After 24, No Men Want To Date You (But Let's Give Them A Bit More Credit Than That)

It's a tired old cliche that's unfortunately played out far too often. But it seems it's not just mid-life-crisis men who prefer younger women. It's all men.

And most of them would prefer their girlfriend to be 20. Because by 24, us ladies are most definitely over the hill.

According to data analysed by OKCupid president and co-founder Christian Rudder for his new book Dataclysm: Who We Are When We Think No One's Looking up to the age of 50, men would like to go out with a girl between the ages of 20 and 24, with the most desirable age 20.

You know those magical years where you haven't got a clue who you are or what you want from life, are still trying to lose all the weight you put on duirng your Uni years and when you can't afford to buy new clothes or have a hair cut. The ones where you're STILL LIVING WITH YOUR PARENTS.

Sexy huh?

At an event last month Rudder, 39, explained:  "Women who are, say, 28, find guys who are also 28 about the most attractive, and so forth. Up until about 40, when that's getting too old.

"By contrast, women begin to decline in attractiveness - from the perspective of men - as soon as they hit their early twenties.

"It is kind of terrible."

He goes into more detail about the results, which were gathered from OKCupid dating profiles, on his blog.

"The median 31-year-old guy, for example, sets his allowable match age range from 22 to 35 - nine years younger, but only four years older, than himself," he writes.

"This skewed mindset worsens with age; the median 42-year-old will accept a woman up to 15 years younger, but no more than three years older."

Now we're big fans of online dating, and make full use of every high tech way to meet potential partners, but we can't help but feel taking the results from OKCupid at face value may not be the wisest thing to do.

Rudder adds: "What you see when you actually look at what people do, you see the realism set in. So these 40-year-old guys... the people they actually have the courage to actually go out and message are a lot older: it's 30, 35-year-old women." So that should make us feel better. Right? (Sigh.)

Rudder enjoys his human experiements but he's using a very specific section of society to draw his conclusions from. And while he suggests that his findings reveal what we would really do or think if no one knew about it, this doesn't feel particularly scientific or representative to us.

How many recently dumped/mid-life crisis-ridden men are scewing the results?

Researching only the single-and-looking segment of society misses out all the men who are happily settled with women of their own age, who probably wouldn't be keen on dating someone of their daughter's age.

Here's hoping anyway.

Not that there's anything wrong with 20 year old women. They're great. But are they genuinely ideal partners for 40, 45 or 50 year old men? Sure age is just a number but in most cases what do these men really hope to have in common with someone half their age? Apart from a willingness to have sex.

Well there's no pretending that's not what the main draw is.

But let's take some deep breaths and not fall into a pool of depression at the state of male-female perceptions.

There are of course reasons why women seek out older men too and the psychology of relationships is far too complicated to give a one-size-fits-all answer.

But the world IS moving on. Fewer and fewer women are happy to simply be trophies on the arms of the rich and wrinkly. Instead of getting depressed by the stats, perhaps we should just give blokes a bit more credit.

But it's definitely time for a sea change. It's so ingrained in us that women like older (richer) men and men like younger women, that even in our first teenage relationships we stick to the younger girl-older boy ratio. If age really is just a number we need to ditch the accepted expectations in all our relationships.

And for all those men who've set their dating profile age preferences rather lower than their own birthdate we'd suggest your should probably think about upping it a few years.

You will thanks us, honestly. After all, like fine wines we only get better with age. And thinking back to our 20-year-old selves, the conversation gets infinitely more interesting with every passing year.