So this is an interesting challenge. My first thought is that it's actually a challenge shared by theists--Mormon men who want a Mormon wife, for example--but these people share a whole social structure (their religious community) that is already working to bring them together. Without this, atheists do face a special hurdle.
Studies have shown that women tend to be more religious than men.
Wow, those numbers are high. Yes, when you're limited to 14 percent of women, general dating strategies become a lot less useful.
Other groups faced with numbers like these have to create (and advertise among themselves!) special spaces for meeting and flirting. (I'm thinking about gay bars now.)
The types of general activities you've suggested are good for socializing, but unlikely to have a larger-than-average atheist population. Are there activities similarly strong in socializing that would have a larger atheist population?
I hope others can suggest more, but the only one I'm coming up with is political activism. If you are in the U.S.A., you could look for events put on through http://secular.org/ or any of the Member Organizations. Even though men are more likely to be atheists, women are more likely to be volunteers, so you may find that the gender balance evens out.
I will look into that, thanks.
I am beginning to suspect that it is surprisingly common for intelligent, competent adults to somehow make it through the world for a few decades while missing some ordinary skill, like mailing a physical letter, folding a fitted sheet, depositing a check, or reading a bus schedule. Since these tasks are often presented atomically - or, worse, embedded implicitly into other instructions - and it is often possible to get around the need for them, this ignorance is not self-correcting. One can Google "how to deposit a check" and similar phrases, but the sorts of instructions that crop up are often misleading, rely on entangled and potentially similarly-deficient knowledge to be understandable, or are not so much instructions as they are tips and tricks and warnings for people who already know the basic procedure. Asking other people is more effective because they can respond to requests for clarification (and physically pointing at stuff is useful too), but embarrassing, since lacking these skills as an adult is stigmatized. (They are rarely even considered skills by people who have had them for a while.)
This seems like a bad situation. And - if I am correct and gaps like these are common - then it is something of a collective action problem to handle gap-filling without undue social drama. Supposedly, we're good at collective action problems, us rationalists, right? So I propose a thread for the purpose here, with the stipulation that all replies to gap announcements are to be constructive attempts at conveying the relevant procedural knowledge. No asking "how did you manage to be X years old without knowing that?" - if the gap-haver wishes to volunteer the information, that is fine, but asking is to be considered poor form.
(And yes, I have one. It's this: how in the world do people go about the supposedly atomic action of investing in the stock market? Here I am, sitting at my computer, and suppose I want a share of Apple - there isn't a button that says "Buy Our Stock" on their website. There goes my one idea. Where do I go and what do I do there?)