Two recent very “unscientific” and somewhat controversial rankings were recently released about American cities. Amazon recently released their findings about America’s “Most Romantic Cities” and Men’s Health recently released their findings about America’s “Drunkest Cities”. Stay tuned to see how Seattle did in both categories.

According to Amazon, who is now apparently an expert of sorts in these matters, Seattle is the 13th most romantic city, which is quite an accomplishment in a city full of cynical hipsters.  

Before you get too excited, there’s bad news- Bellevue, our stuck-up neighbor to the East beat us out by one. I don’t know about you, but I hate to admit defeat to Bellevue for anything.  Luckily, if we examine the criteria closely, we can see that it actually would have been better not to have been included on the list at all.

The high-level “researchers” at Amazon based their conclusions on Amazon purchases of romance novels, sex and relationship books, romantic comedy films, sexual-wellness products and Barry White CDs.  


By the majority of those criteria, Seattle as the most literate city in the nation, should not have made the list at all. Come on, seriously, how many Seattleites actually read Danielle Steele and her colleagues? I don’t and if I did, would never admit to it to another living soul. I’m quite positive that any allegiance that Seattleites have to Barry White albums is the sole reason we made it to the top 20 Most Romantic cities in the first place.

For those of you not listening to Barry White cd’s or secretly reading Romance novels for free on your Kindle, I’m confident you are curious  how drunk Seattleites are in comparison to residents of other cities. Apparently, Seattleites are not nearly as drunk as we are romantic. Men’s Health just released the results of a study which listed Seattle as the 64th drunkest city in the nation.

 Given the criteria for this study, this is nothing that we as a city need to be embarrassed about. The statistics were drawn by DUI arrests, drunk driving-related accidents, liver disease, and the frequency of binge drinking. I’m guessing that the only reason that we made the list at all is the fact that we have a major university in our city- let’s face it- college students are pretty famous for their binge drinking.