Sometimes I hear people say they want to move to a bigger city because there would be more people to meet. A town of 80,000 or even 200,000 just isn’t a large enough pool to draw friends from. They want to go somewhere big where they can choose from a wide array of people.
It sounds like a no-brainer. If you have x% chance of meeting your soulmate or your BFF in a town of 100,000, then surely that percentage increases considerably by moving to a city of one million. And even further by moving to a city of 10 million.
It’s true, of course, that the probability of your soulmate’s existing in a group of 10 million people is 100 times greater than that of their existing in a group of 100,000 people. But that says nothing about your chances of meeting that person.
The populations of modern cities are beyond our practical comprehension. Human beings evolved in bands and tribes, and that’s the group size we’re instinctively accustomed to. More than a couple hundred is tough for us to engage with on a personal level.
Take my relatively small city of 80,000. There is no way I will ever know 80,000 people, even if I dedicated my life to it. Suppose I started tomorrow going door-to-door meeting everyone in my town, writing down their names, taking notes on their lives, making every possible mental exertion to know who these people are. By the time I got to the end (how many years would I have to spend?) I would have forgotten the people I started with, and a substantial portion of the population would have turned over with residents’ comings and goings.
So no matter where you go, the percentage of the total population you meet (and actually remember) is going to remain quite small. That’s just a constraint of our psychology. The people you meet are also probably going to be a fairly narrow demographic slice. Your friends and lovers will probably be focused around some particular location, vocation, or leisure interest. They will be your neighbors, your colleagues, or your fellow yoga class attendees. A big city will mean seeing more faces on the street, but I can’t remember the last time I made a friend doing that.
I learned something about this when I first left home for college. I was excited about the social opportunities that would inevitably come with going to a school of 12,000 people, as opposed to my high school of 2,000. Imagine being able to hand-pick your friends out of such a large group!
I spent my freshman year in a dorm complex of about 600 people living in 12 separate four-story stacks. At the end of that year, I had four real friends. Two of them lived in the same stack as me, one floor down, and the other two lived just a couple stacks over. What an incredible coincidence that out of the entire university population, the four people best-suited to be my friends all happened to live within 90 seconds’ walking distance of me.
I realized that the pool from which I was drawing friends was actually just as small as it had been in high school. The people who lived on the other side of campus, or who didn’t know someone I knew, or with whom I didn’t have any classes—they might as well have not existed.
It’s a bit different in adult life, since we have more choice about where we live and how we spend our days, but it’s still true that the major commonality of all our relationships is proximity. We make friends with the people who happen to be there. And the people who are “there,” in any real sense, are not going to come from too wide of an area. Uptowners generally don’t meet many downtowners.
There are definitely some towns so small that your social life would benefit from going someplace bigger. The people I’ve known who complain about their small towns don’t live in towns that small, though.
You can test whether your town is truly small by the Grocery Store Test, which works like this: if you moved to the entirely opposite side of your town, would you still shop at the same grocery store?
I use grocery stores in this test because they are a place where everyone goes, and to which few people have a sentimental attachment. If you moved to the opposite side of town, you might still go to the same bar or shop at the same bookstore, because those are “your places.” Most of us don’t care what exact grocery store we go to, though. In my town, the south side co-op is the same as the north side co-op.
So if you move from one side of town to the other and still shop at the same exact store, that means your town is so small it only has one grocery store (or at least only one store good enough to patronize). More to the point, your town is so small that moving to a different part of it doesn’t mean seeing different people.
There are a handful of semi-familiar faces at my grocery store—people who I recognize because they also are regular shoppers at the store. But if I moved out to the north side of town, it’s entirely possible I would never see these semi-familiar faces again. I wouldn’t be shopping there anymore, and the people shopping at my new store may well be people I’ve never seen before.
A broader way to apply the Grocery Store Test is to consider whether there are many things in your town that can be called “the only one in town.” Even in my smallish city, if you were to ask about yoga classes, golf courses, dance studios, or yacht clubs, the answers would be: more than one, more than one, more than one, more than one.
And once you have more than one group devoted to a certain interest, you begin approaching the limit of how many people an individual can even consider as potential friends. If you were super devoted to meeting other yoga-ers, you might alternate each week between the west side class and the east side class. But if you tried to alternate among three or four classes, or if those two classes happened to have 50 people each instead of 25, would you really have an easier time meeting people?
One thing that does affect your chances of meeting people in a new city is the type of person who lives there. A certain type of person will find it easier to make friends in San Francisco than in Nashville, and vice versa. Finding a place with a relatively high percentage of people with values similar to your own could make you a lot happier. But the overall size of that place is pretty meaningless as a determiner for how happy you’ll be with the people you actually meet there.
You get to choose between a city of 100,000 like-minded people and a city of 1,000,000 like-minded people. As far as relationships go, is one really different from the other?
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