I'm not there in those interactions but I wonder how much of it is a mismatch between what you desire in a relationship and who you are attracted to in a person.
This is simply the other side of the coin, "online dating divides people heavily into winners and losers"
What is happening is that in the same way most women get more attention than most men, the few men who do get attention get to pick and choose because all of the women are going for them.
They get less desirable as time goes by so when they decide to ‘get serious’ at 35 it is already getting late
My take is that "age gap" relationships are difficult, even somebody who is 50 today grew up in a very different world than someone who is 27 on top of all the other issues about not outliving your partner too much, etc.
There's two metrics here though which influence and confuse one another. Women get plenty of attention on the attractiveness side, but just because you can get laid doesn't mean you can get a relationship. It makes sense that if a lot of people are acting as suitors that you would then down select from this group. The problem is that on the woman's side you don't know if the suitor is looking for a relationship or just to get laid. Without a good metric for that, you can't properly down select and might just end up with a pool of only people that want to get laid. Especially if the primary initial selecting criteria is simply attractiveness (i.e. you're using an app). This is probably unsurprising considering in the digital world we often convince ourselves that we have stronger relationships because of tools like these (e.g. keeping up with friends more because Facebook) but in reality we don't because we are sacrificing the only meaningful tool to build and maintain relationships: physical time together.
For modern society, this return to acting out the ancestral environment makes everything unstable. I predict in my lifetime for depression and suicide to be overtaken in number by extreme bouts of violence and riots.
Okcupids data showed this in nice clear charts.
The numbers invert as you get closer to 40. Single women at 40 are desperate, single men at 40 have a jaded, and quite accurate, view of the majority of women.
Then they meet someone, it's hard to drop everything if there's still more matches you haven't met yet.
Online dating is the death of our species.
What the head wants and what the heart wants ...
I am not sure, if this is a new thing, but there quite some social norms and expectations, that are impossible to fullfill (for both sides), creating unfulfillment and then drama.
I cannot say, that I know many happy couples. I met some and trying to work on my relationship, but it is really, really hard. Much harder, than I thought it is supposed to be.
What about that majority of cases when a woman doesn't want a commit? People grow to sexual age in 18 and can be not committed until much later, so in between they can/should/want to have less consequential encounters, right? So what about that majority of cases, do women still struggle when they are in the same situation - when they would have sex but unwilling to commit?
Sorry for going off on a tangent, but I think this needs correction. By that age, puberty is already over. For girls, onset of puberty is 10, reproductive maturity is 14.
It could be that you mean something else, namely a related social/legal construct, but that does not seem likely to me because of the word "grow".