I did a piece for Jezebel that runs today: The Dating Paradigm Shifts for Women in their 30s. It begins:
“This is so weird,” my friend Nicole -– a successful 33 year-old entertainment executive — tells me. “Ever since I started dating, I went for older guys, sometimes much older. But now I’m head over heels for a 29 year-old. It’s crazy, but right now, it just makes sense.”
While the “cougar” (the older woman who pursues significantly younger men) is at least partly an overhyped media creation, there’s some evidence that for one age group in particular, this is a real emerging trend. More than a few women in their late 20s to mid 30s who generally dated older men are now switching to going out with younger guys. While the stereotypical cougar is a woman in her 40s with a boyfriend little more than half her age, these women are still in their 30s going out with guys just a few short years younger than themselves…
29 and 33? That’s only a four year difference. This is a big difference when you’re 13 and 17 but not that big once you’re 29 and 33. It’s practically the same age group.
Agreed, not a big difference at all. But it is a very significant difference psychologically if you’re a woman who’s always assumed you’d be with a guy who was older than you.
So basically these women spend their early years exclusively dating men older then them because they’re immature and must “date up.” Then they hit their thirties and the pool of men older than them is of a pretty low quality because most eligible men have settled down by that point in their lives, and so they start aiming younger to capture the still eligible set that their smarter peers were dating (and eventually married) all along, except doing it back when they were the same age as these guys and not half a decade or more older.
Some pretty nasty generalizations about men in their 40s here, but I have no doubt it played well at Jezebel! Hey, “played well at Jezebel,” I’m a poet and didn’t even know it.
Seriously? This is something new? Probably a solid 20 percent of my grandmother’s friends were in marriages where the woman was a few years older than the man. She was born a LONG time ago.
And the generalizations about men in their 40s are pretty much the same as those that some entitled American men apply to American women.
No matter what your preferred gender, there are going to be more single 20-somethings than single 30-somethings. The rest of it comes across as merely repeating stereotypes, and self-aggrandizing by putting down your peers. You’re better than this.
JFP, you weren’t the intended audience. Thanks for snarking.
But JFP, he did research!
He asked some of his Facebook friends! It’s a trend ! It’s science!
(It couldn’t be that still-single women at that age are rapidly running out of options among their peers. Nah. Hugo would never turn a bug into a feature when it comes to women and his relentless white-knighting quest. )
I have always preferred men a few years younger than me. They were just hotter and more fun. In teh past, men more than 3 or so years younger thanme seemed liek children. As I get older, thsi is less and less teh case so that I would now consider dating a guy 10 years younger than me if he were willing.
And FWIW, in my family there is a long history of women partnering with younger men. My mother had always dated men 3-5 years younger and her mother (my grandmother) was 12 years older than my grandfather and even my great-gandmother’s mother (great-great grandmother) was some 10 years older than my great grandmother’s father when they got married over a hundred years ago. As such, I still can’t quite get my head around men who write women off for being a year or two older than them. Ridiculous.
There was a discussion on another thread here about looking for the keys under the streetlight, or finding what you’re looking at, rather than what you’re looking for, as concerns convenience sampling from Facebook.
Hard to interpret what it means in any case. My take: a little bit of “How Stella Got Her Groove Back.” I’m not buying into the “so weird” surprising thing, it just looks like its women on the cusp here who are the ones looking for the spring fling.
Um, Aetius? Those ‘settled older men’ would, in your worldview, have settled down either with the younger women who were dating them in the first place, or with slightly older women. Please come up with a revenge-fantasy scenario that is internally consistent.
I am not sure this is really a super unusual thing or a trend, but maybe more a thing people are taking more notice of. My mothers parents were exactly the same age. My fathers parents, well, his mom was 7 years my grandfathers senior- and even back when they got married (in the 30′s) she was not the only woman of her kind who had married a younger man- also, well, post WWII, there were FEWER generally considered Men Of Age to Be Married in VARIOUS parts of the world, which could play into why many women of that era married older/younger men- especially amid, oh, Jewish European Communities?
The majority of my female friends range between the ages of mid-20′s to mid 40′s- some date/are married to men who are older, some younger, some the same age- and some actually don’t care because well, they like the person and age is secondary. It’s pretty much the same amid my female friends- though almost universally it seems that people in my age group-male and female- do tend to get married, if they get married- later in life than say, oh, my parents generation, same goes for having kids. That actually SEEMS to be a noted and proven trend…I am not so sure women dating/marrying younger men really is, but rather something people are just now starting to notice…