The other week I gave a talk at a Royal Society meeting on “Love actually and in theory: towards a robust science of love”.
I was co-presenting with Professor Craig Roberts of the University of Stirling, and we highlighted the plight of older adults when it comes to mate preferences and mate acquisition (a.k.a. dating).
We presented data showing the state of affairs when it comes to the older dating population in the UK: From midlife onwards, heterosexual women face a progressively less favourable dating market because women increasingly outnumber men, and older men are more likely than older women to be partnered (Office for National Statistics, 2024).
This discrepancy between single men and women comes from a combination of men’s higher mortality rates, men’s greater likelihood of partnering with younger women, and the preference of many women for staying single.
On the last point, older women are increasingly financially independent, and tend to have good social networks (as compared with men), so many may feel less need to be in a couple. If they can’t find what they regard as a decent man, they’ll tend to opt to stay on their own.
But for those women over 50 who would like to find a male partner, they will inevitably face more competition from other women, including younger other women.
This seems a bit depressing—how are we older women supposed to find a man?
But the good news is, there are ways to level the playing field and to stand out to, and attract, one of the good men who are out there.
So first, I need to explain a bit about the concept of “Mate Value”.
Consensual Mate Value (henceforth CMV) or the immediate attractiveness of someone that everyone more or less agrees on, depends on how appealing you are when someone doesn’t know you. For women particularly, this will depend a lot on physical attractiveness and youth, so that older women will tend to be at a disadvantage with CMV.
But over time, as someone gets to know you and your individual quirks and personality, the importance of CMV decreases significantly, and the importance of compatibility, or “Unique Mate Value” increases in your appeal for them.
The person who’s right for you will find you uniquely more and more attractive as they get to know you, and vice versa, of course. You’ll likely have experienced this in the past when you’ve found someone a bit “meh” at first and then gradually come to fancy the pants off them!
Of course, the opposite can happen, too—someone you find gorgeous at the beginning can quickly turn quite ugly if they have some unpleasant personality quirks.
Clearly, the implications of this are that if you’re an older woman, you should be prioritising meeting men in ways that can let the compatibility component of mate value shine through as this will both attract—and make you attracted to—the right person.
And how do we prioritise compatibility?
Clearly, you need to try to meet men where you can get to know them over time.
That could include your workplace if it’s big enough to include a selection of men—is there a staffroom or lunch place at work where you can get talking with people?
Or, of course, you can start going to a new club or class—something you actually enjoy, so you can meet up again and again with people who share an interest with you, and this means you can gradually make friends with men and see where it goes…
Make sure to pick events where there is likely to be a reasonably high proportion of men – to increase your chances of coming across one you like, of course—but also research shows that when there’s a relatively high proportion of men in a group, women are more likely to get the kind of attention they want from them—basically because the men have more competition. It really does affect the way people relate to each other.
So think sports clubs, or music groups—although probably don’t join a choir expecting to meet men. Lovely as choirs are, most of them are 95 percent women.
If you can’t find a club for the particular activity you’re interested in – then why not start your own? It’s really easy to start a Meetup group, for example, and that way you get to make contact with all of the members – it’s the organiser’s privilege.
Your job then, is to get creative about ways to meet, and get to know, men.
But you’ll see the flaw in this. It takes a lot of effort, money, and especially time to get out to series of events like these and get to know people, and also find out if they’re single, never mind available and desirable!
A more efficient way to sort through the dating pool and find potential partners is, of course, online dating. But then the question becomes: How on earth can I prioritise compatibility in a system that blatantly encourages objectification?
Well, there are things you can do to prioritise the compatibility element of your attractiveness, even with online dating, and this will be the topic of my next post. Do sign up for my posts below so you don’t miss it!
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