Because this isn't a simple binary; not every good-looking 25 year-old is going to find the single-richest person, the friends I'm talking about are all rich an

Because this isn't a simple binary; not every good-looking 25 year-old is going to find the single-richest person, the friends I'm talking about are all rich and successful (and have the related qualities that signal money and class without looking nouveau riche)[1], and the girls they date are good-looking but not perfect 10s. On top of that, the subpopulation of 30 y/o women I mentioned are the ones who are still single at 30. There are a good amount who didn't fully go the casual-sex route and skewed more towards finding a relationship: those are the type of people that my friends are dating. (Though even within an individual, it's not like people make an all-or-nothing decision between flings and deeper relationships: it's just a preference, and an ongoing decision about where to put one's energy). As you allude to, I slightly switched the topic of conversation from "average men" to "my rich social circle". What I was getting at is that these same people, despite being pretty rich in their early 20s too, now have almost the same situation that women in their early/mid-20s have: lots of power in the dating market. The implication, to me, is that men who are more average in desirability will have correspondingly less luck but still experience that shift in power, as women their age who have fallen off the desirability cliff "settle" for them. I've noticed the same myself: I'm rich and I'm told I'm funny and reasonably good-looking, but I'm also not very tall; I did a little dating in my early 20s, and was in a long-term relationship for much of my 20s, but the last few years (late 20s), is the first time I've had a pretty decent clip of getting openly hit on by women without putting any effort into it. I don't want to make this sound like I have it all figured out; it's just something I've noticed in my own experiences and the experiences of all my friends, and I have a model that explains it reasonably well (and comports with the broader science on sexuality that I'm aware of). [1] It doesn't escape me how this sounds, and if I'm being honest, I find class-signaling to be pretty gross. But it's just a reality I've observed in the corner of the dating market that I have visibility into through my own and my friends' experiences.