A friend of mine is back on Match.com, after taking a few year hiatus. She says online dating is entirely different in her late forties, than when she began in her early forties. I’m urging her to write an article about some of her funnier stories. Like the guy who had a checklist of physical features that he required in a date, including eye color. He only dated women with blue eyes.
Through the match.com system, she’s dating guys who are much older than she is, because few guys on Match.com are interested in dating women who are the same age. The late-40’s guys say that they want to date women who are 30-45. So, she’s going out for drinks with guys in their 60s.
Will someone explain this to me? Why don’t 47-year old men want to date 47-year old women?
Apt. 11d 
It pisses off my wife.
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My experience on OKCupid was different. More younger guys emailed me, wanted to set up a date, than older guys.
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Looks matter to a guy first, the average 37 year old woman will have her looks longer than the average 47 year old woman, so all other things being equal, men prefer to date younger women. One can dercy that, but right or wrong, it is what it is.
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I think John B.’s comment made me gay.
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Aaaah. Anita Bryant was right.
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Maybe Ti-Grace Atkinson was right. (“Feminism is the theory, lesbianism is the practice.”)
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Because 47 year old women are wise to their bullsh*t?
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I think Laura’s 47 year old friend wants male bullshit. Otherwise, why would she be dating at all?
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Good point! I’m a married woman in my thirties, so I admit I’m not intimately familiar with this species of bullshit….yet!
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My mother-in-law dated via online sites after she was widowed…she had to date men almost 80, though she was in her early sixties at the time. She didn’t want to date much older men because she was afraid getting too attached to someone who would die so many years before her, and being effectively widowed, again. It seems to be backwards, doesn’t it? Since men die earlier on average, women should date younger men…
Has anyone read the nytimes magazine article on the development of a female version of viagra (which I guess actually does contain some viagra)? The comments are just beyond belief…(or maybe it’s just that I am done for the semester and have tons of time to read them).
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I’m 63, wife 61, happy, and I hope this stays ENTIRELY THEORETICAL. I wish she paid a little more attention crossing the street, so I suppose I could find myself suddenly alone. Would I look for a 47 year old? Who really wouldn’t know why Dan Quayle jokes are funny, or that Paul McC was in a band before ‘Wings’?
If I decided I wanted to try and start a second family, I guess I would look for a woman in her 30s. If not (and it seems remote that I would) I would likely look for somebody interesting, and who shared my disdains and liked the same bands and books. Since most people form their bands taste in high school, probably that’s where I try to go.
So: 33 or 63, probably, and not 47. I hope I don’t have to find out.
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Are we certain it’s “guys who are 47 don’t want to date women who are 47,” or is it rather, “guys who are 47 don’t want to date _this_ woman who is 47?” As a staid married woman, I haven’t ever put a toe into the online dating scene. However, I gather there is a picture and self-description involved? Maybe your friend needs to change certain things about the picture and description to appeal to people under 60? Perhaps she should hire an “online dating consultant” to change her dating profile? (and searching for this term brought up an Atlantic article, so there are such folks.)
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On Match.com, you can cruise through the personals and see details about what the person is looking for: religion, education, politics, and age of potential dates. Apparently, it is rare to find a guy who wants to date someone his own age.
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Laura perhaps overstated things a bit, for effect. It’s not that only men in their sixties are willing to date a forty-seven year old. Rather it’s that the vast majority of men are not interested in dating women who are older than they are, even by one year. If a man is 55, his target age range will typically be 35 to 54. If he’s very open-minded, it will be 35 to 55. It’s a rare guy who will say 35 to 58, though they do exist.
My general policy is to not date a man who won’t date a woman at least his own age, because if he won’t I think it says something about him that I don’t like. There are certainly men to choose from in their fifties and late forties and a few in their early forties as well. Though, yeah, plenty of sixty-somethings contact me (which is okay, as long as they are also willing to date other sixty-somethings). There are also a lot of men who are lying about their ages; or else they must’ve had a really, REALLY hard life.
Men discriminate on age and looks; women discriminate on height and income. Though income is easy to lie about, at least in the early stages.
And Dave S., maybe (heaven forbid!), you’d just have to look for a smart, culturally aware forty-seven year old. I mean, who doesn’t get Dan Quayle jokes or know Paul McCartney’s history?
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I wonder how you should interpret those age ranges on a site where everyone lies about their ages.
For what it’s worth, our divorced guy friends don’t care about age as much as appearance – 47 or 50 or 55 isn’t a problem as long as you are a *hot* 47 or 50 or 55 (and interested in sex). The age range is just a proxy, I’m sure.
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I wonder how much of it is actually that men won’t date above their age, and how much of it is that when stating your ideal preferences, it’s easy to be much pickier or more confining than you would be in real life. Very likely most men not looking to start a family would date someone older than them if she were attractive and they had good chemistry, but online dating allows for (requires?) people to state general absolutes they wouldn’t necessarily adhere to. I’m sure any requirements like height, body type, age, income, etc. would go right out the door for the right person, “be the right person” or “have chemistry with me” isn’t something you can list as a requirement for a future partner on a dating site.
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I used to work (7+ years ago) with a large online dating site where I was responsible for a partnership referring mostly people over 50 from our site to theirs. We got reports on what people who had come in from our referrals were searching on.
I guarantee you that a lot, if not most, men over 50 are looking for women about a decade younger, at least online where the stakes of trying are low. (The majority of searches performed by men over 50 were much younger but I will be kind and assume they were window-shopping.) This is a really common problem for single women at or after midlife. It really sucks.
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These are indeed preferences. And I get plenty of emails from men who say their age range is up to 42, for example. They are going outside their preference if they see something they like. But what does it say about you as a man if your stated preferences (and these function as search terms) are for someone younger than you, shorter than you, who makes less money than you do? Though in some ways, it’s a useful filtering tool to have that out there.
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Dude, would you please write that article? I will tell you exactly which editors would gobble it up.
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Dude, how do you expect me to have time for article writing, what with my all my sexagenarian drinks dates?
But if I do it, I’ll hit you up for your list…
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Try to pitch as reality TV. “Groped by a Geezer” could be the new Jersey Shore.
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Other things to consider:
1. Selection effect: are middle aged men on online dating sites significantly different from single middle-aged men not on dating sites? In my generation, I’m pretty sure the answer is no, but I don’t know if it’s as common from people in their late 40s-50s to try online dating, so perhaps the sort of man who is looking for a much younger woman and is unsuccessful in real life is more likely to turn to the internet. Anecdotally, the profiles of men around my age (25-35) usually list age ranges of up to 5-10 years older than themselves, which is similar to women around my age. It’s not uncommon for a 22 y.o. to list 18-30, or a 25 y.o. to list 20-35, so it doesn’t seem like only wanting younger women is a ‘men-in-general’ thing, or an ‘online dating’ thing. Related to this:
2. Gen-X/late Baby Boomer attitudes towards gender: I read somewhere (I think the NY Times, several years ago) that Gen X men were more conservative in their gender views and expectations than either Baby Boomers or Gen Y. Anecdotally this has been my experience, as it seems women in my mother’s generation (early/mid 60s) have not problem finding and dating men of their own generation in the 40s, 50s, and 60s, and in my own peer group, I know as many women with younger boyfriends as I do men with younger girlfriends. Statistically, falling divorce rates can also be an indication of this, as Baby Boomers have a higher divorce rate and my generation is too young to have been married long enough for generational marital trends to appear. This means that falling divorce rates are mainly due to Gen X marital habits.
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“…so perhaps the sort of man who is looking for a much younger woman and is unsuccessful in real life is more likely to turn to the internet.”
Bingo. I suspect that the internet creates the illusion of masses of choice for moderately attractive, moderately successful men, so that they wind up being choosier than their actual stats permit them to be. Presented with all this internet pulchritude, they reach for the stars.
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B.I. — there are LOTS of men and women over 45 on OKCupid. When my profile was active I didn’t go a day without an inquiry email–from men as young as 27 and as old as 70 (I was mid to late 40s at the time). When I did a search limited to 40-55 year old men, there were hundreds of matches within 50 miles of me, and I don’t live in a city, just a big town.
I don’t like dating older men. I find most of them to be too anti-feminist for me; they make casual remarks from a non-feminist basis more often than I can tolerate, and their behavioral expectations are insulting.
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Men and age; women and height.
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Height: NY Times had an article about sperm banks a while ago. They don’t bother getting semen from men shorter than 5’9″ – nobody wants it.
Oddly, no such preference for egg donors – and since roughly half the outcome from egg donation is boys you would think that there would be some preference on donors. Go figure.
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Dave.s. Actually egg donors can’t be taller than 6′ at our clinic, and I requested no one taller than 5’9″.
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@Macaroni – “Actually egg donors can’t be taller than 6′ at our clinic…” Huh? What’s the reason for that policy? If most people want tall sons, doesn’t it make just as much sense to use a tall donor’s egg as it would to use a tall donor’s sperm?
Every man I know over 6′ 4″ has a mom who is at least 5′ 8″ or taller.
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I’m getting close enough to 50 to count it in months. I’m single again started using Match. Although most guys profiles say the age range of younger women, I ignore it and they respond. I’ll wink or message or something. Some of them have reached out to me. I’ve had 10 offers of dates, and gone out on 5. One I liked, he thought I was too conservative (because I hadn’t been to Burning Man. Seriously). Two we had no chemistry. One of them I’m still in touch with, and the other I’ve dated three times. It’s fun. I feel like a kid in some ways. OKCupid is a much better site in my opinion. You can answer a bizillion questions on everything from sex to politics and get a better idea about someone before you meet them. I stick with the high school rule- if we could’ve been in high school together, I’m interested just because of the shared culture. That said, I have a date with a 39 year old tonight. I’m breaking the rules because he is hilarious, and he contacted me.
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My feeling is that the dating sites turn us all into commodities. (This is not an original idea – you can see article on it everywhere.) So of course if you’re shopping, you don’t have to compromise. You can get boots in the exact color you want, with the exact heel height, etc., for the right price, if you shop long and carefully enough. So why not human beings?
I’ve heard a few great success stories too, but honestly this does not keep the process from being thoroughly depressing.
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My feeling is that the dating sites turn us all into commodities.
No way anything that tied to alcohol consumption will ever go that far into the realm of the orderly.
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“My feeling is that the dating sites turn us all into commodities. (This is not an original idea – you can see article on it everywhere.) So of course if you’re shopping, you don’t have to compromise. You can get boots in the exact color you want, with the exact heel height, etc., for the right price, if you shop long and carefully enough. So why not human beings?”
I think that that’s how it feels, but that the results may be disappointing. There’s the illusion of nearly infinite choice, but the reality that 1) the pictures and profiles may be misleading 2) what we like in person may be very different from what we think we like 3) it’s not a one way transaction–we need to be chosen.
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