New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady missed almost all of the 2008 season after tearing his ACL in the year’s first game. A torn ACL is a painful injury, and the recovery was grueling, but Brady probably wasn’t suffering too much—he had a lot more time to spend with his then-girlfriend (and now wife), supermodel Gisele Bundchen.
Many of us may have dreamed about dating a supermodel, but only a lucky few get to fulfill that dream. Supermodels are a rare breed—they are beautiful, hard-working, and very well-off—and there’s no reason to expect them to date just anyone. But if you’re not just anyone, maybe you have a chance.
The first problem with trying to figure your odds of dating a supermodel is trying to define what separates a regular model from a supermodel, and then figuring out how many supermodels are out there. Luckily for us, Stars-Portraits.com has a list of supermodels, so we’ll just use that as our basis. Stars Portraits counts about 320 supermodels, which seems like a reasonable estimate.
There are about 116 million males 15 and older in the United States, and about 57 million are single. If each of them had the same odds of dating a supermodel, and we assumed that all the supermodels on the list were unmarried and would date an American, your odds of dating a supermodel would be somewhere around one in 178,100. That’s not so good.
But it also ignores that different people will have vastly differing odds. A farmer living in Indiana is not very likely to meet, let alone date, a supermodel. If you really want to date a supermodel, there are a couple things you can do to better your odds:
  • Move to one of the two fashion capitals of the United States—New York or Los Angeles. The combined population of males 15-and-older in those two cities is about 4.6 million, and of those, just 2 million are single. Already, just by moving, you’ve improved your odds almost 30-fold, to around one in 7,127. That’s still a very low number, but it’s better than what you had before.
  • Become professionally successful. While it is difficult to precisely define success, the highest income group reported by the US Census is those with incomes greater than $100,000 so that’s what we’ll use. Though we do not have statistics for New York and LA specifically, nationally, 1 in 15.36 men who live alone (because a supermodel presumably wouldn’t want to date a guy who lives with a roommate, or in his parent’s basement) have an income of at least $100,000. So being successful will improve your odds to around one in 150. It’s still a long shot, but compared to our first guesstimate, things aren’t looking so bad!
There are two additional factors which are out of your control, but if you have them going for you, your odds can potentially get even better.
  • You are tall. Given the height of supermodels, it is unlikely they’ll date a man shorter than six feet tall, unless you are the head of a major power, like the 5’5’’ Nicholas Sarkozy, who is married to the 5’9” Carla Bruni. 1 in 5.05 American men are at least six feet tall, so if you’re lucky enough to fit into that category, your odds of dating a supermodel might increase proportionally, to about one in 34.
  • You are good looking. Economic and psychological research has shown that attractive people are more likely to date and marry other attractive people, so if you’re good-looking it stands to reason that your chances of being with a model are much improved. Supermodels are some of the most beautiful women on the planet, so they won’t just date anyone, for the most part. Let’s guesstimate that they will generally only consider you a serious prospect if you’re in the top 20 percent of the best-looking men in the room. In that case, your odds might increase to one in 7. Considering that we started at one in 178,100, things are looking pretty good.
All you have to do is be tall, attractive, wealthy, and live in New York or LA and you might have a shot at bagging a supermodel. Or you could just be Tom Brady—that works too.