the bar scene and matchmaking, one can be fed up with anecdotal evidence and unsolicited advice. What we need is data, cold, hard aggregation about where people really do find love.

Shut Up and Love is conducting a survey about where folks in loving relationships found their partners. If you are not in a relationship, a healthy relationship that ended well could be useful count, but please don't tell us where you met your psycho ex. We're not interested in finding those. Click Here to take the survey or copy and paste this link: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=1O8bTtOyKIQTAw7EXdeA5g_3d_3d.

We'll need at least several hundred responses to come up with truly useful information, so please please help spread the survey link these first two weeks in August, by email, on Twitter, or inviting people to the Facebook event, to name a few ways. I'll post the results up by the end of the month. Thanks for sharing your experiences! We are smarter together than we are alone!