Researchers have challenged the idea that women prefer men who are older than them after finding precisely the opposite in thousands of women who went on blind dates.
Quizzed after their brief encounters, both men and women tended to rate younger dates as more desirable future partners, suggesting men do not have a monopoly on putting a premium on youth.
Psychologists on the study said the results were surprising because academics often presume the global trend for older men in married and cohabiting couples mirrors the preferences of both partners.
The researchers analysed questionnaires completed by more than 6,000 blind daters who used a matchmaking service to fix them up with a potential long-term partner. Overall, men and women were equally more attracted to younger dates, at least after the first meeting, the authors report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Paul Eastwick, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis and the study’s first author, said the finding would be “shocking to many people” because men tend to be older than women in romantic relationships and women generally say they prefer older partners.
Globally, married men are on average four years older than their wives. The smallest gap, in Europe and North America, is less than three years. The largest gap is in sub-Saharan Africa, where men tend to be more than eight years older than their wives. In a recent survey of 130 countries, none had heterosexual couples where men tended to be younger than their partners or even the same age.
US census data shows that in half of married couples, the man is at least two years older than the female, while only 14% have a woman who is older by the same margin. In England and Wales, nearly a third of married couples have an age difference of five or more years.
The study may throw a spotlight on couples with older women, such as the French president, Emmanuel Macron, (47) and his wife and former teacher, Brigitte (71), but the preference for youth in the study was so slight that a wave of Babygirl-style encounters in offices from Slough to Sydney is unlikely to be brewing.
In Halina Rejin’s film, an older CEO played by Nicole Kidman embarks on a torrid affair with a young male intern, earning a two star review from the Guardian, twice.
Eastwick said the effect amounted to daters preferring the younger of two potential partners 55% of the time. “It’s small, and you probably wouldn’t notice it yourself with just the ‘naked eye’, but it makes a difference in the aggregate,” he said.
If women do tend to prefer younger men, why are most women the younger partners in relationships? One theory is that women may find younger men more attractive at first, but the relationships wither when, as the authors write, “the liabilities of men’s youth come to the fore”.
But men may simply get to exert their preferences more often. The age gap in Europe and the US has fallen for decades, while larger gaps persist in regions with less gender equality. Another possibility, Eastwick said, is that an age difference is baked into the dating pool from the start. Because boys mature later, they are older before they are considered viable dating material. Meanwhile older women may take themselves out of the pool “because they don’t want to be a nurse or a purse”, Eastwick said.
A separate study last year found that the older people got, the more they preferred a younger partner. But while men started out with younger partners, women started with older men before shifting to same-aged partners in middle age and younger men in their retirement years.
“There is perhaps some wisdom in broadening one’s horizons,” Eastwick said. “Many men found the women who were older than them to be appealing. So if more people went on dates where the woman was older than the man, I bet you’d start to see more of these “age-reversed” couples.”
