Dating at 40: women look younger, men look toward 60

At 40, the dating market flips: women look younger

Who does a man in his forties attract when he wants to date? The recurring answer is not flattering: women in their 50s, or straight into the 60s club. Dating at 40 is no longer a symmetrical affair. While a woman in her mid-forties finds that men in their twenties are messaging her, a man the same age watches his natural range shift upward. The diagnosis, put more bluntly than elegantly, is that the age gap has turned upside down.

The age gap: women look down, men look up

The story going around has two sides. On one hand, women in their early forties receiving attention from men twenty years younger, channeled through social media and mobile apps. On the other, forty-something men finding that their target audience has moved into the 50 or 60 age bracket. Some joke that certain crossfit gyms have become the meeting point where those generations cross paths, and others say it with no joke at all: to date at 40, a man has to aim above where he would like. Behind the joke lies a hierarchy nobody signs up for but many describe.

A 65-year-old woman and her calendar full of thirty- and forty-somethings

The case that has kept the conversation going is a personal account: someone says that last year he chatted on Tinder with a 65-year-old woman who confessed to having an overbooking of dates with men between 30 and 45. The figure, impossible to verify and with no statistical value, works as a mirror of the general story. With that number on the table, some argue that past a certain age demand flips and that the average forty-something man competes at a disadvantage. Against it weighs the obvious: an isolated anecdote does not describe a market, least of all one as poorly measured as courtship.

Where do you meet women past 50?

The practical question, the one people actually type into a search engine, is where those women are. The answers circulating point, once past 60, to Facebook Dating, with Badoo as a reference, and with no study behind them: just the experience of those who have tried and tell the tale.

Pay up or get used to solitude

Once the diagnosis is accepted, the way out narrows to two options. One is economic: paying, defended as the smartest choice in the long run. The other is active resignation, the stance of those who claim they learned from an early age to be alone and not to get bored. In between, some wrap it all in a sarracena judgment about the women of that generation and blame feminism, as if a change in the rules of courtship were a collective fault. It is an old reading of a fairly new phenomenon.

With all this, the dating market points downward at 40 and seems to pick up at 60. Statistically dubious consolation, but consolation all the same.