The wall is real but not for the reasons you think

How to soften the impact of aging on your marriage prospects

Sadly it is true that as women age their sexual market value decreases. Everyone knows this happens, but why it happens is poorly understood.

If you understand the phenomenon, you can minimise its impact on you.

“Jane will be quite an old maid soon, I declare. She is almost three-and-twenty! Lord! how ashamed I should be of not being married before three-and-twenty!”

-Lydia Bennet, Pride & Prejudice

Looks

It is true that people, in general, get less attractive as they get older.

But, speaking broadly, we find it quite difficult to tell how old people are and overindex on cues that don’t change throughout adulthood like big eyes or height. I think this is, in no small part, because we look much younger and more attractive than people of previous generations. Provided you’re successfully combatting wrinkles, grey hairs, and weight gain, how old you look will depend mostly on how you dress and carry yourself.

Increasing youthfulness and labour regulations that cast adults to play teenagers is confusing our ability to assess age.

If you were sexy at 20, you will probably still be attractive in your 30s. I would expect a typical 8 to drop to a 7 over the course of ten years. Nothing devastating should happen to your appearance over this time. If you’ve only just started to think seriously about your looks, you might even hit your attractiveness peak in your 30s. (More on how you can do this later.)

I stole this meme

All the good ones get taken

Every day that passes, eligible bachelors in your age range start dating the women they are going to marry. Men get spit back out onto the apps for three main reasons.

1. There’s something wrong with him

2. There’s something wrong with her

3. Bad luck

As you get older the men who are attractive, want to get married, and don’t have ruinous personality problems get snapped up. What’s left are the men who can’t get girlfriends, aren’t interested in serious dating, and/or have been serially rejected by women after getting into relationships with them. Obviously lots of single older men are still marriage-worthy. Maybe they’ve had a bit of a glow up, matured over the years, or just had some unfortunate sources of incompatibility. But the more time passes, the less likely this becomes. My gut instinct is that it’s not worth wasting your time on men older than 35.

For a while the market gets better as men who aren’t yet ready for marriage become ready and learn to clean their rooms. But then it gets worse as functional and commitment-minded people exit forever.

Men can actually smell her depleted ovarian reserve.

The problem described above should harm men and women symmetrically. The reverse logic should also hold too. The women left in the dating market in their 30s are also, presumably, less able to get boyfriends, less interested in marriage, and/or have been serially rejected by boyfriends.

Unfortunately there are lots of factors which make this asymmetric.

1. While I think the looks-based analysis of the wall is overrated, there is still some truth to it. Women can expect their physical beauty to wane faster than a man’s.

2. Men who want children will sometimes reject older women who they find attractive because they are worried about her fertility – especially if they want several children. A woman will rarely reject a man for being too old, regardless of whether he harbours a ruinous mutational load in his loins.

3. Women who don’t want relationships don’t bother meeting men and stringing them along. If they want to use a man for sex, they can usually engage him without fuss. Men, on the other hand, when seeking short-term dalliances, will often pretend at being a serious suitor and thus, waste a good woman’s time.

4. A bad man is much more ruinous than a bad woman. So the men who get spat out into serial monogamy are more likely to carry a dangerous downside risk.

The most important factor, that reinforces all the above, is that across societies men usually prefer to date women who are younger and women prefer to date men who are older. So as a woman gets older, her potential market shrinks and, as a man gets older, his potential market grows.

Speaking in very general terms, a woman who is in her early twenties usually has all the men her age available to her as well as all the single men in their thirties too. Whereas a woman in her thirties can usually only date men in their thirties – selection effects and all. A man in his early twenties can usually only date women his age – but that’s okay, they haven’t been so adversely selected yet – and when he’s in his thirties he can still date the women in their twenties, as well as the increasingly desperate thirty-somethings.

Women experience this as a sharp decrease in their sexual market value while men, even though they are also getting uglier, will feel as if they’re getting sexier.

I ran a small poll in my first post. It totally confirms my preconceived notions. We, as a culture, love to blame men for their perversions. I think this is why we blame the wall on their shallow desire for youth. But, in my experience, a man is perfectly happy to date women a little older than him, but a woman ‘gets the ick’ if her paramour is younger than her.

In my poll, single men were on average willing to date six years younger and three years older. A small handful of men were willing to date more years older than younger, but they were typically 20 year olds who didn’t want to date under 18s. Some of the older men didn’t even want to date women as old as they were – I assume because they want children.

The women were the opposite of the men but more extreme. The average woman was willing to date two years younger and eight years older. In fact, there were more women who were willing to date 10+ years older than 3 years younger.

Sexual market value is not marriage market value

It’s very difficult to know what your league is.

I can’t see myself accurately in the mirror. I go from thinking I’m a beautiful goddess to thinking I’m a horrible bin raccoon. People say things from time to time but you can’t trust them. My husband once said I’m the most beautiful woman he’s ever met and he definitely can’t be trusted. (He also once said that I look like Julia Roberts, which I think meant “I find Julia Roberts attractive.”)

My friends aren’t going to tell me anything useful. And even when they are unusually candid it’s difficult to assess taste versus objective value on the market.

Sometimes you can learn general rules about beauty and assess yourself based on those. But people are always trying trying to sell you snake oil, so it can feel like playing with astrological charts.

Most women end up defaulting to assessing their attractiveness by working out how many people find them attractive and comparing that yardstick to other women they know. This is a very confusing signal with a lot of dishonesty and noise, but it probably is the best you have.

But, I think this signal leads you to overrate your value on the marriage market place.

First, you can probably sleep with a man who is out of your league but you can’t lock him down. That man will probably pretend to have honourable intentions and, especially if you reject him, you may never know what he was after.

Second, your marriage market value will decline quite quickly. You might be assessing people based on your league a couple of years ago rather than your current one. If you’re too slow to update you might throw away your best option.

Age informed tricks and tips

So, what is to be done?

My best advice is that you shouldn’t waste time. If you’re young, don’t focus on work or having fun. Start dating for marriage now. You’ll have an easier time finding a great man.

The best age of man to target is probably younger than you think. I think you should focus your attention on men in their mid twenties. In my poll, the average age of men in relationships was 31, two years older than the single men, but they met their wives/girlfriends at a median age of 25. I recommend any woman 27 and younger to aim for people in their mid twenties. They are probably not thinking about marriage yet but they will be after a couple of years. And they haven’t hit their peak sexual market value yet so you can buy a great guy at a discount.

If you’re older and want to have children soon, you don’t want to be in a relationship for a few years before you get married. So you are looking for the kind of man who already knows he’s looking for a wife. Ideally you want a man whose friends are starting to get married. I wouldn’t risk dating a man under 28 unless you have evidence that his social group marries young. In person this is easy to find out. Presumably, you’re meeting because you have mutual friends.

Online there are clues you can pick up on. Do any of his pictures show him as someone’s best man? Is he holding a baby? Is he religious?

If you don’t get any of these clues, I would aim for 30. After that milestone birthday, he’s probably thinking about being a serious grown up.

When possible, you should also focus on men who haven’t been single for very long. Forget silly notions about rebounds. Snap up your newly single friends ASAP. Don’t wait for a respectful mourning period.

After some time on the apps, men pick up tricks for optimising their profile and they work out that their league has improved since they were last hawking their wares. Look for clues that the profile is bad but the man is good. If he has a high IQ job and his prompts are generic, he probably isn’t dumb, just poorly versed in Hinge.

If his pictures look like they were taken by or with an ex-girlfriend that probably means he has a recent ex-girlfriend and other women are arbitrarily ruling him out. What better arbitrage could there be?

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Thanks to everyone who took my survey! I’m donating £200 to Give Directly on behalf of an anonymous responder.

Eighty six people filled it out. If I get about a hundred more responses, I will make some nice data viz but at current numbers it looks a bit lumpy.