How To Tell If a Man Will Continue to Fancy You Using Statistics

I just read that 31% of people aged 45-54 who married in the last year in the USA had met on the internet. This is heartening news. Of course statistics have a tendency to belie the realities of life in the same way that life tends to inflate vital statistics.

A famous statistician once said ‘we are not concerned with the matter that is uncertain.’ But that’s what’s the matter. Uncertainty.

Having established that The Man probably does fancy you (note the use of the second person as if we aren’t really talking about me at all), how does one discover whether he will continue to fancy you or if it was just a passing fancy? And if passing is fancy why is it comparatively popular?

Statistics may prove to have some insight into the problem. So:

How to tell if a man will continue to fancy you using statistics –

1. Gather your sample (no, not that, that’s how to use biological techniques) (we may come to that another day).
2. Observe the experimental setting (bed, sofa, hillside, kitchen or bicycle).
3. Take extensive and exhaustive notes on extensive exhaustion (try not to get your pen confused with anything else) (oh and try and be subtle or the Man may wonder why you have to write everything down and take this as a sign of early-relationship-memory-loss, evidence gathering or belief in astrology).
4. Use numbers.
5. Analyse the numbers using statistical analysing sort of things.

Statistical analysing sort of things can be either
a) Descriptive – where you make a nice graph (usually shaped like a breast), a tasty pie chart (shaped like a pie that some bastard hasn’t divided up fairly at all), or a bar chart (shaped like New York). You can also use numerical descriptors about deviation. In my case I will stick to just the usual deviation.
b) Inferential – this is said to account for randomness (that’s handy) and draws inferences (don’t we all?).

I set about the task. This is what happened:

From my sample I inferred that due to the randomness of life, the exhaustion occurring from experimentation and my inability to understand the setting of my bicylce, I came to the analytical and statistical conclusion that the answer to ‘Whether the Man Would Continue to Fancy Me’ was:
14
with a mean of 78
and an average of 28,892,892.
Or, in a more descriptive manner:
a graph that was shaped like an aardvark pole-vaulting,
a pie chart that was pencil and onion flavoured
a bar chart that strangely resembled Einstein’s hair-do in 1953, or possibly the Outer Hebrides.

The problem with statistics is that, like men, even when one has them, they are more or less impossible to interpret.