Contributed by: Erika on Saturday, February 20 2010 @ 10:08 am
Last modified on
Popular online dating website OKCupid recently dug into its member base and asked the question: why are men not seeking women of their equal age or older? According to their post-Valentine’s Day blog entry, the typical user on their site aged 22-30 states age preferences for female matches to be younger. Now, that was worth a deeper look by their staff and what they found might surprise you.
OKCupid’s user base peaks at about 7 million users aged 24 and drops significantly as age increases. This could simply be a factor of OKCupid having developed into an online dating site that caters to a younger crowd or that membership over age 30 decreases because people in those age brackets are in relationships/married. So herein lies the question that OKCupid set out to answer: why are older women on the site having a more difficult time matching-up than their male counterparts?
It all comes down to age preferences stated in the male user’s online dating profile, they say.
While the male to female user ratio on OKCupid stays fairly balanced across the age brackets, men consistently indicate in their user profiles that they prefer dating younger women. While they do indicate that they are open to older women, it’s with much narrower limits. For example: OKCupid’s average 31-year-old male user sets his age range preference for women as 22 to 35 – a full nine years younger but a mere 4 years older. And here’s the shocker – as male age increases, age preferences toward younger women skew even further. They give the example of their median 42-year-old male user typically looking for women up to fifteen years younger but only three years their senior.
Interestingly enough, when OKCupid flipped the coin, they found women to be much more tolerant of age ranges. Women on the site typically message those younger and older than themselves with equal frequency. They also become more open to dating older men after age 29 according to messaging practices tracked on the site.
So with the skew in view, where does that leave men and women in the quest to find a match when age enters the equation? Check out the second installment of this article: OKCupid Says Men Are Looking for Older Women and Just Don’t Know It. For more information on the dating site, check out our review of OkCupid.