Dating apps have minimum allowed age ranges. So a lot of people probably do this but only because they can’t set a smaller range. You may think 4 years is plen

Dating apps have minimum allowed age ranges. So a lot of people probably do this but only because they can’t set a smaller range. You may think 4 years is plenty wide for most people, but as a 26 year old male I really only am interested in eg 24-26 or even 25-26. There is also an “Elo”/mmr aspect where even if you are ok with dating someone 27-28, the reality of dating is that those women users will reject you at much higher rates than in 25-26, so including them in your range will lower the frequency with which you’re presented even to women that you do want to date due to lowering your “MMR”. Agreed with other commenters that there are weighted preferences. While I may be ok seeing 22 or 23 year olds and in principle open to dating people in that range, in practice the rate of people I want to date in that range is much lower (but not 0). Same with people older than me. I’d say including people beyond your actually revealed preferences actually indicates that you are open minded, assuming there are at least some people in that cohort that you are actually interested in, because it shows that you are willing to go through a much higher reject rate to find people who you are interested in.