Those who fall into the former category are primarily engineers, since no other degree commands a high salary fresh out of college.  Doctors and lawyers have high salaries, but they tend to be older, which means that they tend to be married.

Those who fall into the latter category are primarily students who are too busy dating other students to be considered as available dating material.

Everyone else who lives in Palo Alto is married for the most part.  There may be sprinklings of divorced or widowed men in Palo Alto, but even those men tend to move to move to San Francisco.  Those men also tend to be older and have embarrassing reproductive troubles.

The problem with early-stage startups is that they are sponges that soak up men.  Any educated, sharp, capable single man within a 1000-foot radius of an early-stage startup is vulnerable.

It’s great that these smart, single men are working, kid me not.  But they work such long hours for these startups that they disappear into the woodwork, like termites hollowing out structural Douglas fir beams of a house.  You never see them until it is too late, i.e. until the damage has been done and the house has fallen on your single, unmarried head.  By the time they come out for air, the damage has been done, and they are so burnt out that they leave for places like San Francisco and Los Angeles.

A man with that much passion for his work is sexy.  But what good is being sexy if you can’t find him in the first place?  That’s a rhetorical question, but I’m going to answer it anyway.  A single, eligible bachelor who can’t be found is essentially as good as if he were hypothetical.

If he doesn’t already live in San Francisco, he’s planning to move there within the next few months.  He spends every Saturday and Sunday going apartment-hunting in San Francisco.  He doesn’t have time to meet up with you on the Peninsula during the weekends because he’s busy apartment-hunting in the city.

Men are drawn to San Francisco just like they are drawn to fast, shiny cars.  Both San Francisco and shiny cars offer the hope and potential of an exciting, fast-paced life filled with parties and pretty ladies. While a man’s social life in Palo Alto ends at 11pm when downtown closes, in San Francisco it ends at 2am.  To a man who knows his mathematics (and most in the San Francisco Bay Area do), that means 50% more social life, and therefore 50% more beer and ladies.  That’s a huge amount for a man.

Palo Alto may have a cute downtown with gelato, bakeries, coffee shops, and bookstores, but no man wants to be caught dead in a gelato shop with his man posse at 10pm on a Friday night, mocha-coconut gelato in hand, recycled napkins in the other hand to catch the drips.  No matter how much a man likes his gelato, this feels embarrassing to him.  Better to be in a bar in San Francisco with the guys, even if beer isn’t as tasty as gelato, he thinks.  Now that’s manly.

So men migrate to San Francisco in droves, in search of what it means to be a young, single man, which inevitably means prowling the city and hunting for the elusive, promised ladies that are supposed to be waiting for them.  Trouble is, they’re either taken or in the gelato shops.