Survey Results: Do Men and Women Want the Same Things? (Part 1)

Do women want marriage more than men? How strong are men's age preferences? Who is having more sex? I found out, plus much more.

Assuming you pay attention to sex and dating discourse (and if you read this Substack you do, at least passively) a great deal of the arguments revolve around men and women liking or wanting different things. Some people (sometimes even me!) will theorize that women want marriage and kids more than men do, and that men prefer the unchained life of casual sex. Other people will say that it’s women, not men, who prefer transactional, casual relationships, while men are pining for the families that Feminism and Wokeness won’t let them have.

Is my below comic a real thing, or did I Make Up a Guy?

I also wanted to understand the dating strategies, priorities and preferences of different types of people. Surely, the lived experience of a male virgin is different from that of a woman who had sex last week? And what about older women versus younger men, or the reverse?

Several things I found out (some of which will be released in Part 2- I figured it was best to split it up in two parts because it’s a lot of information!)

• Detailed data on the age preferences of the genders, by age cohort. Plus, how does someone’s ideal age for a partner measure up to the overall age range to which they are open? If a guy says he prefers women 5 years younger, does that mean he won’t date women his age?

• Stats on physical, financial and life path preferences. Is single parenthood a dealbreaker for most singles? What about obesity or lack of a college degree? How many women are willing to date a guy exactly their height?

• Sex! Who is having the most sex? How often are singles having sex? Does this increase or decrease with age?

• The good old fashioned biological clock. Who wants children more often? Who wants more children? And do men and women disagree about how long you should date before getting engaged?

• Plus much, much more!

Demographics

Feel free to ignore this section if you don’t care about the baseline demographics of all 800+ survey respondents, but if you’re curious, you can reference this section.

To qualify, respondents had to be never-married American singles who date the opposite sex at least 50% of the time. This meant the survey wasn’t exclusive to heterosexual people, because bisexual people can still lean toward dating the opposite sex. The reason I did this was because the study was designed to measure the different (or similar) strategies and preferences of men and women who date each other. I also allowed people in brand new relationships that weren’t yet serious or exclusive to take the survey.

If you didn’t qualify for this survey (or if you did, but you want to take another one) try my latest one here, open to Americans of all genders, relationship statuses and orientations.

• Gender

  • 66% men

  • 34% women

• Age

  • 22% 18-24

  • 45% 25-31

  • 21% 32-38

  • 9% 39-44

  • 3% 45+

  • Note that I tended to filter by “under 32” vs. “over 32.” This doesn’t mean I think anyone over 32 is old, but rather, because I had so few respondents over 39 or over 45, this made the most sense from a data perspective.

• While I was overall happy with the sample size of the survey, I did notice one thing that might separate my respondents from the general population, which is that a lot of them were virgins. 30% of women and 40% of men who filled out the survey had never had sex. In some areas—mostly in Part 2—I examine how being a virgin would or wouldn’t impact your dating preferences.

Age

The age-old wisdom, if you will, is that women prefer older men and men prefer younger women. Perhaps this is true, but I wanted to get into the degree to which it was true. I recall being eighteen and finding the idea of an “older man” really sexy, but my idea of an older man was a twenty-four-year-old. When I was hit on by men much older than me, I found it pretty weird and unappealing. But hey, that’s just me! Let’s see how other people feel.