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When the anecdotes and the data disagree usually trust the anecdotes. I don’t know anyone in same-age relationships. My date today I have 20 years on.
My best guess is this has something to do with who gets married today. Probably some kind of k-shaped market. Amish-Mormon-Orthodox Jew have high early marriage rates along with other religious.
Maybe the dating and marriage markets are different.
Either that or Miami is super skewed.
Most attractive 24 year old women in Miami aren’t dating fifty year old men, or close to it. There is a larger sugar baby / p4p scene in Miami than any other major city in the US adjusted for the population, but it’s still quite limited. I think it’s more likely the circles you’re in. I know a few women with much older parters, but they tend to be average looking women who get out of a long relationship at, say, 32, don’t like the prospects their age, and settle for a much older man with kids already who funds a nice and relaxing rest of their life. A hot 24 year old, in general, knows that a silver fox today is the man whose ass you’re wiping in twenty years, when you’re still in your forties.
I think it’s more of a big city thing. Celebrities seems to have large age gaps even when they both have money.
The economy and a lot of social games feel very k-shaped to me now which would surprise me that age-gaps are shrinking. Along with a huge lack of social skills in younger generations. My gut would still guess a religious reason if it’s shrinking.
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Yeah. They are more likely to get with an early 30s already prettt successful guy
I would guess 8-10 is ideal now. It takes a lot longer for male financial security today. The last friend I went to I believe was 38 to 30 and both have similar parental social class (midwestern SMB owner to Doctor parents).
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Ultraconservative religion tends to push average age at marriage down for men as well as women, because 'no premarital sex' is a heck of a motivator for twenty-one year old young men.
Not to mention the older you get, you slowly age out of everything in general. A lot of the things I used to be obsessed with as a teenager and young adult just no longer have the appeal they used to, for me. I still have a good amount of kick left in me and the range of things I spend my time on anymore has narrowed considerably. The girl I’m currently seeing I used to be something of a mentor to when she was younger and I tutored her in science class in school. Our peer groups were proximate to each other and although she’s younger than me, she isn’t that much younger. The only issue is she’s unsure if she wants children, and that’s the ultimate deciding factor for me.
Marry her and she'll decide she wants a baby.
What makes you confident? She is really into me and we’ve known each other since we were kids.
Make her mom friends, give her the commitment she craves, her 'maybe' which isn't a no will turn into a yes. Isn't this the girl that doesn't want to use birth control? Sometimes in unprotected sex these things just happen.
I’ve known her parents since we were kids. Not extremely well since she’s 7 years younger than me, but we’d see each other all the time growing up and we’d hung out before. She would tail my friend group when we were in the same area and out doing things. Her birthday was this September; and I took her to the beach and planned things for her for the whole day, from morning until night. Like I said my friend group was older than hers so they all have known me but didn’t know me very well, and one of the last times we hung out, my hometown was having a Church related event we went to and had fun with, and I’ve also had dinner since then with her mother (who does remember me) and her step father (who doesn’t remember me very much). We plan to spend more time together though. I’ll definitely consider your input.
When I said 'make her mom friends' I didn't mean make friends with her mother, to be clear. I meant 'make sure she has friends who are moms'.
Ah. Good point. Yeah, she has a few of those too, but I don’t know them. Most of her friends are unmarried but in relationships. Like I said our peer groups are proximate to each other so there’s overlap. Last baby shower I was at, some of her friends were in attendance for my cousin’s new son and I still know them, albeit distantly.
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Most women who sincerely don’t want children will say so outright. IME “unsure if she wants kids” is distinct from “doesn’t want kids” and usually really means “does want kids, but is scared of it, and so only with a guy she very much trusts to support her and do it right”. The flip from “no” to “yes” is different from the flip from “maybe” to “yes”, to put it another way. The biological clock is a real phenomenon too, not sure how old you and she are but generally it seems to kick in by the late 20s or early 30s. It’s a judgment call though, and of course depends on the individual and your impression of her.
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Yeah I know a few friends in their early-mid thirties who tried the 'get married and she'll flip on it' where No turned into 'maybe I guess' but somehow never turned into actually trying to have a child.
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I'm a vibes enjoyer too, but surely in this case the data is straightforward and accurate whereas your anecdotes are just your own personal bubble.
I like the Bezos quote when it applies to messy data with lots of confounders, especially when the data is polluted by political bias.
I don't think that's the case here. One shouldn't just pop this quote out anytime you are surprised by data that conflicts with your priors. What possible reason would there be for this data to be incorrect?
I think this is the key issue. When any research comes out from an institution which has been captured by the Left; and that research happens to support the Leftist narrative; and it contradicts my general observations and experience, I tend to go with my own observations and experience.
As far as age gap marriages go, my general observation is that as far back as I remember, they've always been pretty unusual. And they still seem pretty unusual. I'm talking about large age gaps, like 10 or 20+ years.
As far as same age marriages go, the data here seems to say that in the last 50 years, the average gap has gone from 3 years to 2.2 years. That's not really enough to be very noticeable.
At the same time, in my general experience, most women in their 20s are open to dating men 10, 20, or even 30 years old, provided that the man is otherwise attractive to them (which is kind of a big "if").
Anyway, my instinct is that recent technological changes (social media; easy availability of pornography; smartphone dating apps etc.) are the main drivers behind any recent changes in dating and mating patterns.
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Despite disagreeing with poster above, I think in this case data is missing a fairly straightforward element: Dating preferences are highly localized, Aggregate statistics is highly not. The locality has a lot to do with local culture, local norms, local socio-economic factors, and local attractiveness. The problem cuts both way. Opt-out is making sweeping generalizations projected from his hyperlocal data but the reverse is also true, people making sweeping generalizations from aggregate statistics towards highly specialized local regions.
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Sure but that goes for the reverse. I'm a couple states north of you and I know about 14 long term relationships/marriages with a 1-2 year age gap and only 1 with a 10 year age gap. But I'm in my mid 30s for context and I'm guessing you are over 40, unless...
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I think it'd be a Miami thing where Miami is essentially the PVP meat market realm
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I mean, how much data are you willing to disregard? We have numbers for almost all countries. The country with the highest age gap is Eritrea at 8.5 years. But outside of the Muslim world and Subsaharan Africa, age gaps are small, and nowhere comes close to 20-30 years. And they're not driven by religious sects who marry young. The average age of marriage in all western countries (even those without any Amish, Haredim or Mormons) is around 30 or higher.
The most parsimonious explanation is that you, an old man who dates young women, hang out with other old men who do the same.
When Jeff Bezos was talking about data and anecdotes disagreeing, he was cautioning against measuring the wrong thing. He wasn't instructing people to ignore all data in favour of generalising their own unusual circumstances to the entire country/world.
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