Older Men With Younger Women

NY Times, Dec 19^th – From “Vibrator” to “Cougar Town”, It’s Still a Man’s World

Generally, in these sorts of films [younger male/older female romance], Dr. Lauzen noted, “the entire story has to revolve around explaining that relationship, because how can it be that a younger man would find an older woman attractive.” An older man-younger woman relationship, by contrast, is “just accepted, no explanation needed.” – Patricia Cohen

Factor 1 -- Until the 20^th century there was essentially little or no medicine of the kind we enjoy today. The average life span was under 40. So, any human being living to 50 or 60 or beyond tended to be a genetically superior beast – better teeth, bones, organs etc., more intelligent, better resistance to diseases, less likely to take foolish risks, etc. Simply put, people who lived to a ripe old age typically had better genes.

Factor 2 -- In giving birth -- an extremely demanding and dangerous act -- young females have a significantly greater chance of delivering healthy babies, and recovering to bear more children. The odds for age 40+ females doing the same nosedive.

Factor 3 -- We are all the products of thousands of generations during which evolution was relentlessly selecting for traits which enhanced the chances of more surviving offspring. We have all thus been “programmed” – at least to some degree -- to find attractive in a mate those qualities which suggest that likelihood. So it is not an accident that most women are attracted to taller, narrow-hipped, broad-shouldered men and most men are attracted to small-waisted, wide-hipped, ample-breasted, women. Those inclinations are the fruits of eons of genetic trial and error.

A Simple Example:

Let us imagine a “year-1” caveman tribe of homo sapiens, consisting of 100 “ready-to-father-children” males and 100 “ready-to-bear-children” females, both groups consisting of members of varying ages. For whatever reason, ten of the young females just “have a thing” for older males, and likewise, ten of the young males have an attraction to older females. (The rest of the tribe tends to mate with partners more or less their own age.)

Now – the ten young females mate with older but healthy males – and likewise the ten young males mate with older but healthy females. Surely it’s obvious where this is going -- many more of the offspring of the older males/young females survive -- than in the reverse combination. The offspring of the former are not only likely to be born with better genes (as indicated by the father's longer life), but – and here’s the key point – their offspring will have an excellent chance of inheriting -- at least to some degree -- their parents inclinations for this older male/younger female combination.

Conversely, since the older female/younger male group have fewer surviving offspring (and surviving mothers) – evolution is not all that interested in selecting for that combination. It just doesn’t pay off as well.

Simply repeating this selection process through countless generations and we end up with a society (and this seems universally true) where an older male/younger female pairing is common, and the reverse is rare. Evolution, in its “wisdom”, has spoken.