I am thinking about a conversation I had with an older woman recently and was just browsing the pages of Match once again and am reminded why I have difficulty believing it when I am told that a womans value goes down with age and a mans value goes up, men preserve their handsomeness better, etc. That may have used to be the case, or it was never true at all.
The other night an older woman, a previously married cougar basically, was telling me that women value younger men for the same reason that men value younger women, and that there is no difference in the way we think. She said just like men like firm skin, good looks and a hard body, women want the exact same thing in men. I asked her about why generally younger women used to marry older men, and she said that it is because in the old days women were more defendant on men financially and don't need to be any more.
They still want a man with money, of course, but they also want a young hard body now too. This woman is Asian and she is in excellent shape for her age. Even though I am younger than she is, I actually found it disheartening that she said these things because I figure that even though I may have squandered my youth, I can still be a cool rich older guy one day who can get chicks, like Sean Connery or something. I used to be re-assured that men keep their sex appeal longer than women do, and that it even goes up with age.
The second thing that makes me doubt the older man=higher value myth is that on match, I actually did the math on several pages of women aged 28-35, and they want a man between 7 years younger and 3 years older than themselves!
I would have thought considering traditional age differences it would have been the other way around. There are three explanations for this. One is that Match has a subset of women with cougar tendencies that are not representative of the world at large. Another possibility is that they are just restricting the upper age range more than they really would IRL just to keep guys 15-25 years older bombarding them with emails. The third and most disheartening is that this is indeed what most women have in their heads that they really want, and we men become just as unattractive to women as we age as women do to men.
The other night an older woman, a previously married cougar basically, was telling me that women value younger men for the same reason that men value younger women, and that there is no difference in the way we think. She said just like men like firm skin, good looks and a hard body, women want the exact same thing in men. I asked her about why generally younger women used to marry older men, and she said that it is because in the old days women were more defendant on men financially and don't need to be any more.
They still want a man with money, of course, but they also want a young hard body now too. This woman is Asian and she is in excellent shape for her age. Even though I am younger than she is, I actually found it disheartening that she said these things because I figure that even though I may have squandered my youth, I can still be a cool rich older guy one day who can get chicks, like Sean Connery or something. I used to be re-assured that men keep their sex appeal longer than women do, and that it even goes up with age.
The second thing that makes me doubt the older man=higher value myth is that on match, I actually did the math on several pages of women aged 28-35, and they want a man between 7 years younger and 3 years older than themselves!
I would have thought considering traditional age differences it would have been the other way around. There are three explanations for this. One is that Match has a subset of women with cougar tendencies that are not representative of the world at large. Another possibility is that they are just restricting the upper age range more than they really would IRL just to keep guys 15-25 years older bombarding them with emails. The third and most disheartening is that this is indeed what most women have in their heads that they really want, and we men become just as unattractive to women as we age as women do to men.
