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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 shoul

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: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/08/20/a-profile-of-single-americans/ 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/2020/ https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/2...): 18-29: 17% (Avg. age ~24) 30-49: 28% (Avg. age ~40) 50-64: 21% (Avg. age ~57) 65+: 17% (Avg. age ~72) 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 5y ago
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.
- drno123 5y ago
  Young women are more attractive because, through evolutionary selection, men find fertile women more attractive. Genes which caused men to find unfertile women more attractive quickly died out.
  - drewcoo 5y ago
    > men find fertile women more attractive Do they? How can they tell? Do they ask to see the eggs first? > Genes which caused men to find unfertile women more attractive quickly died out. Die out? I don't think genes work that way. But maybe language is a stumbling block here. I will grant you that fertile women have been fertilized historically because tada - here we all are! But that does not in any way mean that all sex was for the sake of fertilization. Or even between semen- and egg-bearing people. And the amount of non-child-producing sex both today and historically seems to suggest that fertility is not the primary concern, let alone cause for non-childbearing sexual urges to "die out."
    - zdkl 5y ago
      You're replying social sciences to a biology comment, where the mechanism described above can absolutely be shortened to "genes die out" in a given population pool.
    - kragen 5y ago
      I can't tell if you just missed the point, lack the background knowledge to understand it, or are pretending not to understand it for some kind of political reason, so I'll try to explain it in a different way. Men who only sought sex with other men* or with postmenopausal women may have had a lot of sex, as you say, but they also have no descendants (unless a fertile woman raped them at some point, or they were born late enough to donate to a sperm bank). So their genes died out. Even a fairly small inclination in this direction is enough to produce a very large difference in gene prevalence after many generations. In only 200 generations, an allele that gives you an only 5% lower chance of having children will decrease in its relative prevalence by a factor of thirty thousand (0.95 ** 200 = 3.5e-5). That is the way genes work. Of course most sex among humans (and hominins in general) doesn't produce offspring, and in humans and bonobos (but not chimpanzees) most of it can't possibly produce offspring. That's fine. Sex isn't a limited commodity. Sex is abundant. But hominins, especially humans, are choosy about who they have sex with, and any alleles that can get them to be choosy in a way that will increase their chances of reproducing will become more abundant over time. Is 200 generations a long time? Hominins are about 300,000 generations old. Australopithecines are about 200,000 gnerations old. Homo is about 100,000 generations old. Homo sapiens is about 10,000 generations old. Agriculture and Catal Hoyuk are about 500 generations old. So I don't think it is. Does that help? ______ * Unless those other men they were having sex with were trans men equipped with a fertile uterus, anyway.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  This is of course true in a very general sense, but both men and women can radically up their game if they genuinely care to and are halfway-smart about it. There are lots of things about how to relate to others in a friendly and self-assertive wrt. sexuality that society does a very bad job of teaching the general public about, and that can make a real difference.
  - kungito 5y ago
    Yeah, if you are smart enough, you could compensate in other ways, but is seems the reality is different. People aren't smart enough on average to compensate for the simple factors which seem to guide people make the decisions.
- mettamage 5y ago
  Man, am I glad I ignored this kind of stuff and always took shots that I felt were way out of my league when I was in my early twenties. I approached 5000+ women. The women with the most amazing personalities tended to stick, some of them being models and way out of my league. Now that I am thinking about it, my chance of anything going somewhere was 0.1%. People say it’s a numbers game. I’d like to more specifically say: go for volume and then more volume. Meet lots and lots of people in general. Social adventures are more fun than purely looking for love. My point is: have these low chances (0.1%) been taken into account? I have many stories where people won’t believe it’s true. But when you have a big n, your range gets wider as well.
  - durnygbur 5y ago
    This costs money and consumes time so is difficult while working full time also one has to be in geographic location where people are curious and willing for "social adventures". In Europe that's maybe a dozen cities in total? So you basically have to sustain yourself in most expensive locations with most brutal housing markets, without income. Then in Europe even within 300km radius there is language barrier and people stereotype heavily based on your ethnicity, quickly grade your desirability, even if it's a native EU ethnicity. In short - it all flows towards hotspots, nothing redistributes of trickles down.
    - ben_w 5y ago
      On the other hand, most Europeans speak more than one language precisely because of how close the next country with a different one is. Why do you estimate only dozen suitable cities? And why go by number of cities rather than population sizes? Cambridge (UK) was a good place with smart, fun, and adventurous people, and has a population about 27 times smaller than Berlin.
      - durnygbur 5y ago
        > Europeans speak more than one language If your skillset is English, German, and French then you're good to go. Over 30 official languages on the continent produce countless subsets though. Polish, Lithuanian, and Hungarian will not get you far even though knowing these three would be an enormous achievement. > And why go by number of cities rather than population sizes? > Cambridge (UK) I mean locations like Amsterdam, Barcelona, Balearic Islands maybe Munich and Madrid, and few more. British society is heavily class-based, not only language is important but accent as well. What chance to socialize I have in Cambridge as a foreigner not studying in or not associated with Oxbrige?
- odiroot 5y ago
  > The reality is that young women are more attractive to men, with youthful looks, an innocence and potentially more submissive. That's a really weird way to look at things. Especially the last claim. You're disregarding the whole biological angle. Male partners (whether consciously or instinctively) look for a healthy female to produce "the best" offspring possible. Males are biologically able to produce a healthy offspring for much longer than females. And considering menopause, there's an absolute deadline for producing any offspring.
  - watt 5y ago
    Considering the overpopulation of earth, not sure why anyone would prioritize "producing offspring". Maybe someone driven by very base biological urges, sure. But if you just put some thought into it: why bring a child into world with rather grim, resource-constrained future?
    - imtringued 5y ago
      Giving birth to exactly two children isn't going to destroy the planet.
    - hyperdunc 5y ago
      If biological evolution in humans isn't displaced by radical technological change then this attitude will be selected against.
    - the_lonely_road 5y ago
      Rough googling produces 89.6% of people become parents and it stands to reason that some of that remaining 11% would have wanted them but died first or were sterile. The numbers suggest the vast majority of people prioritize producing offspring for whatever reason. It’s likely 10,000 reasons not one. Social pressure, for the grandparents, because everyone else is, because I want to pas son my genes, because she/he was too hot to worry about protection that night, etc. The largest single issue with your comment though is that most of us probably don’t see the future as a grim resource constrained fact. Life over here in the West in 2020 is pretty good, historically speaking and in absolute terms. Even for the worst amongst us. We can backslide quite a bit and still be looking positivity towards our descendants expected quality of life. As for the developing world, in most of those places the quality of life has been a rocket ship during their lifespans so it would be rough for them to come that conclusion as well I would imagine. I understand climate change is scary and recognize it could be the end but when faced with existential dread like that some people lay down and curl up while most people stand up and push forward harder. There are 1,000 ways we all die but billions of possibilities so I personally choose to live in today and face just the 1 death that comes for us when it comes rather than all 1,000 possibilities every time some hack journalist wants to clickbait up their revenue that quarter.
odiroot 5y ago
> Life expectancy between sexes varies by 3-5 years It's close to 10 years for my country. Very common in post-communist states.
watwut 5y ago
Average age difference in married couples in USA is 2.3 years. So in fact, it matches your criteria.

Guthur 5y ago

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.

drno123 5y ago
Young women are more attractive because, through evolutionary selection, men find fertile women more attractive. Genes which caused men to find unfertile women more attractive quickly died out.
- drewcoo 5y ago
  > men find fertile women more attractive Do they? How can they tell? Do they ask to see the eggs first? > Genes which caused men to find unfertile women more attractive quickly died out. Die out? I don't think genes work that way. But maybe language is a stumbling block here. I will grant you that fertile women have been fertilized historically because tada - here we all are! But that does not in any way mean that all sex was for the sake of fertilization. Or even between semen- and egg-bearing people. And the amount of non-child-producing sex both today and historically seems to suggest that fertility is not the primary concern, let alone cause for non-childbearing sexual urges to "die out."
  - zdkl 5y ago
    You're replying social sciences to a biology comment, where the mechanism described above can absolutely be shortened to "genes die out" in a given population pool.
  - kragen 5y ago
    I can't tell if you just missed the point, lack the background knowledge to understand it, or are pretending not to understand it for some kind of political reason, so I'll try to explain it in a different way. Men who only sought sex with other men* or with postmenopausal women may have had a lot of sex, as you say, but they also have no descendants (unless a fertile woman raped them at some point, or they were born late enough to donate to a sperm bank). So their genes died out. Even a fairly small inclination in this direction is enough to produce a very large difference in gene prevalence after many generations. In only 200 generations, an allele that gives you an only 5% lower chance of having children will decrease in its relative prevalence by a factor of thirty thousand (0.95 ** 200 = 3.5e-5). That is the way genes work. Of course most sex among humans (and hominins in general) doesn't produce offspring, and in humans and bonobos (but not chimpanzees) most of it can't possibly produce offspring. That's fine. Sex isn't a limited commodity. Sex is abundant. But hominins, especially humans, are choosy about who they have sex with, and any alleles that can get them to be choosy in a way that will increase their chances of reproducing will become more abundant over time. Is 200 generations a long time? Hominins are about 300,000 generations old. Australopithecines are about 200,000 gnerations old. Homo is about 100,000 generations old. Homo sapiens is about 10,000 generations old. Agriculture and Catal Hoyuk are about 500 generations old. So I don't think it is. Does that help? ______ * Unless those other men they were having sex with were trans men equipped with a fertile uterus, anyway.
zozbot234 5y ago
This is of course true in a very general sense, but both men and women can radically up their game if they genuinely care to and are halfway-smart about it. There are lots of things about how to relate to others in a friendly and self-assertive wrt. sexuality that society does a very bad job of teaching the general public about, and that can make a real difference.
- kungito 5y ago
  Yeah, if you are smart enough, you could compensate in other ways, but is seems the reality is different. People aren't smart enough on average to compensate for the simple factors which seem to guide people make the decisions.
mettamage 5y ago
Man, am I glad I ignored this kind of stuff and always took shots that I felt were way out of my league when I was in my early twenties. I approached 5000+ women. The women with the most amazing personalities tended to stick, some of them being models and way out of my league. Now that I am thinking about it, my chance of anything going somewhere was 0.1%. People say it’s a numbers game. I’d like to more specifically say: go for volume and then more volume. Meet lots and lots of people in general. Social adventures are more fun than purely looking for love. My point is: have these low chances (0.1%) been taken into account? I have many stories where people won’t believe it’s true. But when you have a big n, your range gets wider as well.
- durnygbur 5y ago
  This costs money and consumes time so is difficult while working full time also one has to be in geographic location where people are curious and willing for "social adventures". In Europe that's maybe a dozen cities in total? So you basically have to sustain yourself in most expensive locations with most brutal housing markets, without income. Then in Europe even within 300km radius there is language barrier and people stereotype heavily based on your ethnicity, quickly grade your desirability, even if it's a native EU ethnicity. In short - it all flows towards hotspots, nothing redistributes of trickles down.
  - ben_w 5y ago
    On the other hand, most Europeans speak more than one language precisely because of how close the next country with a different one is. Why do you estimate only dozen suitable cities? And why go by number of cities rather than population sizes? Cambridge (UK) was a good place with smart, fun, and adventurous people, and has a population about 27 times smaller than Berlin.
    - durnygbur 5y ago
      > Europeans speak more than one language If your skillset is English, German, and French then you're good to go. Over 30 official languages on the continent produce countless subsets though. Polish, Lithuanian, and Hungarian will not get you far even though knowing these three would be an enormous achievement. > And why go by number of cities rather than population sizes? > Cambridge (UK) I mean locations like Amsterdam, Barcelona, Balearic Islands maybe Munich and Madrid, and few more. British society is heavily class-based, not only language is important but accent as well. What chance to socialize I have in Cambridge as a foreigner not studying in or not associated with Oxbrige?
odiroot 5y ago
> The reality is that young women are more attractive to men, with youthful looks, an innocence and potentially more submissive. That's a really weird way to look at things. Especially the last claim. You're disregarding the whole biological angle. Male partners (whether consciously or instinctively) look for a healthy female to produce "the best" offspring possible. Males are biologically able to produce a healthy offspring for much longer than females. And considering menopause, there's an absolute deadline for producing any offspring.
- watt 5y ago
  Considering the overpopulation of earth, not sure why anyone would prioritize "producing offspring". Maybe someone driven by very base biological urges, sure. But if you just put some thought into it: why bring a child into world with rather grim, resource-constrained future?
  - imtringued 5y ago
    Giving birth to exactly two children isn't going to destroy the planet.
  - hyperdunc 5y ago
    If biological evolution in humans isn't displaced by radical technological change then this attitude will be selected against.
  - the_lonely_road 5y ago
    Rough googling produces 89.6% of people become parents and it stands to reason that some of that remaining 11% would have wanted them but died first or were sterile. The numbers suggest the vast majority of people prioritize producing offspring for whatever reason. It’s likely 10,000 reasons not one. Social pressure, for the grandparents, because everyone else is, because I want to pas son my genes, because she/he was too hot to worry about protection that night, etc. The largest single issue with your comment though is that most of us probably don’t see the future as a grim resource constrained fact. Life over here in the West in 2020 is pretty good, historically speaking and in absolute terms. Even for the worst amongst us. We can backslide quite a bit and still be looking positivity towards our descendants expected quality of life. As for the developing world, in most of those places the quality of life has been a rocket ship during their lifespans so it would be rough for them to come that conclusion as well I would imagine. I understand climate change is scary and recognize it could be the end but when faced with existential dread like that some people lay down and curl up while most people stand up and push forward harder. There are 1,000 ways we all die but billions of possibilities so I personally choose to live in today and face just the 1 death that comes for us when it comes rather than all 1,000 possibilities every time some hack journalist wants to clickbait up their revenue that quarter.

odiroot 5y ago

> Life expectancy between sexes varies by 3-5 years It's close to 10 years for my country. Very common in post-communist states.

watwut 5y ago

Average age difference in married couples in USA is 2.3 years. So in fact, it matches your criteria.