
The above comment is typical. As it is, men between 22 and 30—nearly two-thirds of the male dating pool—focus almost exclusively on women younger than themselves. I'll be investigating this phenomenon today, with gusto and charts. Ultimately, I'll argue that they would be well-served to expand their search upwards, to women in their thirties and forties.
Because it has been a successful way to introduce previous posts, I wanted to put real faces on this demographic before I delve into a bunch of numbers. Pictured below are some single users in their mid-thirties or early forties, taken from the first couple pages of my own local match search. Nothing I'll talk about today pertains necessarily to any one of them, but I wanted to put forward some people to go with the statistical discussion.
Dating Preferences & Age
It's no secret that dating changes radically as you get older. As you can see below, the number of online daters peaks at 24, drops sharply at around 30, and then gradually tapers off, as the remaining singletons either find mates or withdraw themselves from contention:

The bar chart here shows how the woman to man ratio changes over time. As you can see, it's basically flat. In a better world, this would imply that older people don't necessarily have a harder time finding decent mates than younger ones, as the composition of the dating pool holds relatively steady from age to age. Put another way: a 45 year-old woman shouldn't in theory have a harder time finding a date than a 20 year-old, because the female-to-male ratios at those ages are equal (roughly 11:9).
Of course, we all know that 45 year-olds do have a much harder time, because the male fixation on youth distorts the dating pool. Look at how men have set their age preferences on OkCupid:

As you can see, a man, as he gets older, searches for relatively younger and younger women. Meanwhile his upper acceptable limit hovers only a token amount above his own age. a man, as he gets older, searches for relatively younger and younger womenThe median 31 year-old guy, for example, sets his allowable match age range from 22 to 35—nine years younger, but only four years older, than himself. This skewed mindset worsens with age; the median 42 year-old will accept a woman up to fifteen years younger, but no more than three years older.
A man's bias toward younger women becomes even more evident when we overlay his stated preferences with his actual messaging habits.
This next graph is what's called a heat map. It shows messaging concentrations by age; for each vertical age bracket, the greenest areas have the most messages, the reddest have the fewest, and the yellow have the average.

As you can see, men tend to focus on the youngest women in their already skewed preference pool, and, what's more, they spend athe median 30 year-old man spends as much time messaging teenage girls as he does women his own age significant amount of energy pursuing women even younger than their stated minimum. No matter what he's telling himself on his setting page, a 30 year-old man spends as much time messaging 18 and 19 year-olds as he does women his own age. On the other hand, women only a few years older are largely neglected.
So you can see how differently women think about dating and age, here are the corresponding charts for them:

Except in their early to mid-twenties, when they apparently want nothing to do with younger guys (i.e. guys who are still in school?), women show an admirable openness to both reasonably younger and reasonably older men. Notice also how a woman's actual messaging activity, shown in the heat map below, is roughly centered on her own age (as illustrated by the dotted "age parity" line).

This second chart also contains something very peculiar that we didn't see at all in men. Notice the vertical stripes at ages 20 and 29. These color discontinuities indicate dramatic changes in a woman's dating mentality: when a women turns 20 she decides it's okay to message significantly older men (i.e. the upper reaches of the chart suddenly become less red). At 29, a woman becomes even more open to older men and, in addition, stops writing the youngest ones. The typical 28 year-old women sends a small but significant number of messages to men too young to drink. The typical 29 year-old sends practically none.
In any event, here's what happens when we synthesize all the above data. By tallying the number of people interested in each age group and gender, we can get a dynamic picture of the dating pools. I've made a little javascript widget to illustrate what's going on.
a by-age distribution of men who would date an 18 year-old woman


I was tempted to title this The Tides Of Longing. Move the slider to the right, toward middle age, and you can watch the pool of dating possibilities gather, crest, then drain away. Metaphors aside, we can evaluate the potential matches for a given age/gender by summing the area under the curve (AP Calculus, ftw!) I made these calculations in the chart below, and we can see that women have more pursuers than men until age 26, but thereafter a man can expect many more potential dates than a woman of the same age. At the graph's outer edge, at age 48, men are nearly twice as sought-after as women. Here's the data:

A woman's desirability peaks at 21, which, ironically enough is the age that men just begin their "prime," i.e. become more desirable than average. Following that dotted line out, statistically speaking, a woman's desirability
peaks at 21you can see that a woman of 31 is already "past her prime," while a man doesn't become so until 36. As we mentioned above, after age 26, a man has more potential matches than his female counterparts, which is a drastic reversal of the proportion in young adulthood, when women are much more sought-after. Because men's dating preferences skew so young, and women's are age-equitable, men peak later, and have a longer plateau of desirability, than women.
So that's the lay of the land, and now I'd like to say why I think it could be different. In the next three sections of this post, I will show that an older woman's attitudes, both about sex and life, are just as good if not better than her younger counterparts', and hopefully I'll convince more guys to venture north of their current age-limits:

Sex
Articles touting a woman's mid-thirties "sexual peak" have stalked the pages of Cosmo since time immemorial, but these articles typically cite clinical testosterone/estrogen/progesterone studies and attempt to make the leap to "sexual peak" from there—if they bother to cite any data at all. I, on the other hand, can make my claim by looking at a woman's stated preferences:



This is a nationwide "age progression" of American women, a normalized heat map similar to the ones you saw above, but with an added geographical component. By moving the slider you can watch how attitudes become more sex-positive as the population gets older.
This older-women-are-more-sexual pattern repeats across almost every proposition. Here are a few more data sets just as sparklines (computed, like the map above, for our sample set of 100,000 women). Again, these are just a handful of examples; whether we ask about bondage or kissing, women are the most sexual in their thirties.
Researching this post, I also came upon an interesting complementary pair of graphs illustrating sexual dominance preferences. Younger men want to be dominated. Older women are generally interested in doing just that.

In addition their lack of physical inhibitions, older women have much healthier attitudes in two other areas of sexual concern: STD testing and contraception.






Attitude
There are two operative stereotypes of older single women: the sad-sack (à la Bridget Jones) and the "cougar" (à la Samantha from Sex In The City) and both, like all stereotypes, are reductionist and stupid and I've tried to avoid them. I hesitated beginning my case for older women with something about their sexuality, like I did in Exhibit A, because that territory borders right on cougar country. But the evidence there was too compelling to ignore.
On the other hand, I found no basis whatsoever for Ms. Zellweger's version of the thirty-something single woman. The data indicate that they are in fact way better adjusted than their younger counterparts. For example:


It might be hard to eyeball, because the bottom graph isn't steeply sloped, but women in their thirties are 4.0% more likely to be happy than their younger counterparts. As anyone who's been in a relationship with someone who lacks them can attest, self-sufficiency and confidence are awesome qualities in a match.
The graph below shows a similar trend, until a poignant drop at the end.

Either something very sad happens to a woman at 40, or something incredibly awesome happens at 39. Hard to tell. And I also want to say, guys, that just because a woman is older, she's not necessarily on the fast-track to marriage:

Looks
The final thing I want to address is looks, because I think that is guys' most fundamental worry about dating someone older. There's no doubt that younger people are are more physically attractive—indeed in many ways beauty and youth are inextricable. That's why most of the models you see in magazines are teenagers, and turn-back-the-clock surgeries like face-lifts are so popular. There's no getting around this fact, and I don't want to hide it:

But, combing through the data, I intuitively felt like this graph didn't tell the whole story. So I dug deeper, and found something interesting. If you separate out the absolute best-looking women, almost all of whom are very young, and also remove the people you won't realistically want to date (the worst-looking women), you find that everyone else's attractiveness doesn't change much with age:

In other words, given that nobody is drop-dead gorgeous or drop-dead hideous, your average 25 year-old is roughly as good-looking as your average 35 year-old. for the vast majority of men, dating the absolute hottest girls isn't realisticYes, throwing out the prettiest of the pretty young things is a clumsy handicap to put on an age-by-age comparison. But at the same time, for the vast majority of men, the best-looking women are simply out of reach, so it's actually accurate to exclude them as possibilities. In fact, unrealistic male expectations inspired this article, so we want to do everything we can to correct for them.
Many of you are probably scoffing at the idea that many 35 year-olds are as attractive as many 25 year-olds, but there are social factors at work that you might not consider as you go through life making judgments. Most importantly: nationwide, thirtysomethings are much more likely to be married and therefore much more likely to have stopped optimizing their attractiveness. So the typical 35 year-old woman you see out in the world isn't representative of the single 35 year-olds who are still dating and looking good.
Anyhow, that just about concludes my case. Ultimately, you be the judge. Here are single women in their mid-twenties and women in their mid-thirties, all in the 70th percentile of attractiveness, side by side. The older women are on the left, in case you can't tell.






Of course, you could also do your own search and see for yourself. Thanks for reading.
There is one flaw in all of this data — it doesn’t matter if men are willing to date older women, because older women are still not willing to date younger men.
I agree and find this article interesting. Throughout my life I always ended up with younger girls than I and the attitudes and problems of youth would often get in the way. I’m currently dating someone older(by a year
) and already find some of your statistics to be accurate about older women. Of,course everyone is different and generalizations don’t always fit.
Thanks for the article and proving once again why your site is the best dating site so far!
I really enjoy your write ups, with the statistical analysis you do – this is a fairly obvious point you’ve portrayed but the detail and real world data is really mind blowing.
Are you really sure your point isn’t a marketing scheme?
Look at the mismatch on your JS graph measuring “The Shape Of The Dating Pool” and how incongruous they are at age 24! Looks like 50% loss!
You present a really interesting study. Do you work with the gay population? If so, could/would their statistics be different?
I’ve seen several articles that suggest the following:
If the woman is 5 or more years younger than the man, then the divorce rate is 1/2 the median divorce rate. However, if the woman is 5 or more years older than the man, then the divorce rate is again the same higher than the median. Thus, sticking with current behavior may seem to increase long-term happiness.
Here are a reference:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1222726/The-secret-happy-marriage—man-5-years-older-hasn-t-hitched-before.html
As others have said, there’s a lot of extenuating information you’re not accounting for here, not the least of which is that older women generally don’t want to date younger men. I’m 24 and have absolutely no problem with dating older women. Hell, I generally prefer them, as I’ve always been a bit more mature than most of my peers and women my age and younger don’t usually catch my interest because of that. Virtually all the women I’ve been interested in over the past few years have been older than me, and every single one of them just cut me off without explanation as soon as they learned my age, never mind the fact we were hitting it off splendidly before that stupid number came up.
There’s also the geographical factor someone mentioned upthread, though that’s neither your fault nor within your power to correct. As a single male living in Utah, I concluded some time ago that the cruel irony of dating sites is the places in which they’re most likely to work for a person are also the places in which one is least likely to need them (i.e. population centers).
What I find really interesting is that the “Youngest allowable match” line in the first chart almost exactly matches the old “Divide by two, add seven” rule. It’s uncanny.
Older women can’t have babies.
And if you want to get married ladies,remember these simple 8 words:
1. long hair
2, stay thin
3, sex anytime
4. shut up
If you violate any of these, your marriage is doomed.
Great post. But as much as I hate to say it, it’s somewhat ‘politically correct’ in its interpretations. E.g., you portray the disparities as something that men perpetrate upon women.
But another interpretation is men-vs-men; i.e., that older men are making a difficult dating environment for younger men, by compressing the market through contacting the same women they are.
it is all in the importance of proliferation of the human species… Older women cannot have children.. it is ingrained into the males to ensure we as humans go on as a species.
“Men seek females who signal fertility. Qualities that serve as cues to a woman’s ability to reproduce are attractiveness, youthfulness, and permissiveness (Feingold, 1992)” Women do not choose on this level. We choose on intelligence, looks, strength etc.
But hey, your graphs were pretty
You probably have the numbers for this, but you didn’t report them, so I’m going to work under the assumtion that they conform to my reality.
You have your theoretical ‘zone of awesomeness’ and then back this up by various facts such as ‘older women are more willing to be in a relationship that doesn’t lead to marriage’, ‘older women are more okay with casual sex’ and etc…
Maybe as men age, they start LOOKING for women who want a real relationship, and not just casual sex. I know, from my personal experience, I am much more interested in settling down now, at age 31, then I was when I was 23. That makes the younger girls more appealing from a ‘do they match what I’m looking for’ standpoint.
Of course, the age range for women I’ve dated has trended towards more older than me than younger than me. A 16 year gap to the plus side (a 38 year old when I was 22) compared to only an 11 year gap on the younger side (a 19 year old, last year). So maybe I’m the exception.
Or maybe I’m exactly what you’re writing about should happen.
Sara-
This site is rife with women with children. I’m not raising someone else’s kids. I’m not abusive, either.
I’m just not suffering for someone else’s mistakes. I’ve dated women here who haven’t learned from their mistakes.
And older women generally run a risk of having kids with genetic problems.
I think younger women wanna hold out for something better. What that “better” is, no one seems to be able to say. Everyone complains of distance but all I see are women who want to be wined, dined, and flew all over the globe. Sounds like they’re looking for traits an older male has, but they want the six-pack too (see previous OKCupid research.)
If no one is offering to do that for me, count me out.
Thing is, some people want to settle down. Like, for good.
Maybe OKCupid is noticing the dysfunction we all are already aware of.
How old will a 21 year old be in 10 years? 31.
So if I date a younger girl now, and it works out, then I’ll still get to date an older woman later! It’s the best of both worlds.
If it doesn’t work out – dudes are more attractive as we age… so… life rules!
Besides: the whole point of a threesome when you’re a 25 year old dude is to have a threesome with 2 young chicks. I can have a threesome with two 31 year olds when I’m 35.
Refuted.
Okay, so, you seem to not mention the fact that men and women appear from the age ranges over time to invert one another.
Men seek out younger women (lion’s share below the “parity line”), by and large, while not seeking out many older women (skinnier section above the parity line).
Women on the other hand appear to have a monopoly on seeking out older men (larger section above the parity line) and are reticent to seek out younger men (skinnier section below the parity line).
Somehow, that seems to be an odd parity of its own. Men seek out younger women. Women seek out older men. Or, if not “seeking out” they’re both more “open to the ideas.”
Also, if you’ll note, they’re both similar in that both “heat maps” have a distinct bulge BELOW the relative “minimum ages.” It’s merely more pronounced in the male graph, but definitely quite noticeable in the female graph too. So, don’t hang that just on “men like younger women.” Apparently, women are also apparently quite willing to drop their “lower age limit” priorities almost as opportunistically as men. Again, not as pronounced, but definitely there. Neither appears to have much bulge ABOVE the “maximum age” line, however. So, it’s hard to see that women are completely “more altruistic about age.” The women may have a slightly wider spread on the top section of the heat map, but not by much. Both graphs are pretty similar that way (bulge below the minimum age limit, and little “give” above and beyond the maximum age).
Just my 2c.
Excellent article. I have learned more from it, than in all the psychology, sociology and drunk discussions I have had in my life.
This was an interesting study. I am in the 1/3 of males who doesn’t seek younger people. Though I’m only 22, I feel girls who are 18 and 19, tend to seem too young, their maturity is often different, because they are in college for the first time, usually away from home for the first time, and they have yet to become more introspective and question previous notions. I value being at the same stage of life. A freshmen in college, is at a different stage in life than a student later in college years. I can’t imagine a desire to date girls 8-9 years younger when I’m 30. How could we relate being in such different stages of life? Anyways, women have it tough in dating getting older, as the article says due to men’s weird obsession with youth and looks. I guess when they feel it slipping, they want someone younger to revive it.
Women can be awfully picky in wierd ways. #1 they don’t want a man shorter than them, #2 they don’t want a man younger than t hem, #3 they don’t want a man thats a different race than them, #4 they don’t want a man that makes less money than them.
I’ve known this for a long time. I’ve done online dating about 7 years ago, and over the years I’ve noticed older women were about as good looking as younger women, but much more open sexually, and more likely to put out. Before I would date women only my age or younger, but when I opened up to several years above me, I just started finding myself enjoying more women.
To date, I’ve slept with 43 women, mostly from online, and had foreplay with atleast 20 more. It’s been a really fun ride, but I’ve been married for the past 2 years, and met my wife the traditional way. Although, she is 7 years younger than me, so I don’t know if that means older women are fun in the sack, but don’t want for marriage.
At 40 you think your happiest times are behind you because your parents start dying and you think it’s all downhill from here on out.
Have you noticed that the younger male / older female genre has gained acceptance in mainstream TV program?
Anything with the archetypal MILF in it, really: “Desperate Housewives”, “Cougar Town” and the quirky “Accidentally on Purpose”.
I’d like to mix some decent amount of alcohol in the mix, shake and see how those stats come out.
Great job Christian!
I’m amazed at the analysis that went into this, but like many other similar studies, it seems heavily biased in “men should change their ways,” as opposed to “both genders can make a difference.”
Yes, men tend to pursue women younger than themselves. But women also tend to date men older than themselves. So to only suggest that men pursue women older than them, while women still pursue men older than them, is a setup for failure. Both genders should be more flexible in their standards!
the go team has it right: in 10 year the 21 will be 31, and the 31 will be 41.
i’m 25. i have no problem fucking someone in their 30s and 40 *eventually*, but as a young guy i’m not/haven’t had much sex, where as a young woman can, with limitations, have as much as she wants w/ her pick of guys. (ok, not all women, but, whatever.) since i’m not really able to fuck girls in their 20s while i’m their age, is it really so wrong to want to fuck them when i’m a little older and my “value” has gone up?
also, another commenter made a great point, re, *children*. where are the controls for children? it’s reasonable to assume more children are positively correlated w/ age, and the presence of children is negatively correlated w/ desirability.
The infoviz and interactivity here are awesome. And without flash, too! Kudos.
A robowife can be whatever age you want her to be.
Stick with younger women, they dont hate men yet.
This just confirms what younger guys have been trying to point out to older women for generations. It’s just too bad the older women are still not interested. This article will probably infuriate those older women who are constantly complaining about the young guys who are always hitting on them because they’ll fear the article will encourage the guys.
Also, graphs 4 and 5 explain graphs 1 through 3.
Finally, it’s my humble opinion that women in the age range of 30 through 50 are far more attractive than most women under 30 today. This is probably also true of men.
1. As is pointed out above, older women either already have kids, do not want to have kids with you, or are too old to safely have kids. This is obviously undesirable.
2. Men are naturally programmed to prefer younger, more fertile women. Scientific studies back this up.
3. The author of the study ignores the fact that the chart for women’s age preference is MORE skewed than the chart for men’s age preference for close to half the age range. Where’s the criticism there?
As much as I enjoy dating older women (although no more than 5 years older) because of their insatiable sex drive, I am interested in something more than sex.
You didn’t document how you calculated the heatmaps in the early part of this post, but you did show that OkCupid as a whole has a huge age skew. Might this not skew messaging activity, and need to be corrected for?
For example, imagine a 30 year old man with this very simple pattern of messaging: If he sees a 90%+ match, he clicks, and then sends a message 50% of the time. If he sees any match below 90%, he doesn’t click. Age does not affect whether he clicks or sends a message – that is, if the 90%+ profile he clicks on is of a 22 year old or a 48 year old, he’s still 50% likely to message. Given OkCupid’s demographics, wouldn’t your heatmap count this hypothetical man as having a very strong preference for women in their early 20s, even though he actually has no age preference at all?
Next, consider dueling age limits. Imagine that our hypothetical man at any age, with the messaging behavior described above, won’t send a message if he sees he’s outside of her desired age range, even if he was inclined to. What if he’s 27 years old? For the most part, according to your chart, this means that women aged 21-28 are willing to hear from him, and most women outside that range aren’t. So even if OkCupid’s demographics weren’t skewed so heavily towards early/mid 20s, he’s still appear to have a preference for early/mid 20s even though he doesn’t.
In short, you don’t say enough about your data to show that it means what you say it means, and there seems to be a very very strong possibility that it *doesn’t* mean what you say it means.
hell, im 18 and ive been with women in their thirties. i love older women and think theres nothing sexier
Oh lawrds. More bad news.
Not that I mean to work with a half glass empty,
but the sad thing is, a guy with at my age (25)
who has no accomplishments in life to attest has
no chance of meeting a women. I’ve been an
unfortunate case victim of Chaos Theory who
hasn’t been able to reach his best due to
various circumstances.
I would date an older women, but do no not
feel inclined because I do not like the idea
of “being taken care of”. This case become
more especially true when she is single and
has kids.
On this site, I’ve had a number of young men contact me, mostly via IM. They are generally in their mid- to late-twenties and early to mid-thirties. I am 56. They start with a compliment about my looks, ask if I like younger men, and then offer themselves as lovers, often talking up the size of their “equipment” and/or their stamina or prowess in bed. I have had a lover almost 18 years younger than me, but we also could converse intelligently, laugh together, and go places and enjoy one another’s company. I am not universally against younger men, but I’m not just looking for a sex toy! I want the whole enchilada– long term relationship, caring , affection, humor, similar values, etc. and the youngsters aren’t offering all that.
i love older woman, they have been there done but they stl need us the young stars to work them. young woman are fine but they reson too murch you will only have sex with them when they want to , but older woman they are forever horny and hungy for more
Why’d you remove the age scale heat map for oral sex? I thought the geographical trends there were fascinating.
i fooking luv this shite.
This was an interesting read…as an older women who only seems to find younger men when it comes to having similar interests. I have, however, stopped initiating any kind of correspondence with men more than 2 years younger, even though I would date someone as much as 8 or 9 years younger, because they don’t seem to want anything to do with older women, no matter how much of a great match they might be (89% and above on this site).
Dear OKCupid, then stop sending me 21 year olds as quickmatches. :p (Yes, my preferences are set above 21)
I’m 30, I don’t need that drama.
I haz problems wit yur chart. Why start at 18? Where is 3 and 13 yearz?
This makes a lot of sense. Freud would really be proud of you! The fact that (supposedly) sons want to sleep with their mothers (The Oedipus Complex) is clearly reinforced in modern times by a man dating an older woman. That’s the underlying psychosexual motivation right there.
Also, the older/younger scenario is completely taken from ancient times, when an older/younger male would get together. See, even the straights take lessons from the gays!! Now if only they would give credit where credit is due….
No offense, but older women are old.
Regarding the, “how many times per week do you want to have sex,” heat map, isn’t that really just showing how desperate people are? Let’s face it, after a six month dry spell, we all want sex twice a day. And after three months in the same apartment, we want a little more space. So, when you’re a single lady of 40 with no foreseeable dates, you’re horny as can be.
Also, I take issue with the sample set of 100,000 of each sex. We all know that men vastly outnumber women on dating sites, so men are effectively forced to message all sorts of women. Yes, the distribution of those messages is still interestingly downward-oriented, but you can’t really treat acts of desperation as representative of a population as a whole.
Nice study and charts…
As someone who is practically off the charts in age (49), I would feel a little doomed were it not for the fact that I am one who really appreciates younger men and have been lucky enough to date a couple who have appreciated my company as well. (And considering my size [BBW] and my IQ [Mensan], I was damn lucky we connected. I don’t like ‘em young and dumb, I like them young and smart. Otherwise, a BOB [battery-operated boyfriend] is a better option.)
However, even though I can’t have children, I DO want to live with someone. Sex as often as I want? Woohoo! Too hard to do when you’re just dating. I LOVE YOUNGER MEN, but they aren’t looking to move in together, there’s the rub.
Also, there are tons of men just a few years younger than myself that haven’t married yet, want to marry someone young and have a family. I did that already! My kids are adults, and I want to be with someone I can have fun with, that has the energy to keep up with me and likes me for myself, every lump, bump, wrinkle and gray hair (oh, wait, no gray–good stylist!).
So I disagree with some of the younger guys here who say that older women won’t touch them. It may be they have been burned by one, or like me, they may have stopped dating younger men because they want something more than a “date”. I will never remarry, but I do want to cohabit and build a life together. If there are any 32 (half my age plus 7, right?) to 50 year-olds out there who feel the same, I’d like to hear from you!
I am a 30 year old male and desire women no younger than 26 and no older than 34…this is about what females average during that period. I think its awesome that I have pretty much always thought like an average woman about this. God, i cant imagine dating a 21 year old kid.
In my opinion, or from a couple of studies that i read, men seeking out youunger women and women seeking out older men ensures the best continuation of our species and this is just bilogical evolutionary behaviour which we have acquired as humans…..so not just the guys but we women are also guilty of this younger/older malfunction but its completely natural, older guys want younger girls and younger girls are more than okay with older guys…and also i think its because women mature more quickly than men, so they dont find a man their age with compatible level of maturity and it is true that long lasting relationships are usually those of the younger women/older men combo especially if you look at marriages……………so chill people, what happening is all for the best.
I love younger men, always have…only as I get older the men I am attracted to seem to get younger and younger… I have no trouble meeting them, I’ve been married, had kids who are all in their teens now… and the guys I meet in their twenties seem to love the non-pressure that I and other ‘cougars’ allow them… we just want a good time, a laugh, friendship and lots of sex. In fact, any younger guy I’ve dated who was with an older woman for the first time, seems to have continued dating well above their age… simply – unless you want ‘forever’ – it WORKS!
Well, I’m now a 38-year-old man interested in settling down and having a family. I’d be delighted to date an older woman, but childbearing ability is a prerequisite, y’know? I don’t like contributing to the stereotype, but that’s cruel reality for ya.
Christian, can you comment on Malheur County [SE Oregon] in the “How often” map? It appears to be the horniest county in the US, and unlike the blue counties in Maine and North Carolina, its women seem to consistently answer “once a day” at all ages. My first thought that it was just small sample size, but it seems that you still have women of a wide variety of ages. Is that correct?
I totally agree with this article. Please younger women, take it easy on us young men. Learn from older women. They are devine.
I’ll chime in to echo the several posts who note with dismay that a mere 40 years seems to be the END of your definition of “older”, for both women and men.
I am not interested in a woman’s age. (And would certainly never ask.) I care about having common interests: would she like to spend days hiking, biking, cross-country skiing? Does she think music has gone seriously downhill since 1750? And so on…
So I offer a suggestion: How about not having age (or birth date) as part of profile info at all? (Or perhaps make it optional.) Then see what happens with matchups.
Excellent reading; very persuasive. I’m 27, and I have my age limit set 22-28. It’s strange to reflect, but my last girlfriend is probably 30 now. I’ve avoided older women on the assumption that they would have a great desire for stability–a home, a family, regular income–at a time when I’m shooting for a PhD, and expect to be living cheap and cheerful for the next couple of years.