[Grishnakh]

It's well-known that there's very few single women in the Bay Area, whereas DC is the opposite, with a surplus of single women.

NYC also has a large surplus of single women, and Seattle has a surplus of single men.

Basically, the east coast cities have female surpluses, and the tech-heavy west coast cities have male surpluses.

[cloudjacker]

The overlooked thing about this is that these gender surpluses would work for you even better in person. Despite online seemingly covering a larger spectrum of people you wouldn't otherwise meet, in person you can create scenarios with multiple people without competition.

[Grishnakh]

The problem here is that you have to actually have some kind of venue for meeting people in person. Frequently, people turn to online dating precisely because they've exhausted all their usual social circles for prospective partners.

I'll use myself as an example: I'm a software engineer (big surprise on this site!), so I don't have any female coworkers who are eligible, I'm not a college student any more, I'm not religious so I don't go to church, I'm not a drinker so hanging out in bars isn't really fun for me, and I don't have any friends left who have single female friends to introduce me to. So that leaves me with things like 1) hobby/social groups on Meetup.com, 2) hanging out in coffee shops, 3) going to bars even though I don't drink and don't like the atmosphere, and 4) online dating. FWIW, I've been doing #1 (I've tried #2 but it has such a terrible success rate in actually meeting anyone I gave up; you'd have to spend a LOT of time to meet just a few people, unless you're in your 20s and in a real hot-spot for this kind of thing, like on a college campus), and not experienced any success there at all: I go to hiking meetup, but it seems most of the women who attend these in this area (and there's a lot, sometimes a 3-1 ratio F:M!) are retirement-age. Sorry, I'm not into dating women old enough to be my mother.

Online dating exposes you to people you would never meet in real life; that's why people do it. There's just no way around it. You can talk all you want about how it's better to meet people in person, but our society simply does not have many venues for this any more. In the old days, people met through friends, family, and church. These days, people like us are non-religious, we've moved away from our hometowns and move periodically for work so we don't have many friends to put us in contact with possible partners and family lives too far away. Online dating also lets you filter people out easier: I can look through someone's profile in less than 60 seconds and determine she's not someone I'd be interested in dating for various reasons (religious, extreme or conservative political opinions, etc.), things which aren't immediately obvious if you just walk up to someone in a bar and start chatting, and which may take a long time to find out through normal conversation.

[cloudjacker]

You talked exclusively about a gender deficit, I mentioned gender surplus.

You also mentioned the pros of online dating, everyone is aware although it sounds like you've had to explain this to other people in your age range and older, you neglected the cons. Females get a gender surplus of men on online dating, if you want females you should pursue situations with a gender surplus of females, and this distinctly excludes online dating.

[Grishnakh]

>if you want females you should pursue situations with a gender surplus of females, and this distinctly excludes online dating.

Yes, I realize that, however the venues for this are very limited in my experience; I already listed out everything I could think of.

Usually, when this discussion comes up, people will recommend things like "find groups that do things you like, and you'll meet women you like there!" Sorry, but I'm not likely to meet any desirable and single women at a Linux or programming group. And I do attend some outdoors groups, but IME there the women are generally much older than me (and I'm not young either). I'm not really sure what the single female 30-45 crowd does in the DC area, but it's not hiking. From my limited dating experience in this area, their general free-time activity appears to be hanging out with their female friends and complaining that they can't find a husband while their biological clock is running out so they're going to start on IVF from a donor.

[Grishnakh]

I see I got an upvote here, so just in case anyone's interested in a funny anecdote about the IVF comment, I met a 43yo woman on Tinder a few months ago in the DC area. We talked on the phone before meeting in person, and one of the first things she told me after we got started chatting was how she had already tried one round of IVF...

Dating at this age really sucks.