I don't think that differences in life expectancy are the main driver for the results seen here. Life expectancy between sexes varies by 3-5 years, so you should expect the average age difference be around 2 years. I don't think this is enough to cause a 12-year difference in the peak dating pools, assuming that the demographics of the single population match the overall population. In reality, the demographics do not match; younger men (<30 y/o) and older women (>50 y/o) are more likely to be single compared to the baseline:
Men and women just on average look for different things.
The reality is that young women are more attractive to men, with youthful looks, an innocence and potentially more submissive.
Conversely older men tend to be more emotionally mature and financely independent, which women find more attractive.
Women start with it all from an attraction point of view and men start with nothing.
Of course people might not like this or have different tastes but in general it seems to be true. I also think there is nothing wrong with these or any other choices of attraction.
Quite a lot of anecdotes here that seem unironically ripe with certainty about what seems to me to be a well-made series of ironic analyses. 'Women between x and y would never look at a man over k if not for ____'. Sounds like my toxic relative who won't shut up about the plight of western civilization.
Dudes, loneliness is hard, but try to let it affect your outlook for the positive. Someday, if you aren't too hung up on your insecurities and can tell a joke or two, you'll hit it off with someone. If she's cool, she won't care about your car or your height or your age or whatever. Maybe there's variation in this over time, but who knows.
Just get out there, take care of yourself, and be sociable but not too trying ;)
Typical generic, infantilizing dating advice, about as effective as telling unattractive people to just "be themselves".
Dating norms exist. They vary from culture to culture and over time. The natures of norms and humans are such that there will be large scale average behaviors and some varying proportion of the population will consist of outliers. Toxically optimistic platitudinous advice such as this only ensures a perpetual class of lonely, dissatisfied people, primarily men.
Historically the rate of reproduction among men has varied, anywhere from 4/5 to 1/17. Lonely men need to be proactive and most importantly realistic, and understanding current preference norms and in what ways these men fall into or outside of them is critical to evaluating which aspects of themselves they may improve, and to what degree their immutable characteristics realistically limit their chances of attracting mates that they desire.
Hypergamous cultural norms, like those toward which the west is moving, create masses of perpetually frustrated men, many of whom who at best lose interest in participating in society, and at worst become bitter and violently antisocial. Thus movements which tilt dating norms toward hypergamy create unstable and dysfunctional societies. I know that your advice is given in good faith, but your relative is not the toxic one.
The problem with using government statistics (including the American Community Survey, as far as I can tell) is that "single" is roughly equivalent to "anyone who is not married", which is very different from "willing to date".
That means that people who are in a committed relationship but haven't gotten married yet, or perhaps never want to get married, are considered single. There are also people who are simply not interested in dating or relationships. Consequently, the dating pool is even smaller than the statistics would suggest (assuming we're not counting currently-married people who are in the dating pool due to separation, infidelity, or being in a poly/open relationship).
This data ignores the common preference each gender has for age. It's as common for a heterosexual man to be 10 years older than his partner, as it is for a man to be two years younger. This would be more meaningful if the data was weighted by the probability of a marriage for each given age and gender.
There are a lot of posters making this general point in terms of common sense and evolutionary biology, but the post we're responding to is about statistics.
There is a statistical (and therefore actionable) way to weight the curves, in terms of likelihood of marriage between a man and a woman of a given age. Getting the relevant data might be difficult, but all marriages are recorded, and matching the names of the relevant parties to other records showing their age may at least be contemplated.
If anyone has a few months to pull this together I'm sure we'd all enjoy it!
This omits the rather obvious problem that men are much more likely to date younger women. So the dating pool might be largest for men around 50 because of all the single women over 50 - but most of those men won't consider them.
People might be quick to point out anecdotes to the contrary - as there are always exceptions, but it's still generally true. It has been that way probably for all human history as women are more attracted to status in general and men to youth and beauty (proxies for virility.)
Which leads me to think it must be really lonely being a single women over 50. Also if you're a man of that age into older women, you've basically got the market to yourself.
> Which leads me to think it must be really lonely being a single women over 50
On the other hand, if they were a woman who dated an older man, they certainly didn't care about 'taking away' (for lack of a better term) that opportunity from a woman closer to his age. Younger guys are at a disadvantage due to lack of status/maturity and nobody sheds a tear when they go through long periods of bachelorhood without luck.
> This omits the rather obvious problem that men are much more likely to date younger women. So the dating pool might be largest for men around 50 because of all the single women over 50 - but most of those men won't consider them.
There's some truth to this but the difference between 48 and 52 isn't very important if you're 50. Men don't draw a sharp distinction at that age where they refuse someone two years older but are happy with someone two years younger. Beyond that, you really aren't going to find many attractive 30 year old women interested in you if you're a typical 50 year old man. (No offense intended to anyone, but balding, somewhat overweight 50 year old men with bland personalities just aren't in high demand with women that age.)
Assuming you are right, you must add one more thing to your hypothesis that men around 50 have the largest dating pool: you must have some status and wealth to access the younger women.
A broke, non handsome, average 50 year old guy will have exactly 0 access to women between 18 and 35.
The case of age gap between men and women is greatly overstated on HN. The average age difference (for a heterosexual couple) is 2.3 years. In 64 percent of heterosexual couples, the man is older.
There is age gap, but you all wrote about it as if 45 years old routinely dated 23 years old. They don't.
For a lot of history, women did not get to pick their partners. Moreover, marriage was an economic institution, not a romantic one. And there were also limitations on males: military service and expectation they will be providers pushing their marriage age higher.
You can't just bring in system in which participants have severly limited options and then claim it is all individual choices.
The main problem, and I see this a lot in this type of analysis, is it completely takes attraction out of the equation. It is assumed that all men are attracted to all women, and vice versa. In reality, if you're not attracted to someone, they are not in your pool, regardless of any other factors.
Any such analysis must be conducted on a per-sex basis as the game is completely different for men and women. In fact, it's debatable whether the creepiness rule applies to older women, or to women at all for that matter.
To do this properly for men, the number of available older women needs to be heavily attenuated. According to this, 60 year old women are in the dating pool for 35 year old men. How many 60 year old women do you really think a 35 year old man will find attractive? A vanishingly small number. Conversely, men find the women on the bottom end of their creepiness band disproportionately attractive. But not enough to balance it out. I suspect it would be more realistic to simply rule out all older women.
For women, attraction is different. Women do not have a preference for younger men. In fact, the opposite would seem to be true, especially since women do have a preference for wealth, stability and status. So, using the same example of a 30 year old woman, think about the limits of the non-creepy dating pool. How many 25 year old men will be attractive to her? Not many. But, equally, how many 60 year old men will be attractive to her? Also not many. However, it is probably also the case that not many men in general are attractive to her.
There are so many other confounding factors. Like, for example, the fact that women can't do much to change their level of attractiveness, they're either attractive without trying, or they're not, while for men it's necessary, and often sufficient, to build attraction through hard work (similar to how male in other species do courtship displays).
I find the reluctance to take attraction into account to be, at best, wishful thinking and, at worst, delusion. It makes any analysis like this, frankly, ridiculous.
Ignores the apparent fact that polygamy and rapid serial monogamy are very common in under-25's but happens a lot less with married people. So young people have a lot more mates available by sharing.
How do you figure polygamy happens more with younger folks - or are you conflating "polygamy" with "casually dating/having sex with more than one person"?
And isn't "rapid serial monogamy" just dating one person at a time? And this doesn't seem so much different than 20 years ago, though it might look different than earlier times when parents had more direct control over who their daughter dated/married. (and of course folks date most folks for a short time: it takes time to get to know someone - hence 6-12 month relationships happening quite often.
It's much worse than the article suggests. The article doesn't explain why people don't marry. People who marry before middle-age often have secure attachment styles. The dating pool from middle age on consists primarily of people with insecure attachment styles. Relationships with insecurely attached people are especially problematic. If you're not married, but want to be, look for widows or widowers with secure attachment styles, and work on developing secure attachment.
This is actually a very good point often missed in similar discussions. People have different personalities and traumas and some are more suited for stable relations (what you call secure here) and some are less (anxious/avoidant types in this framework). And as you can imagine, more secure personalities find partners in life sooner.
Because of that both later age dating pool and also dating app pools are in general scewed towards insecure types. Doesn’t mean dating 20yo is a guarantee for a more stable person, but chances are generally higher.
On the other hand, I feel, security increases with the age, but for a very small portion of the population actively working on it (therapy, practices, ceremonies).
Do you have evidence for this besides 2 links to books on Amazon that I can't currently read? My searches aren't finding much in the way of papers and such.
I hope that advances in biology will make fertility a choice and allow most human beings to enjoy life without constantly worrying about kids and mates.
- pointless statistical analyses
- creepy transactional views of intimacy
- facile evo-psych explanations of sexual attraction
- misogynist ressentiment
- the plight of the incel as today's #1 social issue
- mechanistic proposed solutions to loneliness which will benefit neither the men using them or the women they're used on
One of the nice things about this site is that reading the comments is totally optional. Since it sounds like you already knew what you were going to find here, maybe everyone would have been better off if you’d simply moved along without complaining?
The rest of your points are entirely valid, but this is absolutely not. Every living thing with a brain is in some sense acting as a utility maximizer. If you're not getting something you want out of a relationship, you won't partake it in it. Denying this is delusional.
The article has one major flaw: you either want to date people that are younger than you or older than you. Not both. So the analysis should be split in two.
[+] [-] stopping|4 years ago|reply
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/08/20/a-profi...
50% of men under 30 are single, compared to ~25% of men 30 and above.
49% of women over 65 are single, compared to ~27% of women under 65.
Edit:
Here are the population proportions for each of the age bands in the above source (numbers fudged from https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/2...):
It's not too hard to calculate the age of the average single man/woman. The average single man is ~43. The average single woman is ~51.[+] [-] Guthur|4 years ago|reply
The reality is that young women are more attractive to men, with youthful looks, an innocence and potentially more submissive.
Conversely older men tend to be more emotionally mature and financely independent, which women find more attractive.
Women start with it all from an attraction point of view and men start with nothing.
Of course people might not like this or have different tastes but in general it seems to be true. I also think there is nothing wrong with these or any other choices of attraction.
[+] [-] odiroot|4 years ago|reply
It's close to 10 years for my country. Very common in post-communist states.
[+] [-] watwut|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brailsafe|4 years ago|reply
Dudes, loneliness is hard, but try to let it affect your outlook for the positive. Someday, if you aren't too hung up on your insecurities and can tell a joke or two, you'll hit it off with someone. If she's cool, she won't care about your car or your height or your age or whatever. Maybe there's variation in this over time, but who knows.
Just get out there, take care of yourself, and be sociable but not too trying ;)
[+] [-] tryonenow|4 years ago|reply
Dating norms exist. They vary from culture to culture and over time. The natures of norms and humans are such that there will be large scale average behaviors and some varying proportion of the population will consist of outliers. Toxically optimistic platitudinous advice such as this only ensures a perpetual class of lonely, dissatisfied people, primarily men.
Historically the rate of reproduction among men has varied, anywhere from 4/5 to 1/17. Lonely men need to be proactive and most importantly realistic, and understanding current preference norms and in what ways these men fall into or outside of them is critical to evaluating which aspects of themselves they may improve, and to what degree their immutable characteristics realistically limit their chances of attracting mates that they desire.
Hypergamous cultural norms, like those toward which the west is moving, create masses of perpetually frustrated men, many of whom who at best lose interest in participating in society, and at worst become bitter and violently antisocial. Thus movements which tilt dating norms toward hypergamy create unstable and dysfunctional societies. I know that your advice is given in good faith, but your relative is not the toxic one.
[+] [-] e_y_|4 years ago|reply
That means that people who are in a committed relationship but haven't gotten married yet, or perhaps never want to get married, are considered single. There are also people who are simply not interested in dating or relationships. Consequently, the dating pool is even smaller than the statistics would suggest (assuming we're not counting currently-married people who are in the dating pool due to separation, infidelity, or being in a poly/open relationship).
[+] [-] watwut|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iratewizard|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samatman|4 years ago|reply
There are a lot of posters making this general point in terms of common sense and evolutionary biology, but the post we're responding to is about statistics.
There is a statistical (and therefore actionable) way to weight the curves, in terms of likelihood of marriage between a man and a woman of a given age. Getting the relevant data might be difficult, but all marriages are recorded, and matching the names of the relevant parties to other records showing their age may at least be contemplated.
If anyone has a few months to pull this together I'm sure we'd all enjoy it!
[+] [-] eloff|4 years ago|reply
People might be quick to point out anecdotes to the contrary - as there are always exceptions, but it's still generally true. It has been that way probably for all human history as women are more attracted to status in general and men to youth and beauty (proxies for virility.)
Which leads me to think it must be really lonely being a single women over 50. Also if you're a man of that age into older women, you've basically got the market to yourself.
[+] [-] colmvp|4 years ago|reply
On the other hand, if they were a woman who dated an older man, they certainly didn't care about 'taking away' (for lack of a better term) that opportunity from a woman closer to his age. Younger guys are at a disadvantage due to lack of status/maturity and nobody sheds a tear when they go through long periods of bachelorhood without luck.
[+] [-] bachmeier|4 years ago|reply
There's some truth to this but the difference between 48 and 52 isn't very important if you're 50. Men don't draw a sharp distinction at that age where they refuse someone two years older but are happy with someone two years younger. Beyond that, you really aren't going to find many attractive 30 year old women interested in you if you're a typical 50 year old man. (No offense intended to anyone, but balding, somewhat overweight 50 year old men with bland personalities just aren't in high demand with women that age.)
[+] [-] 88840-8855|4 years ago|reply
A broke, non handsome, average 50 year old guy will have exactly 0 access to women between 18 and 35.
[+] [-] watwut|4 years ago|reply
There is age gap, but you all wrote about it as if 45 years old routinely dated 23 years old. They don't.
[+] [-] watwut|4 years ago|reply
You can't just bring in system in which participants have severly limited options and then claim it is all individual choices.
[+] [-] cauliflower2718|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] globular-toast|4 years ago|reply
Any such analysis must be conducted on a per-sex basis as the game is completely different for men and women. In fact, it's debatable whether the creepiness rule applies to older women, or to women at all for that matter.
To do this properly for men, the number of available older women needs to be heavily attenuated. According to this, 60 year old women are in the dating pool for 35 year old men. How many 60 year old women do you really think a 35 year old man will find attractive? A vanishingly small number. Conversely, men find the women on the bottom end of their creepiness band disproportionately attractive. But not enough to balance it out. I suspect it would be more realistic to simply rule out all older women.
For women, attraction is different. Women do not have a preference for younger men. In fact, the opposite would seem to be true, especially since women do have a preference for wealth, stability and status. So, using the same example of a 30 year old woman, think about the limits of the non-creepy dating pool. How many 25 year old men will be attractive to her? Not many. But, equally, how many 60 year old men will be attractive to her? Also not many. However, it is probably also the case that not many men in general are attractive to her.
There are so many other confounding factors. Like, for example, the fact that women can't do much to change their level of attractiveness, they're either attractive without trying, or they're not, while for men it's necessary, and often sufficient, to build attraction through hard work (similar to how male in other species do courtship displays).
I find the reluctance to take attraction into account to be, at best, wishful thinking and, at worst, delusion. It makes any analysis like this, frankly, ridiculous.
[+] [-] cigaser|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] durnygbur|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] exporectomy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Broken_Hippo|4 years ago|reply
And isn't "rapid serial monogamy" just dating one person at a time? And this doesn't seem so much different than 20 years ago, though it might look different than earlier times when parents had more direct control over who their daughter dated/married. (and of course folks date most folks for a short time: it takes time to get to know someone - hence 6-12 month relationships happening quite often.
[+] [-] aetherspawn|4 years ago|reply
Personally though ... hard pass.
[+] [-] getpost|4 years ago|reply
https://www.amazon.com/Attached-Science-Adult-Attachment-You...
https://www.amazon.com/Attachment-Disturbances-Adults-Treatm...
[+] [-] vernon99|4 years ago|reply
Because of that both later age dating pool and also dating app pools are in general scewed towards insecure types. Doesn’t mean dating 20yo is a guarantee for a more stable person, but chances are generally higher.
On the other hand, I feel, security increases with the age, but for a very small portion of the population actively working on it (therapy, practices, ceremonies).
[+] [-] actually_a_dog|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kilroy123|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] exporectomy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pm90|4 years ago|reply
I hope that advances in biology will make fertility a choice and allow most human beings to enjoy life without constantly worrying about kids and mates.
[+] [-] enw|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ultrastable|4 years ago|reply
- pointless statistical analyses - creepy transactional views of intimacy - facile evo-psych explanations of sexual attraction - misogynist ressentiment - the plight of the incel as today's #1 social issue - mechanistic proposed solutions to loneliness which will benefit neither the men using them or the women they're used on
am I forgetting anything?
[+] [-] dang|4 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[+] [-] duckmysick|4 years ago|reply
Meta comments about HN relationship threads.
[+] [-] hector124|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notacoward|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wayneftw|4 years ago|reply
Yes, you're forgetting to be curious.
[+] [-] IQunder130|4 years ago|reply
The rest of your points are entirely valid, but this is absolutely not. Every living thing with a brain is in some sense acting as a utility maximizer. If you're not getting something you want out of a relationship, you won't partake it in it. Denying this is delusional.
[+] [-] jari_mustonen|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]