It's true that probabilities are subjective. It's also true that dating market behavior is very sensitive to small changes in the gender balance since behavior is set at the margins (i.e. when people pair off, any dis-balance gets amplified)[1]
That's true at the scale of a city, and it's also true in small cliques. Just like in poker (the analogy I keep coming back to), the table and position you sit at (and who you're playing against) matters much more than your absolute skill at the game. And you might still lose - chance is still a part of it, no matter how hard you try.
"A ratio of three college-educated men to every four college-educated women may not seem dramatically skewed, but Jon Birger insists that, in reality, it is. He uses a musical chairs analogy to explain how a 4:3 ratio can create such a large imbalance. Birger explains that after people start to marry off, that ratio quickly drops to 2:1, then 3:1."
"For his first book, “Date-onomics,” Birger studied this phenomenon in the perfect control setting: college campuses. He found that when there are more women than men on campus, students’ dating behavior is oriented more towards hookup culture and less towards monogamous relationships. (When men are in oversupply, the culture is more monogamous.)"
"Pop culture programs, such as “Sex and the City,” tend to paint New York City as a haven for singles — a place where single women can surely find a match. But if you look at the numbers, this is far from reality, Birger points out. In fact, if you live in the 10001 zip code in Chelsea, Manhattan, 78% percent of 20 year olds are females (according to the 2010 census). Birger advises that college educated women may have better luck in areas where the ratio is reversed, such as Silicon Valley or Denver— dubbed “Menver.”"
https://www.wgbh.org/news/lifestyle/2021/09/24/when-romance-...