I know I have mentioned it before, but I am a big fan of “This American Life.”

But sometimes the stories can bring things up that are, well, a little sad. After last week’s episode, a guy I went to college with tweeted, “this week’s This American Life is pretty depressing.”

The episode is titled “Somewhere Out There” and can be found on their site. Specifically he was talking about the first and last stories.

The first involved one of the correspondents talking about a time when he was at Harvard and along with some classmates calculated their odds of getting girlfriends.

They used something called the Drake Equation, in which you take characteristics of subsets of the population and by applying their percentage in that population you end up with a small group that has all of those qualities. In this case they started with the population of Boston, kept just the females, those within a certain age range, those with a certain level of education and of course those who were single.

The result was a depressingly small number that did not make them feel very good about their prospects.

So of course I did some research on my local population to see how things shake out. In the name of not being too restrictive, I started with my entire county. Fairfax County, Va., has a total population of about 1 million people. Of that, there are about 34,000 females between the ages of 25-29.

That number drops even more quickly by applying just two basic characteristics–the need for them to be single and be a college graduate. According to census statistics, about 46 percent of females in that age range are single. That drops eligible number to 15,460.

I live in an area with a high level of education, with about 62 percent of females in that age range having college degrees. That cuts the pool to 9,696.

The only other obvious requirement from the census data I found was the ability to speak English (since that’s what I speak). But the data shows a negligible percentage of residents who don’t speak English well.

I couldn’t find anything on percentage of females in that age range who are not crazy, or those who like Taco Bell. But I’m guessing that second group will certainly cut down the 9,696 significantly.

You might be saying, nearly 10,000 people is a pretttty big pool. However, that is before you factor in anything like physical appearance, personality and of course the narrowing equation from their end as well. If I had to estimate, I think that brings the original 34,000 down to about 7. Hard to say.