Go to Midtown on any given night, and you’ll experience quintessential Gainesville — a tidal wave of singles on the prowl.
You might leave wondering: “Is everyone single?”
The answer is, for the most part, yes.
According to a report published Monday by The Atlantic City Lab, Gainesville leads the country’s metro cities with the greatest share of adult singles: a whopping 62.1 percent of the population.
The report defined single as someone who is not married, and singles accounted for 51.2 percent of the U.S. population last year.
Four other college towns top the list, including Ithaca, New York; College Station, Texas; Tallahassee; and Lawrence, Kansas.
UF family, youth and community sciences professor Victor Harris said it may just be a matter of context.
“I highly suspect it’s mostly a phenomenon of filling up the town with single people who are going to school,” Harris said.
Between UF and Santa Fe College, students make up about 53 percent of the Gainesville population, according to last year’s census data.
“Eighty to 90 percent of people will still get married at some point in their lives,” Harris said.
They may just be waiting until after college.
Some students insist Gainesville’s party culture is leading to more hookups and fewer serious relationships.
Britany Holmes, a 22-year-old Santa Fe nursing student who transferred from UF, said she’s abstained from relationships since her freshman year.
“I just realized that I didn’t really have time to maintain any relationships,” Holmes said. “Everyone’s out there looking to hook up, and if you are someone looking for a stable relationship, your choices are slim to none.”
She said social media and technology play a large part in the dissolution of dating culture.
“I’m sitting here and trying to make a future for myself,” she said. “I don’t want some guy who’s going to drag me to Midtown every night.”
Amy Clark, a 20-year-old UF finance junior, sees both sides of the spectrum often.
She is getting married in December to her high school boyfriend, Jordan Clear, but the majority of her friends have never dated.
“I think that people who are in relationships tend to be in serious ones, and people who aren’t tend to like it that way,” Clark said. “It just kind of depends if you value that person and that relationship over what singleness has to offer.”
[A version of this story ran on page 1 on 9/18/2014 under the headline "Gainesville leads nation in singles"]
