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My very strong suspicion is there’s lots of relationships that are encapsulated by this Mitch Hedberg quote:

“I don’t have a girlfriend. I do have a girl who’d be mad if she heard me say that.”

I don't know about second study or what flaws they had, but that definitely is possible if:

A) the men in the study are having "side chicks" i.e. in sexual relationship with multiple women at the same time.

B) women are more selective with whom they sleep with i.e. they rather not have sex than have sex with a "loser".

It only doesn't make sense if everyone are in monogameous relationships and everyone has sex as often as everyone else.

For the study cited in the post it could be different definitions of "commited relationship" i.e. maybe more of the young men don't view their relationships are serious, but the women who they are dating view it as such. But also I am not surprised that 20 year old women are dating/marrying 30 year old men, but that is seldom the other way around.

So your explanations for why men might have more sexual relationships than women on average is flawed, none of those reasons would change the averages. Imagine if you had 5 men and 5 women, where 1 man had a sexual relationship with all 5 women and the other 4 men had no sexual relationships. The average number of sexual relationships for women would be 1, because each has a sexual relationship with the one man. The average for the men is : (5 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0)/5 = 1 ! So whether or not there is monogomy, or different patterns of behavior, the average remains the same. The only way the two numbers could be different is if you included same-sex relationships, or if there were more men than women (or vice versa).

This isn't calculating averages, it calculates percent of people that are single. Single is a boolean, so in your case 80% of men are single while 0% of women are single.

"Average" can mean median, not mean. If 10 men all have 3 sexual relationships, and 7 women have 1 sexual relationships and 3 women have 10 sexual relationships it evens out.

The question was who is single, not how many partners.

> the average number of relationships for men and women should be identical!

When those studies say average they usually mean median.

Imagine a population with 10 men and 10 women.

3 of the men sleep with each woman once.

The average hookups for both men and women are three each, but the median for men is none while the median for women is three.

This is a contrived example, normally in each population you'd have outliers, but the point is the data presented here shows that "hookups" are more evenly distributed amongst women than men.

seems women's ideal sex frequency is lower than men’s. what to do ?

The market answer is to price relationships with women, weather short or long term. And the market does do this, under various names in increasing cost: hookups, porn, escort, dating, mistress, marriage.

People just don’t always manage risk: children, disease, divorce, alimony, dying married bedroom, aging...

banning / discouraging prostitution favors women over men. But it harms men more than it helps women.

Interestingly, encouraging female promiscuity actually work economically in the same direction as prostitution by adding to the total number of sexual encounters involving women (ie in favor of men, lowering the price of sex with women)

> The data seems to imply a significant number of women are dating men far older than themselves, which just doesn't seem true to me.

My anecdata matches that data. All my female friends are married to older men, in some cases the difference is in the double digits.

Age and height are very hard barriers for women.

> So that statistic really confuses me, how could that be the case? The data seems to imply a significant number of women are dating men far older than themselves, which just doesn't seem true to me.

Having just read a bunch of research coming from psychology on sex differences, this is very plausible to me. Most studies indicated that women wanted to date someone a few to ten years older while men wanted to date someone few to ten years younger.

> It kind of reminds me of a study I heard about a few years back claiming that straight men average three times as many sexual partners as straight women. Except, that isn't possible!

It really depends on whether they were reporting the "mean" or the "median". It's entirely possible for the median values for the two sexes to differ greatly while the mean values are comparable, which would imply that each group had a very different shape to the curve of their data.

One of many example hypothetical sets of shapes that would fit the data would be one where a graph of the males shows a fairly "normal" distribution with the mean and median having similar values, but the female graph was more of an exponential curve, where a small percentage at the top had tons of partners, and the rest of the women drop off the curve fairly quickly, resulting in a much lower median value than the men, but still the same mean value.

While I'm not sure about the sexual partners statistic, I certainly believe the age-range one. This is obviously anecdotal, but as someone with a large-ish social group in their late twenties it is extremely common to see women with partners in a bracket above them. This was true when I was in my early twenties and remains the same now.

Maybe women lie more than men on the question? Or maybe 20% of men are dating more than 1 woman?

For total numbers of partners, it makes sense if you look at the numbers in the top quartile. In other words, men with the most partners have X times as many partners as women with the most partners. You can do that without any multiple partners, just by looking at the top quartile.

But I think there's some other ways it could make sense if you were looking at the average of everybody (perhaps this is just theoretical and there's not much contribution from these to the numbers, tho maybe there is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯): if relationships are not evenly distributed, and if there are multiple partners.

In the first case, say only 30% of men are dating 80% of women. The remaining 70% of men and 20% of women go unmatched in the time period. Now there's two ways this could occur: in serial, or in parallel. In the serial case, 30% of men date 30% of women, until t1, then they all break up, and date the next 30% of women until t2, then 20% of men break up and date the remaining 20% of women until t3. Over t0 to t3 80% of women were paired at some point, and 30% of men were paired. In the parallel case, the 30% of men are dating the 80% of women all at once.

These numbers are just examples, but I think within these parameters and possibilities there could be some truth to how we get these statistics, which I think are totally valid. But I also wouldn't be surprised if there were serial or parallel promiscuity effects on the female side as well, and I think there would be some (but a fewer number, tho more than "society" would expect) of women in the top quartile that would have more, as many or nearly as many partners as the men with the most (female outliers, or female superdaters). Perceived and innate risk of sex as assessed differently between genders, as well as individual gender/hormone influenced preferences, probably account for adjustment as well.

In the modern hookup-based dating culture, you need a smaller number of chads to service a larger number of women.