In The Case For An Older Woman, the OkCupid tackles a tricky topic, unrealistic expectations of male daters. In this case, mainly that men want to date much younger women. I’m going to point to a few choice quotes and leave it at that.
…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.
The median 30 year-old man spends as much time messaging teenage girls as he does women his own age. On the other hand, women only a few years older are largely neglected.
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.
Either something very sad happens to a woman at 40, or something incredibly awesome happens at 39.
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.
…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.
Check out The Shape of the Dating Pool, it’s an interactive widget, as are a few others. The Tides Of Longing, the Zone of Greatness, older-women-are-more-sexual pattern, this is great stuff! OKCupid is absolutely killing it with this research. Bows and applause all around for the team.
I could quote this article all day long, why we both save ourselves some time, go read The Case For An Older Woman.
