As it turns out Matthew McConaughey’s infamous line from the movie Dazed and Confused of “I get older, they stay the same age” is actually 100% accurate when it comes to the ages at which men find women to be most attractive in life. Sometimes data can be manipulated to make it say whatever you want, but in this case we’re looking at tens of millions of users from OKCupid, all of whom have no idea that this data was even being tracked for a study, so the data is 100% reliable.
This is what the data says: for women there is a four-year span early of life during which men (at all ages) find them most attractive. To put that more bluntly, as men grow older the women they are most attracted to stay the same age, and that age falls within a four-year-long span of life. Conversely, over the course of their lives women tend to find men most attractive when their ages are more closely matched, so as women age they tend to be most attracted to men who are nearest in age to them. Now that we’ve got that settled let’s get to the numbers…
Christian Rudder is the author of ‘Dataclysm‘ (a book that explores ‘who we are when we think that nobody is looking’), and over on Jezebel he did a guest post to write about the ages at which men find women to be the MOST ATTRACTIVE throughout the course of life, for women those ages are 20, 21, 22, and 23 years of age. Even as men reach 50-years-old they still find 22-years-old to be the sexiest age for a woman, and that’s the age 50-year-old men go after the most on OKCupid. Below are two graphs from that article from Jezebel, the first one shows the age of men and the corresponding ages of the women they find most attractive, and below that is the converse graph of women and the ages of the men they find most attractive:
As you can see, we get older and they stay the saaaame age….20, 21, 22, and 23:
The actual analysis of the age progression is quite fascinating and I HIGHLY ENCOURAGE you bros to check out the guest post over on Jezebel AND to scoop up a copy of ‘Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One’s Looking)‘, which is only $8.98 on paperback if you BUY IT ON AMAZON.