Funny how you write a whole article encouraging age gaps, without even once feeling the need to specify in which direction, because it's understood that the guy has to be older.
As far as I'm concerned, bring on age gaps *in both directions*. Flexibility baby! Let people who would be good together find each other!
The fertility bit *does* strongly imply the woman needs to be the younger one, but if you're not concerned about kids then yes the arguments apply both ways.
Actually, one of the more impactful offhand conversations I had in life stemmed from a friend pointing out that in dating everyone overfits on irrelevant legible metrics, when the only important things are illegible, so you might as well "variety date" and get outside your usual bounds because all the legible stuff is essentially irrelevant to relationship quality, happines, and duration.
I find all this fertility talk vaguely nauseating. Fertility is a society-wide statistic, like GDP per capita. Imagine a guy who thinks of his own work in terms of what it does to his country's GDP/capita, that would sound downright psychopathic. Human ways of thinking about work are more in the ballpark of contributing your skills and being appreciated and compensated for it.
Yet work still is orders of magnitude more transactional than reproduction. Just think of the traditional term, in all its glorious cheesiness: children are the fruits of love. That's what it's all about in human terms. Love, and a context where it can be expressed, grow, and bear fruit, which then means hard but (probably) rewarding work. Couples used to be devastated when they were not getting pregnant after a few years — some still are, there's room for all.
My generation (late gen-X), and those that came after, grew up in a growing sense of alienation from all this. Many of us, myself included, did not have kids, not because of some top-down ideological choice, but because the motivation just didn't happen. The field, or the collective vitality in which those fruits would have grown, was suddenly a bit dry. It looks like the basic joy of being alive is in crisis, which is why there's a huge resurgence in introspective therapy, mysticism and meditation. I did that too, that's what you rationally do when the wider world fails to provide meaning and belonging.
I don't want to overstate my case. If you are, or fancy yourself an economist, it's perfectly rational to worry about statistical measures like GDP/capita, and if you are or fancy yourself a sociologist, the same goes for total fertility rate and so on.
But I worry when wonky sociologist-adjacent opinions turn into policy, and institutions of the state come up with the idea that they should be pushing fertility up by the power of bureaucracy. Because I can't think of anything more likely to increase this sense of alienation, than a system that learns to view its people (and especially its women) like breeding cattle.
I think part of the issue here is that 'fertility' is used both in the societal statistical sense, but also in the 'personal probability of making a baby with X certainty across Y instances of sex during the correct period', and, indeed, the essay uses the term in both ways.
My point was the simpler, personal one; young people, and especially young women, conceive more easily when they want to. I am much less convinced than PB that having kids earlier would lead to substially *more* children; I can see the arguments either way. I think many people have fewer children than they consider ideal for non fertility reasons.
> But I worry when wonky sociologist-adjacent opinions turn into policy, and institutions of the state come up with the idea that they should be pushing fertility up by the power of bureaucracy. Because I can't think of anything more likely to increase this sense of alienation, than a system that learns to view its people (and especially its women) like breeding cattle.
You're raising a really great point, skaladom.
Still, a lot of countries in the world are in the position of "you have to do something at the bureaucracy / country level, or your culture and people will no longer exist in the future."
You may or may not be happy to learn that nearly every country-level intervention tried has done basically nothing to move and keep the needle up anywhere, from $10k bonuses per child, to 3 *years* of paid parental leave, to free IVF and free daycare. And of course "having kids for the glory of the motherland" is *right* out as an inspiration.
But this isn't just a problem for one country, this is a problem for EVERY developed country in the world. Modern developed country mores are so profoundly anti-natal that every country that adopts them is basically on track to go voluntarily extinct, and it's affecting every developing country, too (Malaysia and the Philippines both, for example, are under 2 tfr). It's even affecting Africa, so immigration is less of an answer than you'd hope:
This is complicated, because a lot of the enlightened social welfare things we want to keep up in the developed world like scientific research, education, Social Security, elder care, government funded healthcare, and the like, are all funded by working people.
The "dependency ratio," or number of workers contributing taxes versus children and retirees, keeps getting worse, and will continue to get worse as TFR's are below 2, for basically every developed country in the world. As in, it is extremely unlikely you or I will get Social Security, we've been paying into a dead system our whole lives. It is extremely likely that Medicare and Medicaid will have to contract, as well as scientific research, education, and more. It is extremely likely that ALL services provided by the government will have to contract, across every developed country in the world.
How and where that contraction happens is a matter of politics, but old people vote in high numbers and will outnumber the young, so it's pretty ripe for some unpleasant social dynamics.
But say you keep all the old age stuff - now you have to cut things like scientific research and education, and make things even WORSE for the dwindling generations of children, and whacking fertility still more.
It's a death spiral. That's why bureaucracies have to worry about it.
Yeah I like to bring attention to what's happening at the individual human level because it gets overlooked when people just try to identify with humanity or or a whole civilization. Talk of alienation is certainly not meant to be a comprehensive theory, but I think there's something there. It fits well with the data that government interventions are not working, which suggests it's not a simple question of economic incentives.
If you want to talk macro... I take my cue from ecology. No natural variable can keep going up or down forever, let alone exponentially so. So in the broadest sense, the fact that we're headed for our first peak in a long time is a relief. And it's surely better that it comes from an endogenous, behavioral reason, than something more dramatic like nuclear war, pestilence or a hard bump against carrying capacity of the environment. We still have to see how we best navigate the shift, and yes, uncomfortable social dynamics are probably coming. At this point I see lots of pundits claiming to know how we best do that, but I'm skeptical that we can really know. I'm also not very convinced that we have the collective agency to choose a path, given how we're still doing pointless wars, which both kill people and further damage the environment. I think it's more realistic to say that we'll fumble our way through and culture will have to evolve accordingly.
> Yeah I like to bring attention to what's happening at the individual human level because it gets overlooked when people just try to identify with humanity or or a whole civilization.
Good call - it's definitely a neglected area here. And all the likely solutions are pretty outside the Overton Window, so we actually have to pay a lot more attention to this than we are now to move the needle.
> If you want to talk macro... I take my cue from ecology. No natural variable can keep going up or down forever, let alone exponentially so. So in the broadest sense, the fact that we're headed for our first peak in a long time is a relief.
Definitely. And when I look at the actual numbers (going by memory), it's something like 10.3B by 2050 and going down to 10.1B by 2080 - prospectively, there's barely any problem from a macro perspective for at least a hundred years. As you point out, it's probably a good thing to reach that peak, and it's even a plausibly unsustainable peak.
But I think that's from the perspective of "natural biological feedback loops," when the primary risks and regulators aren't biological. We're tarted up apes with nukes and bioweapons and (soon) AI.
The increased cultural and societal stress is a big deal - potentially existential if there's enough conflict about it.
I agree the amount it could contribute to existential "solutions" is probably small, but it's definitely a factor, and we're probably headed into a time of more conflict overall even without the age / dependency dynamics.
> I'm also not very convinced that we have the collective agency to choose a path, given how we're still doing pointless wars, which both kill people and further damage the environment. I think it's more realistic to say that we'll fumble our way through and culture will have to evolve accordingly.
100% - but you know, I think we're going to at least try to do better via some combination of better ideas and better execution.
After all, think of the cost in human sufferiing from that "fumbling." One way or another, there's going to be big shake ups going on in basically every country.
Even if you can only choose a 10% better path, that multiplied by tens or hundreds of millions of people is a big deal.
And an even bigger deal if we manage to avoid it without existential risks or genociding a bunch of people / age groups.
Thanks for writing such an interesting and thought provoking piece! I can see the logic for the majority of the arguments although I would probably disagree on:
1) women can just start their careers at 35. I think this ignores the energy and drive that someone can dedicate to a career in their 20-30s vs their 30-40s, such as working night shifts, putting in extra work at home etc., especially since a lot of careers require front-loading of work to get ahead, and even if the kids are older, most women are still going to have a ten year old using this example who they would want to play an active role in raising which probably wouldn't work alongside their early career.
Conversely, I think the older man is not interested in enjoying a misspent youth with his younger partner. His nightclub days are probably long gone for example. Are you imagining that its specifically the sort of quieter, top 15% maturity young girls who are going for these relationships? Or are you imagining it as a more universal cultural shift? Thanks again! Loved this essay.
Appreciate the positive feedback, provoking thought and discussion is literally why I write, so glad to hear it hit the mark.
1). Yeah, you're right - unfortunately "time" and "energy" are time bound and one way, and there are tradeoffs. I personally think a lot of people in a "fully informed and retrsopectively choosing" scenario would be happier spending a limited quantum of time/energy on their own children, who carry your lineage and culture and values forward through time and into future generations, versus career, which generates income for some company who probably won't even be around in 20 years (S&P average tenure 12-20 years depending on industry). But you know, I agree a lot of careers can be genuinely interesting and rewarding in themselves, and it can be a real tradeoff.
2). Yeah, I think the best we could ever hope for is expanding the percentage of age gap relationships to something like 10-20% of the population at most, because you need fairly strong selection on both ends for it to make sense.
But in terms of energy and misspent youth, speaking as somebody in such a relationship, I'm the one pushing to get her into the gym more often or go on a run with me, and taking us out onto an impromptu dance floor at a place with live music, or to a concert with my crazy light up shoes and goggles - energy and joie de vivre can definitely be one of the "highly selected" criteria!
I think that's really a personality thing, plenty of women in their twenties don't like the night club scene and / or would prefer a "fine dining and wine" sort of scene (which we do, too), and it's really down to your interpersonal dynamics and how your personalities and ways you like to spend time match up.
What happens when you are 50 and your husband is 70? You want to go out and socialize, you're near the peak of your career, while your husband is completely unable to keep up with you physically and wants to go to bed by 10 PM at the latest. That's not even mentioning the nightmare scenario of a slow, gradual slide into dementia. Your choices are to act as an unpaid caregiver for a decade, spend huge amounts of money on long term medical care, or divorce and have your former spouse kicked off your insurance and thrown to the wolves.
I mean, ideally if you chose a spouse with a 20 year gap, he had money and you're able to pay for caretakers if it's as bad as all that?
Also, women can go out and socialize without their spouses, aren't "girls nights out" a thing?
You're describing non-central cases, morbidity is pretty flat from 50-70 - this graph is from Dan Lieberman (Harvard physiologist and anthropologist who studies health and exercise):
In theory I agree. I would not reject a fit, wealthy, handsome older man. I think societally this would be better for birth rates. In practice, most men who are still single at age 30+ have something wrong with them (fwiw I think this is true of women too). Your focus also seems to be more about men as providers - as men/women are pretty much paid the same, relationships become more about common interests and whether the person is fun to be around rather than the amount of wealth a man has accumulated. Regardless of how fit or attractive an older guy is, if he’s a decade+ older, we’re probably not going to have much in common.
Men and women are literally 1:1. You can’t change that by dating older men unless you are saying that older men should trade their first wives in when they get old.
A dating pool comprised of men aged 30+ and women aged 20+ has more women than men. That’s just math. The only way it could balance out to 1:1 is if you remove some women from the dating pool (I.e. men are dumping their older first wives).
My point was, existing trends already have notably more single men in the 18-29 age band than women (see link), so empirically, we're not matching up 1:1 and don't need to worry much about that constraint.
1) if you're arguing for age gaps based on men's attraction to youth, then you aren't arguing for stable, long-lasting relationships, you're arguing for temporary marriages of convenience where the women is continually traded in for a younger model as she ages out of her beauty, most probably also abandoning the kids and leaving the mother as sole provider. Instead of endorsing stable families based on love and commitment, you're endorsing broken homes based on temporary convenience and transactionalism.
2) Most older men just aren't that attractive to women! Yes, we see a lot of "high-status" examples, but that's because basically the only thing that can reliably overcome a man's age (as well as the inherent ick factor of an older man refusing to age gracefully) is an extreme level of wealth - and we're talking 1% levels here. Of course then, this model is more workable for celebrities than it is for normal human beings.
> 1) if you're arguing for age gaps based on men's attraction to youth, then you aren't arguing for stable, long-lasting relationships, you're arguing for temporary marriages of convenience where the women is continually traded in for a younger model
You're pointing to what you perceive as the majority case here, but I don't think it is the majority case, and it would be difficult to identify a data set that let us tease that out and confirm how often it happens (maybe Census CPS, but I don't think there's any way to see prior marriage links in that data set?).
Even if it WERE the majority case - which I doubt - I don't think it's dispositive. **Most** relationships don't last, regardless of age gaps. Before you (or anyone) got married? Every single one of those relationships ended. If you look at dating, it's even worse - how many dates does it take to get to a relationship? Should we tell people to avoid dating and relationships at all, because the failure rate is so high?
Even for marriage, the overwhelming majority of marriages end or were a bad idea - ~42% vintage divorce rates and at least half again that for "one or both partners net unhappy." And that failure rate is *today's* failure rate, where age gaps are ~1.5 years - you can't pin those failures on age gaps.
Should we tell men to avoid marriage in it's entirety, because there's a majority chance that it will end or be a bad idea, and because women intitiate 70% of divorces?
I don't think so. I think relationships are just intrinsically hard, and maybe weren't meant to last for ~50 years on average, because in the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness (EEA) everyone is dying so often that practically no relationship lasts that long.
And to your second point - if all the age gap dudes have money, then no, mom is NOT the sole provider - every rich dude with a v2 or v3 trophy wife and kids definitely pays large amounts of child support. Those kids will still be able to have the latest gadgets, get Mercedes' when they turn 16, and get into the expensive private schools, don't worry.
> Most older men just aren't that attractive to women! Yes, we see a lot of "high-status" examples, but that's because basically the only thing that can reliably overcome a man's age
Sure, this is totally fair. I don't want anyone of either gender to date anyone they're not attracted to - I'd just like people in the aggregate to keep a more open mind about them, because there are Pareto optimal choices out there where both sides of the relationship would be happier and better off for finding each other, but that generally won't happen unless people are at least open to them.
It might prospectively help ameliorate some societal problems we have right now, too, so it's win / win.
> Of course then, this model is more workable for celebrities than it is for normal human beings.
I've personally known plenty of people in relationships with 10+ year gaps in real life from non 1%-ers, but maybe I'm in a weird social bubble?
I don't think this is just a 1% or better thing - wealth isn't the end all, be all. Women are attracted to men for a number of reasons. Were the older men in the relationships I know about fitter and better looking than average men their age? Yes, absolutely. But so are all the women I see in relationships in my social circles too, it's just matching, not super-compensating.
Sorry to hear that dating has been difficult for you - it's definitely one of those "actually important to do" things with a 99.99% failure rate, and it's really frustrating to be in the middle of all that.
I wish I had advice to offer everyone on how to find honest, generous men that want to pair up long term and take good care of you, but that's more or less the hardest thing to find for every woman.
I think a lot of it relies on how you meet - the dating apps are strongly adversely selected, especially when it comes to more attractive and higher status men. If you think about it, any man like that can easily pair up if he wants to - so any attractive / high status man still on the app pretty much doesn't want to, he's having fun, so no rush. Meeting in person is generally better, but also harder than swiping for an hour.
On the desire to have kids and skip the rat race, you might find CHH's article on why trad singles aren't finding each other interesting:
Great idea.
I'm currently on the lookout for a woman in her eighties, preferably extremely wealthy, with no living heirs. Obama had the right idea: https://youtu.be/HwOjvmiBfDg?si=JeTg0wcM9gBNNtyc
Funny how you write a whole article encouraging age gaps, without even once feeling the need to specify in which direction, because it's understood that the guy has to be older.
As far as I'm concerned, bring on age gaps *in both directions*. Flexibility baby! Let people who would be good together find each other!
The fertility bit *does* strongly imply the woman needs to be the younger one, but if you're not concerned about kids then yes the arguments apply both ways.
Yeah, totally agree here.
Actually, one of the more impactful offhand conversations I had in life stemmed from a friend pointing out that in dating everyone overfits on irrelevant legible metrics, when the only important things are illegible, so you might as well "variety date" and get outside your usual bounds because all the legible stuff is essentially irrelevant to relationship quality, happines, and duration.
I find all this fertility talk vaguely nauseating. Fertility is a society-wide statistic, like GDP per capita. Imagine a guy who thinks of his own work in terms of what it does to his country's GDP/capita, that would sound downright psychopathic. Human ways of thinking about work are more in the ballpark of contributing your skills and being appreciated and compensated for it.
Yet work still is orders of magnitude more transactional than reproduction. Just think of the traditional term, in all its glorious cheesiness: children are the fruits of love. That's what it's all about in human terms. Love, and a context where it can be expressed, grow, and bear fruit, which then means hard but (probably) rewarding work. Couples used to be devastated when they were not getting pregnant after a few years — some still are, there's room for all.
My generation (late gen-X), and those that came after, grew up in a growing sense of alienation from all this. Many of us, myself included, did not have kids, not because of some top-down ideological choice, but because the motivation just didn't happen. The field, or the collective vitality in which those fruits would have grown, was suddenly a bit dry. It looks like the basic joy of being alive is in crisis, which is why there's a huge resurgence in introspective therapy, mysticism and meditation. I did that too, that's what you rationally do when the wider world fails to provide meaning and belonging.
I don't want to overstate my case. If you are, or fancy yourself an economist, it's perfectly rational to worry about statistical measures like GDP/capita, and if you are or fancy yourself a sociologist, the same goes for total fertility rate and so on.
But I worry when wonky sociologist-adjacent opinions turn into policy, and institutions of the state come up with the idea that they should be pushing fertility up by the power of bureaucracy. Because I can't think of anything more likely to increase this sense of alienation, than a system that learns to view its people (and especially its women) like breeding cattle.
End of rant, thankyouverymuch!
I think part of the issue here is that 'fertility' is used both in the societal statistical sense, but also in the 'personal probability of making a baby with X certainty across Y instances of sex during the correct period', and, indeed, the essay uses the term in both ways.
My point was the simpler, personal one; young people, and especially young women, conceive more easily when they want to. I am much less convinced than PB that having kids earlier would lead to substially *more* children; I can see the arguments either way. I think many people have fewer children than they consider ideal for non fertility reasons.
> But I worry when wonky sociologist-adjacent opinions turn into policy, and institutions of the state come up with the idea that they should be pushing fertility up by the power of bureaucracy. Because I can't think of anything more likely to increase this sense of alienation, than a system that learns to view its people (and especially its women) like breeding cattle.
You're raising a really great point, skaladom.
Still, a lot of countries in the world are in the position of "you have to do something at the bureaucracy / country level, or your culture and people will no longer exist in the future."
You may or may not be happy to learn that nearly every country-level intervention tried has done basically nothing to move and keep the needle up anywhere, from $10k bonuses per child, to 3 *years* of paid parental leave, to free IVF and free daycare. And of course "having kids for the glory of the motherland" is *right* out as an inspiration.
But this isn't just a problem for one country, this is a problem for EVERY developed country in the world. Modern developed country mores are so profoundly anti-natal that every country that adopts them is basically on track to go voluntarily extinct, and it's affecting every developing country, too (Malaysia and the Philippines both, for example, are under 2 tfr). It's even affecting Africa, so immigration is less of an answer than you'd hope:
https://imgur.com/a/vTS66RI
This is complicated, because a lot of the enlightened social welfare things we want to keep up in the developed world like scientific research, education, Social Security, elder care, government funded healthcare, and the like, are all funded by working people.
The "dependency ratio," or number of workers contributing taxes versus children and retirees, keeps getting worse, and will continue to get worse as TFR's are below 2, for basically every developed country in the world. As in, it is extremely unlikely you or I will get Social Security, we've been paying into a dead system our whole lives. It is extremely likely that Medicare and Medicaid will have to contract, as well as scientific research, education, and more. It is extremely likely that ALL services provided by the government will have to contract, across every developed country in the world.
How and where that contraction happens is a matter of politics, but old people vote in high numbers and will outnumber the young, so it's pretty ripe for some unpleasant social dynamics.
But say you keep all the old age stuff - now you have to cut things like scientific research and education, and make things even WORSE for the dwindling generations of children, and whacking fertility still more.
It's a death spiral. That's why bureaucracies have to worry about it.
Yeah I like to bring attention to what's happening at the individual human level because it gets overlooked when people just try to identify with humanity or or a whole civilization. Talk of alienation is certainly not meant to be a comprehensive theory, but I think there's something there. It fits well with the data that government interventions are not working, which suggests it's not a simple question of economic incentives.
If you want to talk macro... I take my cue from ecology. No natural variable can keep going up or down forever, let alone exponentially so. So in the broadest sense, the fact that we're headed for our first peak in a long time is a relief. And it's surely better that it comes from an endogenous, behavioral reason, than something more dramatic like nuclear war, pestilence or a hard bump against carrying capacity of the environment. We still have to see how we best navigate the shift, and yes, uncomfortable social dynamics are probably coming. At this point I see lots of pundits claiming to know how we best do that, but I'm skeptical that we can really know. I'm also not very convinced that we have the collective agency to choose a path, given how we're still doing pointless wars, which both kill people and further damage the environment. I think it's more realistic to say that we'll fumble our way through and culture will have to evolve accordingly.
> Yeah I like to bring attention to what's happening at the individual human level because it gets overlooked when people just try to identify with humanity or or a whole civilization.
Good call - it's definitely a neglected area here. And all the likely solutions are pretty outside the Overton Window, so we actually have to pay a lot more attention to this than we are now to move the needle.
> If you want to talk macro... I take my cue from ecology. No natural variable can keep going up or down forever, let alone exponentially so. So in the broadest sense, the fact that we're headed for our first peak in a long time is a relief.
Definitely. And when I look at the actual numbers (going by memory), it's something like 10.3B by 2050 and going down to 10.1B by 2080 - prospectively, there's barely any problem from a macro perspective for at least a hundred years. As you point out, it's probably a good thing to reach that peak, and it's even a plausibly unsustainable peak.
But I think that's from the perspective of "natural biological feedback loops," when the primary risks and regulators aren't biological. We're tarted up apes with nukes and bioweapons and (soon) AI.
The increased cultural and societal stress is a big deal - potentially existential if there's enough conflict about it.
I agree the amount it could contribute to existential "solutions" is probably small, but it's definitely a factor, and we're probably headed into a time of more conflict overall even without the age / dependency dynamics.
> I'm also not very convinced that we have the collective agency to choose a path, given how we're still doing pointless wars, which both kill people and further damage the environment. I think it's more realistic to say that we'll fumble our way through and culture will have to evolve accordingly.
100% - but you know, I think we're going to at least try to do better via some combination of better ideas and better execution.
After all, think of the cost in human sufferiing from that "fumbling." One way or another, there's going to be big shake ups going on in basically every country.
Even if you can only choose a 10% better path, that multiplied by tens or hundreds of millions of people is a big deal.
And an even bigger deal if we manage to avoid it without existential risks or genociding a bunch of people / age groups.
>Imagine a guy who thinks of his own work in terms of what it does to his country's GDP/capita, that would sound downright psychopathic.
Why? A doctor should not, but a banker should? I mean, what other social use is a banker but boosting GDP?
Thanks for writing such an interesting and thought provoking piece! I can see the logic for the majority of the arguments although I would probably disagree on:
1) women can just start their careers at 35. I think this ignores the energy and drive that someone can dedicate to a career in their 20-30s vs their 30-40s, such as working night shifts, putting in extra work at home etc., especially since a lot of careers require front-loading of work to get ahead, and even if the kids are older, most women are still going to have a ten year old using this example who they would want to play an active role in raising which probably wouldn't work alongside their early career.
Conversely, I think the older man is not interested in enjoying a misspent youth with his younger partner. His nightclub days are probably long gone for example. Are you imagining that its specifically the sort of quieter, top 15% maturity young girls who are going for these relationships? Or are you imagining it as a more universal cultural shift? Thanks again! Loved this essay.
Appreciate the positive feedback, provoking thought and discussion is literally why I write, so glad to hear it hit the mark.
1). Yeah, you're right - unfortunately "time" and "energy" are time bound and one way, and there are tradeoffs. I personally think a lot of people in a "fully informed and retrsopectively choosing" scenario would be happier spending a limited quantum of time/energy on their own children, who carry your lineage and culture and values forward through time and into future generations, versus career, which generates income for some company who probably won't even be around in 20 years (S&P average tenure 12-20 years depending on industry). But you know, I agree a lot of careers can be genuinely interesting and rewarding in themselves, and it can be a real tradeoff.
2). Yeah, I think the best we could ever hope for is expanding the percentage of age gap relationships to something like 10-20% of the population at most, because you need fairly strong selection on both ends for it to make sense.
But in terms of energy and misspent youth, speaking as somebody in such a relationship, I'm the one pushing to get her into the gym more often or go on a run with me, and taking us out onto an impromptu dance floor at a place with live music, or to a concert with my crazy light up shoes and goggles - energy and joie de vivre can definitely be one of the "highly selected" criteria!
I think that's really a personality thing, plenty of women in their twenties don't like the night club scene and / or would prefer a "fine dining and wine" sort of scene (which we do, too), and it's really down to your interpersonal dynamics and how your personalities and ways you like to spend time match up.
What happens when you are 50 and your husband is 70? You want to go out and socialize, you're near the peak of your career, while your husband is completely unable to keep up with you physically and wants to go to bed by 10 PM at the latest. That's not even mentioning the nightmare scenario of a slow, gradual slide into dementia. Your choices are to act as an unpaid caregiver for a decade, spend huge amounts of money on long term medical care, or divorce and have your former spouse kicked off your insurance and thrown to the wolves.
I mean, ideally if you chose a spouse with a 20 year gap, he had money and you're able to pay for caretakers if it's as bad as all that?
Also, women can go out and socialize without their spouses, aren't "girls nights out" a thing?
You're describing non-central cases, morbidity is pretty flat from 50-70 - this graph is from Dan Lieberman (Harvard physiologist and anthropologist who studies health and exercise):
https://imgur.com/a/4I2vTKb
In theory I agree. I would not reject a fit, wealthy, handsome older man. I think societally this would be better for birth rates. In practice, most men who are still single at age 30+ have something wrong with them (fwiw I think this is true of women too). Your focus also seems to be more about men as providers - as men/women are pretty much paid the same, relationships become more about common interests and whether the person is fun to be around rather than the amount of wealth a man has accumulated. Regardless of how fit or attractive an older guy is, if he’s a decade+ older, we’re probably not going to have much in common.
Men and women are literally 1:1. You can’t change that by dating older men unless you are saying that older men should trade their first wives in when they get old.
Younger men already enjoy specifically higher “single” rates, and this is likely to increase:
A dating pool comprised of men aged 30+ and women aged 20+ has more women than men. That’s just math. The only way it could balance out to 1:1 is if you remove some women from the dating pool (I.e. men are dumping their older first wives).
Oh sorry, I see the graph I attached didn't post in my last comment - guess you can do that in notes but not replies. It's here:
https://imgur.com/a/Wt6RwTa
My point was, existing trends already have notably more single men in the 18-29 age band than women (see link), so empirically, we're not matching up 1:1 and don't need to worry much about that constraint.
Couple of criticisms here:
1) if you're arguing for age gaps based on men's attraction to youth, then you aren't arguing for stable, long-lasting relationships, you're arguing for temporary marriages of convenience where the women is continually traded in for a younger model as she ages out of her beauty, most probably also abandoning the kids and leaving the mother as sole provider. Instead of endorsing stable families based on love and commitment, you're endorsing broken homes based on temporary convenience and transactionalism.
2) Most older men just aren't that attractive to women! Yes, we see a lot of "high-status" examples, but that's because basically the only thing that can reliably overcome a man's age (as well as the inherent ick factor of an older man refusing to age gracefully) is an extreme level of wealth - and we're talking 1% levels here. Of course then, this model is more workable for celebrities than it is for normal human beings.
> 1) if you're arguing for age gaps based on men's attraction to youth, then you aren't arguing for stable, long-lasting relationships, you're arguing for temporary marriages of convenience where the women is continually traded in for a younger model
You're pointing to what you perceive as the majority case here, but I don't think it is the majority case, and it would be difficult to identify a data set that let us tease that out and confirm how often it happens (maybe Census CPS, but I don't think there's any way to see prior marriage links in that data set?).
Even if it WERE the majority case - which I doubt - I don't think it's dispositive. **Most** relationships don't last, regardless of age gaps. Before you (or anyone) got married? Every single one of those relationships ended. If you look at dating, it's even worse - how many dates does it take to get to a relationship? Should we tell people to avoid dating and relationships at all, because the failure rate is so high?
Even for marriage, the overwhelming majority of marriages end or were a bad idea - ~42% vintage divorce rates and at least half again that for "one or both partners net unhappy." And that failure rate is *today's* failure rate, where age gaps are ~1.5 years - you can't pin those failures on age gaps.
Should we tell men to avoid marriage in it's entirety, because there's a majority chance that it will end or be a bad idea, and because women intitiate 70% of divorces?
I don't think so. I think relationships are just intrinsically hard, and maybe weren't meant to last for ~50 years on average, because in the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness (EEA) everyone is dying so often that practically no relationship lasts that long.
And to your second point - if all the age gap dudes have money, then no, mom is NOT the sole provider - every rich dude with a v2 or v3 trophy wife and kids definitely pays large amounts of child support. Those kids will still be able to have the latest gadgets, get Mercedes' when they turn 16, and get into the expensive private schools, don't worry.
> Most older men just aren't that attractive to women! Yes, we see a lot of "high-status" examples, but that's because basically the only thing that can reliably overcome a man's age
Sure, this is totally fair. I don't want anyone of either gender to date anyone they're not attracted to - I'd just like people in the aggregate to keep a more open mind about them, because there are Pareto optimal choices out there where both sides of the relationship would be happier and better off for finding each other, but that generally won't happen unless people are at least open to them.
It might prospectively help ameliorate some societal problems we have right now, too, so it's win / win.
> Of course then, this model is more workable for celebrities than it is for normal human beings.
I've personally known plenty of people in relationships with 10+ year gaps in real life from non 1%-ers, but maybe I'm in a weird social bubble?
I don't think this is just a 1% or better thing - wealth isn't the end all, be all. Women are attracted to men for a number of reasons. Were the older men in the relationships I know about fitter and better looking than average men their age? Yes, absolutely. But so are all the women I see in relationships in my social circles too, it's just matching, not super-compensating.
Sorry to hear that dating has been difficult for you - it's definitely one of those "actually important to do" things with a 99.99% failure rate, and it's really frustrating to be in the middle of all that.
I wish I had advice to offer everyone on how to find honest, generous men that want to pair up long term and take good care of you, but that's more or less the hardest thing to find for every woman.
I think a lot of it relies on how you meet - the dating apps are strongly adversely selected, especially when it comes to more attractive and higher status men. If you think about it, any man like that can easily pair up if he wants to - so any attractive / high status man still on the app pretty much doesn't want to, he's having fun, so no rush. Meeting in person is generally better, but also harder than swiping for an hour.
On the desire to have kids and skip the rat race, you might find CHH's article on why trad singles aren't finding each other interesting:
https://www.cartoonshateher.com/p/why-arent-trad-singles-finding-each