Most of us tend to schedule our dates on Friday or Saturday nights, but it turns out that if we're looking for some — ahem — action we should meet up with our potential bed partners on Wednesdays.
The New York Times reports that dating site OKCupid has come up with something it's calling the "sexual availability index" after collecting data from its users. According to the site's co-founder Christian Rudder, this index is "not unlike the Dow, if the stock market were about sex.”
Why should you care about this index? Because it tells you when your odds of ending the night with a naughty snuggle buddy are best:
Rudder started by finding out, based on OkCupid’s mobile service, which customers in New York, Boston and Washington were out on the town on a given night. From these people’s profile data, Rudder then built a composite of four sets of personal characteristics that might correlate with openness toward new (but not necessarily long-lasting) relationships.
Two measures he studied were explicitly concerned with sex: what percentage of singles out on a given evening listed casual sex as a “romantic priority” and what percentage was willing to sleep with someone on a first date. The other two measures were less sex-centric: what percentage described themselves as extroverted and what percentage fancied themselves as adventurous.
When he put all the numbers together, he got a curious result. Weekdays, not weekends, are better for singles on the prowl — and the mix of people out on Wednesday nights are the friskiest. (The least surprising bit of data is that someone’s chances of success increase over the course of an evening.)
Of course there's no good way to check how accurate this data is — unless Rudder were to reach out to every OKCupid user and ask whether or not they had sex on any particular night. But based on an informal survey of bartenders by New York Times writer Nate Silver, you should consider setting aside a few Wednesday nights and trying your luck.
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Rosa Golijan writes about tech here and there. She's obsessed with Twitter and loves to be liked on Facebook.