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Article about dating older men psychology:
The Psychology Behind Bridget Jones" and Dating Younger Men. Research predicts some older women face major psychological obstacles in dating. Share on Bluesky.

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THE BASICS. The Science of Mating Take our Are You a Good First Date? Find a therapist near me. Key points. Women who marry between 30 and 37 often have lower-earning spouses than women who marry between 21 and 29. For every year past 30, women must make an additional $7,000 to get equally high ratings from potential mates. Unmarried female business school students deliberately downplay their earnings ambitions with male peers. The new hit movie Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy ignited a controversy over age-gap relationships. It inspired "confessional" accounts by older women dating much younger men. These women usually express a positive experience while declaring that they feel they are breaking some kind of taboo. Source: Vyacheslav Argenberg. But away from the romantic heterosexual fantasy, what does the actual science of age-gap relationships reveal about the male-female dynamic? Does psychological research support the argument that Bridget Jones can beat the "marriage market," which apparently so values youthful looks in women? The conventional wisdom is that heterosexual men can become more attractive to women as they get older because what heterosexual women look for in men (confidence, social skills, wisdom, intelligence, and financial resources) all tend to increase for men as they age. Heterosexual women, the psychological argument goes, are more willing to forgive physical looks, even deficits of masculine aging, in return for other gains that tend to come with the passage of time. But even in the appearance department, men appear to age in a way that isn’t quite so undesirable in many female eyes. Evolutionary psychology contends that these preferences often operate below conscious awareness and are driven by a biological program embedded in our genes, to prioritise opportunities to pass our genes on to future generations. 2.36 Is the Magic Number. Previous research also finds that the age gap between spouses is increasing in the man’s age at marriage. A 30-year-old man may marry a woman only a couple of years younger than himself, whereas a 50-year-old man will, on average, according to some studies, marry a woman ten years younger. An average age gap has been found in men being older than the women they marry by 2.36 years. If men, according to psychological research, are much more "visually loaded" and place a premium on youth and looks, then older men will fancy younger women, and younger women will also prefer older men. All of this appears to leave an aging single woman a little out in the cold. Perhaps this helps explain the popularity of movies like Bridget Jones , in which the plot appears to reassure a large segment of the female population that there is hope for them yet in this apparently brutal marriage market. Are Younger Men Really Saying "Show Me the Money" to Older Women? Academic economists contend that older women might have something to offer in the resource stakes if their own income has gone up because they prioritized their careers over relationships. Older women may now, therefore, offer more financial security to a relatively impoverished younger man, compared with a younger woman. However, the picture is complicated by other research findings, that women believe climbing the career ladder, particularly becoming more financially successful than a possible male partner, might put men off. For example, previous research found that unmarried female business school students deliberately downplay their earnings ambitions when they will be publicly revealed to a class, including male peers. Another study used a speed dating experiment to show men place a much stronger value on attractiveness than intelligence, compared to women. Older Women Actually Marry Men Who Earn Less. A study entitled "Pricing the Biological Clock: The Marriage Market Costs of Aging to Women," published by Corinne Low from the Wharton School of Business, has scientifically and somewhat mercilessly measured the trade-off for women who delay marriage to pursue career goals. THE BASICS. The Science of Mating Take our Are You a Good First Date? Find a therapist near me. This study found that if you plot the relationship between a woman’s income as she gets older and the average income of her husband on a graph, while the woman’s own income increases with the age at which she gets married, her spouse’s income decreases with the age at marriage beyond age 26. Women who marry between ages 30 and 37 are married to lower-earning spouses than women who marry between 21 and 29. Women who marry between 38 and 45 are still married to poorer spouses, the study found. In the second phase of this research, subjects were recruited who were interested in dating via apps and websites, and were shown a series of dating profiles. They were asked for each one, “How interested would you be in dating this person?” The study found that while men may prefer a woman two years younger than himself, they prefer even younger women more. In the case of women, there appears to be an “ideal” two-year age difference where women tend to prefer a man who is slightly older than them, but not very much older. Mating Essential Reads. How Much Does an Older Woman Have to Earn to Appear as Attractive as a Younger Woman? For the first time in the history of attractiveness research, economic analysis can determine the precise impact of aging on women’s marriage market attractiveness and provide a monetary measurement of its cost. The study calculated that for every year a woman ages past 30, she must make an additional $7,000 to receive equally high ratings from potential male partners in this dating website experiment. In other words, a woman has to earn the equivalent of $7,000 of annual earnings per year delay in marriage to not lose out in the marriage market. So, theoretically, if she delays marriage from age 25 to age 35, then she has to be earning 10 x $7,000, which is $70,000 more a year, to remain as attractive to the opposite sex at 35 years old compared to when she was 25 years old. Previous research confirms both genders prefer higher incomes in potential spouses. This study finds that men who are more interested in marriage and want kids have significantly stronger tastes for younger partners. However, men who already have children and, therefore, have less reason to seek a more fertile or younger partner exhibit no preference over age. Are Women Who Postpone Marriage for Their Career Facing a Trade-Off? The study finds that men value income in the marriage market. This means that women face a trade-off between investing in one valuable trait, earning power, and depreciating another, youth and fertility. These findings indicate that men also hear the ticking of the biological clock.













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