Men Aren't "Worthless Until 30"

You've probably been told men don't acquire traits women find attractive until age 30 or later. The data shows this isn't true.

Photo by rayul on Unsplash

I like debunking sexual myths (first up: fellas, don’t worry about “finding the clitoris.” A bunch of mean feminists invented the clitoris to mess with you!)

In my quest to dispel sexual myths, I have regrettably gotten stuck on one in particular, probably because people keep parroting it no matter how many times I dispel it: the myth that the dropping marriage rate is because of frigid girlbosses who men don’t want to marry. While some older single women have prohibitively high standards and prefer to be single than to “settle,” there’s no evidence to suggest men are rejecting them because they’re intimidated or disgusted by their educational or career attainment. I wrote about that here. Despite all the freaking out about how choosing a college degree will doom you to a life of spinsterhood, going to college improves a woman’s chances of getting married, even if she just wants to be a tradwife. I wrote about that too. And when it comes to the higher-earning men who can support a comfortable lifestyle for a SAHM, almost all of them—97%—have a college-educated partner. The marriage crisis is primarily an issue for the lower classes and less educated, not the executives with Master’s degrees.

I’ve focused on debunking the “nobody wants a girlboss” so much that I almost forgot another sexual myth that drives me nuts—the idea that women aren’t attracted to men in their twenties, or that men only gain value in the dating arena after thirty.

I’m not talking about the separate but related myth that women are mostly attracted to men significantly older than them, although I’ve gone out of my way to dispel that too. Our willingness to date people of any age is probably different in practice than in theory (and age gaps do happen, more commonly with an older man and younger woman than the reverse) but for whatever reason, age at first marriage is reliably about 1-3 years older for men than for women over the past couple hundred years if not longer. I’m in such a scandalous age-gap relationship myself, come to think of it.

No, instead what I seek to debunk is something I often hear from young men, usually coming at it from a place of despair. They insist that the things women like in men are by default things that men don’t have until their thirties, so they should expect to be single until then. They’re talking about things like money/resources, emotional maturity, stability, and presumably, a subscription to the Bill Simmons Podcast. It doesn’t help that older men often chime in and agree with this sentiment, either because they were late bloomers themselves or because keeping younger men demoralized is intrasexual competition that allows them to go after the young women.

But it’s just not true—and that’s not just my opinion. The statistics back it up.

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