Psychologists from the University of Lincoln have discovered that men’s preferences for the age of their partners depend on whether they want to have children. The research was published in the journal Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences.
Researchers studied the responses of 605,000 single people aged 20 to 50. All reported the number of children, the willingness and unwillingness to have them, and the partner’s preferred age.
As it turned out, the age of the partner for people with children was not as important as for participants without children. This effect was more pronounced in younger users, but decreased with increasing age.
“While women’s age preferences are not so strongly associated with having or wanting to have children, men’s tastes vary. Therefore, men without children (or those who want children) rated their age as a more important factor than those with children (or those who do not want children). They preferred younger women,” she said.
According to the authors, this is due to evolutionary psychology. Females invest more physical resources in the offspring. Men, on the other hand, provide more indirect resources such as food and security. Therefore, men value women’s health and reproductive potential and prefer younger women, while women value men’s ability to provide resources.