As much as I’ve always wanted to be the subject of someone’s missed connection, I doubt I’m suited to it. Aboard public transport, my go-to facial expression is a stern, furrowed brow. “Solving the crisis in the Middle East, no doubt,” my fellow passengers probably sympathize, contemplating the task of fixing the world’s thorniest geopolitical dilemma from aboard the subway and letting me be.

Not that any of this has stopped me from posting missed connections myself. I can’t recall what I wrote, but after some virtual digging I found the subject lines of my posts buried years deep within my inbox:

“Girl in blue/ white floral dress on N train headed uptown at 9pm Monday” - m4w (missed connection)

“Cute brunette girl reading who shared my table at The Bean on Monday” - m4w (missed connection)

That there exists a digital town square where lonely hearts can declare their feelings without fear of public rejection is both lucky and improbable, but the hit rate, by all accounts, is low. I’ve yet to hear any firsthand stories of missed connections that have resulted in anything more than a date or two before the romance petered out. Still, if it seems strange that a quirky section of a website that prides itself on an aggressively dial-up-era design has gained such traction in popular culture — all in spite of the scarce likelihood of finding love — look no further than the motivations of gold miners or oil prospectors. Each successive romantic relationship is a failure until it isn’t, and the lousy odds of forging a real connection don’t have much impact on our inborn optimism.

It may have been my own failures to connect that spurred me to take a closer look at the habits and behaviors of other posters. It also could have been the odd voyeuristic appeal of the whole missed connections section, putting those private and vulnerable declarations of affection into a ruthlessly public, yet anonymous, context. Finally, I suspect it was also rooted in my old psych grad school mentality, making the promise of a large data set, untainted by the specter of observer effects, too tempting to ignore. Who were these people who posted hundreds of messages each day? To see, I gathered the missed connection postings from the nine largest US cities and got to work.

Over the course of January, I collected more than 10,000 missed connections from New York, LA, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego, and Dallas. I analyzed the language, the people who looked and whom they looked for, the days they posted, the words they used, their ages, and a dozen of other points of comparison. And so, without further ado: the missed connections.

New York seems to be a city manufactured for missed opportunities to meet strangers. There is the pervasive reach of the subway, the relatively scarce number of drivers, the never-ending throngs of people. There is, furthermore, New York’s take on big-city loneliness that so many newcomers discover: long days at work, bookended by lengthy commutes that take New Yorkers to the far reaches of the vast metropolis. You won’t be heading to drinks in Brooklyn if you finish work at 6 in Midtown and catch the homeward-bound 1 train to Washington Heights, whether or not you’re savvy enough to change from the express to the local at 96th Street. Indeed, of all the cities New York had the highest number of missed connections. Initially, this seemed to be all about numbers: Of course the largest city in the country would have the most posts.

Los Angeles, however, dispels that notion (mouse over the circles in the map below to see each city’s population and missed connections count). The second largest city in the US, LA sits at the bottom of the tally, with only a few hundred missed connections posted during January. I should note here that if you’re anything like me, your internal sleuth rears up, and you begin to postulate that this is because Angelenos drive everywhere and are never within a 10-foot radius of any prospective strangers.