There is a certain squeeze that happens for women past 40: many eligible men their own age are looking to date younger. Yet they’re being pursued by men 5, 10, 15 years younger.
What gives? Are these men actually serious?
While that particular Thread is actually pretty heartwarming and full of positive stories, I’ve also seen plenty of convos devolve into some variant of: “younger men just want older women for easy sex and won’t commit!”
Exhibit A:
Some matchmakers I follow on social media will also say something similar, in less red-pilled ways: that targeting younger men isn’t a good use of time if you’re seeking marriage. In particular, one matchmaker I follow has an incredibly transactional and cynical view that every single one of these pairings is all about the older women having more money to prop up the younger man.
It’s undeniable that younger men will sleep with older women, but how often do they actually marry them?
As it turns out, it’s extremely easy - much, much easier than dating trends - to verify this! We have very detailed marriage data from the American Community Survey which started including data on who’s newly married that year starting in 2008.
The results honestly were very surprising to me.
Let’s first set the stage:
The #1 trend is that age gap marriages, regardless of which gender is older, are on the decline overall.
There are, of course, highly visible exceptions. There’s always going to be someone like the doggedly youth-focused Leonardo DiCaprio (age 51, but even he is now dating an elderly 27 year old!) or a Madonna (age 67) with her 29 year old boyfriend.
But these are very much the exception and not the rule. And when it comes to man-older marriages, these pairings are way, way down. Unions where the man was 5+ years older are down 27% from 2008.
Moreover, it’s a going down almost monotonically every single year without an end in sight.
Curious if there was any variation on exact age gap size - maybe there’s a secret boom in bigger gaps from soft life TikTok girlies - I found that both moderate (5-9 year man-older gaps) and large (10-20 year gaps) are both decreasing. Even more damning, the 10-20 gap was down more.
However, at the extremes, 20+ year man-older age gaps have stayed tiny… and steady. Basically, the May-December style of Hugh Hefner-esque relationship has always been a very niche category of marriage that flouts social norms and its existence isn’t affected by what the rest of the normies are doing.
Red pill is absolutely wrong that women are clamoring to wed much older men in droves. It’s not rare—1 in 5 new marriages in 2024 had a man at least 5 years older—but it’s culturally passé.
Compared to 2008, the 5-9 year gap was down 24% and 10-20 year gaps were down 35% in 2024.
When it comes to older women, the story is more mixed, but overall decreasing. We saw a high water mark of woman-older marriages in 2014, but it’s gone down since then.
The 45-54 age group—traditional cougarville—has had upswings and downswings with big age gap marriages, but it’s not a clear pattern. Check footnote if you’re curious.1
2024 saw the lowest ever proportion of new marriages where the woman is 5+ years older than the man.
Instead, what we overwhelmingly see is heterosexual marriage becoming more assortative: like marrying like. We can see that couples within 2 years of age form 23% more of new marriages in 2024 vs 2008.
Ok, so maybe there’s not a trend of 40 year old women marrying 30 year old men, but what about senior citizens?
Once I split the data out by age group, I saw a very clear trend: while younger women aren’t marrying younger, older women (age 65+) have more than doubled their numbers.2
One fascinating finding is that if you smooth the lines3 for big age gap marriages (10+ years), you see that since 2013, senior women are more likely to marry much younger men than much older men.
This is actually very consistent with the social media chatter I see. Older men in this age group are often seen as looking for a “nurse with a purse”: someone who will wipe his demented, infirm butt and pay for stuff should his measly 401k runs out. I have a terrible habit of always reading social media comments, and on Facebook, it’s always older women declaring that they want to “protect their peace” and have no interest in men anymore.4
At this age, I really, really get it. You’re not trying to start or raise a family. If you’re looking for companionship and have your own money, it makes a lot of sense as an older woman who’s taken care of herself to find an attractive man who’s 5-15 years younger looking for the same.
While this is a trend is happening at every income level, it’s especially huge with higher income women. 65+ women making over 100k have dramatically dropped off their marriages of older men and taking up with younger ones.
In 2008, there were zero reported woman-older age gap marriages for higher income women. In 2024, they skyrocketed.
As it turns out, the most representative public couple for this age gap trend is Kris Jenner, who met her 25 years younger partner, Corey Gamble, in 2014.
So, if you’re a woman, what does this tell you?
First of all: trends are trends. They only speak in the aggregate. Your individual experience may or may not actually fit into one of these graphs. It’s important to remember that even something being down 30% still means there are literally 250,000 happy exceptions every single damn year, as proven by data.
It’s more important to consider an actual person, not a trend. Looking at a man’s behavior and investment over time, whether your goals and values align, their life phase, and accessing your intuition will give you better information than these graphs.
The upside of this pairing is that the man appreciates that he gets a woman who’s more confident (both in life and in the bedroom), doesn’t play games, and is more mature. The woman appreciates she gets a guy with less baggage and more youthful vigor / eagerness to please.
The core issue with this type of pairing is desire for biological children and life stage alignment. While some men definitely never want children, some may seem presently ok but eventually want to explore that possibility. One way to try to get at that is to ask: “What if you met someone incredible and she definitely wanted kids?”
One of my friends met her partner when he was 28 and she was 35 on Hinge. This was her reasoning:
“I feel very strongly about dating younger men after my ex & I ended things,” she wrote to me. “I decided to exclusively date younger men believing most men who were the marrying type that were my age were mostly all probably married and the rest were either:
mix of people who never want to get married
OR want to get married but are too dysfunctional to figure it out
OR who want to get married but didn’t because they had shit to figure out & they’ve since done the work & are no longer dysfunctional (like myself, you, etc.)
I assumed the last category was the smallest of the 3 so I was like fuck it I’ll just go younger.”
Ok, cool you say. But what if you’re a woman 35+ looking to get married? What if you’re high income woman - what are the chances you’ll married to your equal or better?
I’m going to give you some really, really intense graphs. They might make you feel better. Here is actual hard data how women in different age groups are marrying, broken down by 5 year age buckets, income, and education.
You’ll be able to see:
What percentage of women marry “up” in education and income at increasingly older ages
Surprising finding about income brackets that actually marry “up” in terms of income more with age
How the age gap distribution changes for older women in who they marry at different ages
How the mix changes over time
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