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Single and ready to mingle? Then Whistler's right for you

Facebook study names Whistler as best Canadian city for singles
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The resort's legendary nightlife is just one of the reasons a recent Facebook study named Whistler as the best city in Canada for singles. Photo submitted

If you're looking for love this Valentine's Day, Whistler might not be your ideal location.

But if you're single and ready to mingle? Well that's a different story altogether.

To mark this annual celebration of all things romantic, Facebook scoured user profiles from across Canada to determine which cities were the best for love — whether you're looking to settle down or simply get down with no strings attached.

"With its relaxed ski culture and fun party scene, Whistler, B.C. tops the list as the city in Canada where single people are most likely to remain single on the Facebook platform," said Ana Secher of High Road Communications in an email.

Rounding out the list of the best cities to be single in Canada is Burnaby at No. 2, followed by Waterloo, Longueil, QC and Montreal.

On the flipside, Prince Albert, SK was named as the best place in the country for singles to find love, followed by Cornwall and Timmins, both in Ontario.

For Evelyne Jobin, manager at club-hopping tour operator Whistler World Crawl, it's the community's zest for life that makes it so attractive to singles.

"We all have this common passion," she said. "Everyone's so passionate about what we do here, whether it's skiing or aprés."

Whistler World Crawl takes groups of partygoers to four different resort clubs in an evening, with plenty of drinking games on the agenda to help break the ice. The group can often get as large as 50 people, Jobin said, with revelers identified by different coloured stickers: red if you're taken, green if you're single, yellow if you're playing hard to get, and blue if you're feeling frisky.

But more than just facilitating casual hook-ups, the first order of business for most on the club crawl is to make a connection with someone you'd never have the chance to meet otherwise.

"People (on the crawl) don't have any pretention, they just want to get to know each other," said Jobin. "It's such a good platform for two random people to have a connection."

Local theatre guru Michele Bush has her own take on the resort's claustrophobic dating scene, although she is not currently on the market (in case you were wondering). The writer of the hilarious 2012 Valentine's Day-themed play, By The Time Cupid Got To Whistler He Was Drunk, talked about how the "Whistler Bubble" concept can extend to the bedroom.

"If you've lived here long enough, after a few years you go to a party and you do that whole, 'He slept with her, and I slept with him' thing," she explained. "So by six degres of separation, you've slept with everyone in the room."

And with Matador recently naming the resort as one of the "101 Places to Get F----d Up Before You Die," with it's "hot mess of beautiful people with goggle tans and Volcom V-necks," it's not likely that Whistler will relinquish its status as a singles' mecca anytime soon.