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!

Relationship News Roundup

Deadlines and Social Media Not Just for Work.
Neenah Pickett, 43, sets up a Web site for help in her 52-week search to find The One. She's on week 15. She only blogs about once a week (who am I to judge!), because, well, she's been busy going on dates. Featured today on CNN, the highlight of the story is a quote from Janet Page, a self-improvement professor at Emory: "Women who don't smile are perceived as hostile. Women perceive men who don't smile as being unsafe. But of course, your best smilers in the world are sociopaths."


Friendships help you live longer. Really.
The New York Times reported on several studies that correlated survival rates of older people with serious illnesses with the number of friendships the patients had. One study in particular stood out: a six-year study of 736 middle-age Swedish men found that attachment to a single person (read: spouse) didn’t appear to affect the risk of heart attack and fatal coronary heart disease, but having friendships did. Only smoking was as important a risk factor as lack of social support. Does this mean I can keep smoking as long as my friendships are healthy?

The Craigslist Killer is Engaged!
The day after Phillip Markoff, the suspect in one robbery and one murder of victims found through Craigslist, was arrested, his fiance made the media rounds to defend him. "Philip is a beautiful person inside and out and could not hurt a fly!" she wrote in an email to ABC. If a court of law clears him, then great. I hope they get the real bad guy. But if he's really the killer, this fiance's either going to have a wedding behind bars and lose all her vendor deposits or be dealing with a broken engagement AND the fact that she was madly in love with a woman-hating, cold-hearted, two-faced killer. And we all thought our break-ups were brutal.

Teenage girls blame Rihanna
Rumor has it that RiRi is planning a North American "women empowerment" tour in the fall, this on the heels of a widely publicized domestic violence incident with Chris Brown. Guess she didn't get this memo. But you've got to give it to Rihanna, who is beautiful and a good sport, as seen in this video at 5:02:

Romance and the Recession Status Update