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- PALO ALTO,
Calif. (Reuters)
- The world capital of technology and innovation
became the site of a
more social gathering during weekend as hundreds
of women from as far
away as Britain came looking for single
men.
-
- With
California`s Silicon Valley now surpassing Anchorage,
Alaska for the
biggest percentage of unattached men, American Singles
held its
national convention here, promising women they could find not
just any
man, but a stable man with a steady job, and perhaps even an
Internet
millionaire.
-
- What many found instead was more women. Attendance at
the
event was disproportionately female and many women left early or took
to the dance floor with each other.
-
- Some local women cynically
confided to the out-of-towners
that the statistics lied and said that
if there was truly a surplus of
men, most preferred a late night in
front of a computer screen to a romantic
dinner.
-
- ``I met some girls who drove
down from Portland, Oregon,``
said one 37-year-old woman from Oakland,
Calif. ``They looked incredibly
good for having driven for 14 hours
but they were not thrilled when they
got here.``
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- By the end of the evening, the
women from Portland were
nowhere to be found.
-
- Those women who did stick it
out saw the odds improve
slightly as the night went on. Several men on
their way home from work
dropped in on the party, saying they were
willing to try just about anything
to meet someone of the opposite
sex.
-
- ``It`s absolutely true that there`s a shortage of women,``
said Greg Friedland, a 25-year-old software developer at Oracle Corp.
He came to the American Singles event with a group of friends who
confessed
to being desperate.
-
- ``There`s so many men here that
the women don`t have
to do anything. They just sit there looking
pretty and the guys swarm
around,`` said Friedland.
-
- Another young
software engineer employed at Hewlett-Packard
Co said he came to the
convention after striking out in several other
venues including a
flower arranging class.
-
- ``There`s a very poor population of single women in
the area,`` he said. ``And I think the women who are here get hit on so
often that they don`t come out much.``
-
- The area`s lopsided
male-female ratios made national
headlines this year after a local
newspaper analyzed census data and concluded
that Santa Clara County,
Calif. had the largest concentration of unattached
men of any
metropolitan region in the country.
-
- American Singles founder
Richard Gosse seized on the
data, offering women from around the
country their registration fee back
if they did not meet one good
man.
-
- Later
he clarified that he never promised the women
would be able to have
that one good man all to themselves, and that a
couple of women might
end up meeting the same good man.
-
- Gosse, author of books such as
``You Can Hurry Love``
and ``Looking for Love in All the Right
Places,`` does not have the best
track record with his singles
conventions. He scheduled last year`s event
in Anchorage on the first
day of hunting season and got three women attendees
for every
man.
-
- So
where were all the men this year?
-
- Gosse once again picked a bad
weekend. Sunday marked
the start of the Comdex convention in Las
Vegas, the computer industry`s
biggest trade show, where hundreds of
thousands of high-tech types convene
to get a look at new gadgets and
hear luminaries like Microsoft CEO Bill
Gates speak.
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