Gramping Her Style

My friend just joined a dating site for elite creative professionals. Unfortunately, it grabs your age from Facebook, so you can't shave off years. At 50, she's outside of most men's search parameters -- even older men's. What gives?

--Concerned

Aging is especially unkind to straight women on dating sites. At a certain point (usually age 46 on), women find their options narrowed to men who wear jewelry -- the kind that sends the message, "I've fallen, and I can't get up!" A study by psychologist Jan Antfolk and his colleagues looked at sex differences in the preferred age of romantic partners. They found -- as have other researchers -- that "women are interested in same-aged to somewhat older men" throughout their lives. Men, on the other hand, "show a tendency to be sexually interested in women in their mid-twenties," a preference that emerges in their teen years and (sorry, ladies!) remains consistent as men age. And age. And age. Men's continuing attraction to 20-something women makes evolutionary sense, as, the researchers note, "the highest fertility" in women "has been estimated to occur in the mid-twenties." However, when older men are asked to think practically -- when asked not which women are running naked through their mind at the checkout stand but whom they'd have a relationship with -- women more similar in age have a shot. For example, research led by evolutionary social psychologist Abraham Buunk found that "men of 60 years old would marry a woman of 55." Unfortunately, the online dating world -- with the seemingly endless stream of hot 20-something women -- is not exactly fertile ground for practicality and realism. It isn't that men on dating sites who are aging into the grandpa zone could necessarily get the 20-something chickies. But I suspect that these women's mere presence -- hordes and hordes of them -- has what's called an "anchoring effect." This is a term from research on decision-making by psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. They found that a person's "initial exposure" (to a particular price, for example) "serves as a reference point and influences subsequent judgments about value." Accordingly, in online dating, I suspect there's a reference point that gets set -- and it is 22 and bombshellicious and has yet to have a whole lot of meaningful contact with gravity. Putting this in a less depressing way, in seeking male partners, context matters. Your friend will have more interest from men when she's in a room -- in real life -- where the female competition is limited in number and is around her age. She might have better luck in online dating at a site specifically for older people. Sites that aren't for the over-50 crowd only are likely to be a continuing disappointment -- along the lines of "Hmm...could it be that I accidentally set my preferences to 'wants to die alone in an avalanche of her own cats'?!"