Up until pretty recent history women were not breadwinners, and unless a man inherited his money he had to enter the workforce and earn enough to support a wife before marriage. This meant that for women, choosing a husband was also choosing your entire financial future. Money and stability had to be the first priority. For men choosing a wife, looks and youth could be prioritized. Makes sense! But it does not make sense to ascribe this dynamic to biology.

I think where this idea comes from is conflating mating strategy with mate choice. Female social animals are often smaller and less aggressive, and will choose older males as mates if there is food/resource scarcity and those males can provide them with security and resources. That is mating strategy.

They will also sneak off to mate with the most genetically fit males if the opportunity presents itself safely, or exclusively choose those males if they have the choice and there is no resource scarcity. That is mate choice.

Mating strategy is a transactional approach in response to your social position, mate choice is the biologically driven “love/lust” approach.

Fertility and genetic fitness, which boils down to youth and beauty, are the biological mating drives, and the idea that men are more attracted to fertility than women is mind boggling. If anything, because women can have fewer children at a higher cost to their well being than men, they should have an even smaller window of attraction than men, with a decline in attraction with age that matches the decline in male fertility.

But of course, that’s not what we see. If we go off the okcupid study, Instead women generally show a preference for men around their age throughout their lifetime, while men show a strong preference for women in their early twenties throughout theirs. Neither of these preferences reflect ideal windows of fertility in the opposite sex. So if this stark difference isn’t biologically driven, what are the social factors contributing?

personally, I think this difference is mostly due to women valuing reciprocal attraction much more highly than men. It’s the same reason women do not hire sex workers. Women are also raised with so many Disney-fied stories of romantic love that I think many of us shove down and ignore any sexual desires that go against the idea of “a love that lasts a lifetime ”. And lusting after young dudes who probably aren’t super interested in you is definitely not part of that fairytale lol. In that way it seems like men are more honest and pragmatic about these desires (not in the reciprocal attraction aspect, but in the admitting they exist one)

Edit: reposting as cmv, don’t think it showed up earlier when I posted incorrectly as “discussion”