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Comment by flax | Hacker News Reader

I'm no statistician, but the quoted data in the article is interesting.

> When looking at age and gender together, 63% of men under 30 describe themselves as single, compared with 34% of women in the same age group.

Who are the women dating, then? If it's older men, then you'd expect an inverse inequality among the over 30s. No idea if that's the case. If it's other women, and that's new, that's interesting in itself. Maybe it's a subset of under-30 men who are dating multiple women? Or maybe it's definitional, with the women counting looser relationships as "not-single" than the men do? Finding out what is going on there would be far more interesting than baseless speculation about AI girlfriends.

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Then you should ask these men/women yourself and see. I did ask a while ago some of my younger friends why they aren’t dating, listing several reasons but I believe the answer to your question is feminine hypergamy

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypergamy

If you don’t want to ask directly or know no one ask, just give a glimpse on dating issues in platforms like tiktok and you can quickly draw a conclusion about that.

Globally the average age gap is around 5-10 years. Western countries are outliers in having smaller age gaps around 2-3 years.

Most of the single mid 20s women I know in the UK wouldn't openly speak about it, but in private they'd prefer a partner 5-10 years older. Obviously there is a sampling bias there.

I think the difference is mostly explained by people of equal age meeting at school, University, etc bringing the average down. Purely conjecture though.

If 1 man is non-exclusively dating 2 women, that balances out the numbers. It could also be half exclusive couples, and the other half 1:4 ratio.

This is happening a lot more often with digital dating because there’s a lot more inequality within men than women.

The average guy can’t date the average girl.

Instead the unexceptional guy gets very few dates, the exceptional guy gets so many dates he can’t choose commitment, and women find dates easily but struggle to find committed relationships.

I haven't looked into that Pew Research, but that WaPo graph on "virginity" is so bad that it should be instantly ignored:

1. I guarantee you you won't find it in any WaPo article.

2. It's specific in scope, ignoring gay partners and those that lost their virginity before turning 18.

3. While it does come from GSS, it doesn't include margins of error, which are pretty big.

4. It stops at 2018. If it continued, you'd see a drop.

Here's the same graph with 3 and 4 are corrected: https://ibb.co/pJQjnSN

My first question when I saw this graph. Are they talking about just the US? Just Europe, or the world?

Women prefer older men, generally. Older men are better at signaling success and stability which, if a woman is interested in breeding, is important. If a woman is interested in a career and has opted out of breeding, then the age difference doesn't come into play as much. You’re probably (subconsciously) putting more emphasis on women chasing careers over breeding, since that’s also been the western social mantra lately, but thats not really representative of reality once you actually dig in.

I also think older men are less likely to say weird stuff like this, is this not pseudoscience at best?

It’s not pseudoscience, it’s a very heavily studied phenomenon. It may be the first time you’re encountering it, though, so probably seems weird.

https://labs.la.utexas.edu/buss/files/2019/03/Why-is-age-so-...

> We review voluminous evidence for mate preferences for age and the substantial and varied behavioral sequelae of those preferences. These include (a) in actual marriage decisions, men choose younger wives, and women choose older husbands, on average in all of the dozens of cultures studied; …

This piece states it as a known fact:

https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2015-55834-001

> Women have evolved to seek an older mate, however, research has shown negative opinions toward these relationships if the age-gap is significant. …

but there's a lot of data to counter this as well (the age gap being quite small in the US for example), for much of human history older men have preferred younger women... and young women didn't typically have much say in the matter

The median age gap for a first marriage in the USA has been ~2 years since at least the 1950s (though the ages themselves have gone up) [1]. It was higher in 1890 than it is today.

[1] https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/visualizat...

Globally, not just US. The US has been heavily feminized since the first half of the 20th century. It makes sense that the age gap would decrease about 1 generation after legal suffrage. Thats my point, in societies where breeding is valued, you have larger age gaps. In societies where breeding is not valued, or perhaps more accurately, where careers take a front seat, the age gap diminishes.

Israel is, I think, the poster child for pro-natal developed countries. Their average age gap is only 0.4 years larger than that of South Korea or Japan [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_age_at_fi...

Can we all agree to not call it "breeding"?

I think most likely there is selection bias in how they conducted the survey.

Weird replies. It is obvious the women are dating men over 30.

Who are women over 30 dating then?

Yes, there are more single older woman over 65 but that is more due to the fact that men tend to die earlier. I don't think that women generally prefer partners that are ten years older. Certainly not in the 30s or forties.

So assuming the vast majority of relationships are not poly, the math does not add up.

Now it could be simply faulty data or differences in reporting based on gender but I would still love the hear a proper explanation of the data.

My personal observation is that both man and women tend to be similarly lonely when it comes to long term relationships but who knows. Would be glad if someone could prove me wrong.

they're dating the same men.

> If it's older men, then you'd expect an inverse inequality among the over 30s.

That's not necessarily true. With a preference for older men, the in equality could hold true but lessen for each successive age group, until women begin outliving their partners and the inequality finally inverts at the upper end. Which is at least a well known effect anecdotally.

The same data source [1] gives a similar split for LGB men and women (62% vs 37%).

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/02/08/for-valen...

they're dating other women, the same men, and more willing to consider an interaction a relationship than the partner is.

those are the consensus of possibilities established the last time those stats were posted, in several other forums.

all of that, and people lie on these kinds of surveys. also, people lie to themselves constantly about relationship status. 'we are currently fucking' is not objectively definitive and is open to personal interpretation.

and don't forget conditioning/momentum - "sorry i have a boyfriend" is the automatic reflexive response of a 20-something female, for a huge variety of contexts, regardless of whether it's true or not.

it's like 10 different statements rolled into one.

either way, i suspect that yes, a lot of young women are all in 'relationships' with the same subset of guys in the 25-45 age range who are cleaning up the scene and loving life. there's never been a better time to be an attractive male.

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