Survey Results: Do Men and Women Want the Same Things? (Part 2)

Will women date men their own height? When is weight a dealbreaker? Who has more sex, and at what age?

This is Part 2 of my 800+ person survey on hetero dating: everything from marriage timelines, to timelines for children, age preferences, physical and financial standards, and more! The main purpose for this survey was to figure out to what degree men and women’s sexual and romantic strategies are compatible or at odds, or whether or not they wanted the same things.

You can check out Part 1 here. Part 1 mostly focused on timelines for marriage/kids and age preferences. It also covered the demographics of the survey, but TLDR: it skewed young, so I bisected the age buckets at 32. It also skewed less experienced, with 30% of female respondents and 40% of male respondents reporting never having had sex.

Let’s get straight to the fun- let’s talk about standards!

Standards

Standards seem to be another hot topic in dating discourse. People can’t seem to agree on who is pickier, and why. The manosphere wisdom is that women are picky about income, and men are picky about looks. Or if you’re into the blackpill incel stuff, you might believe that women are far pickier than men about everything. So I wanted to see what’s true and what’s fanfiction (or hate-fiction.)

In Part 1, I asked men and women if they were open to relationships with people at varying ages. For this part, I asked them about other relationship scenarios surrounding looks, life path, income, and other things. Granted, I didn’t get too specific. I assume most people imagined someone who met all their other criteria and also this one trait, as opposed to someone who had the variable trait and was also undesirable for other reasons.

Generally, respondents reported difficulty finding partners with their desired attributes. Particularly, the vast majority of all cohorts reported difficulty finding partners who were intellectually compatible with them—this was a more common complaint than not being able to find anyone physically attractive enough, or the right age. Women over 32 had the most difficulty, especially when it came to physical attractiveness or intellectual compatibility. They also reported rejecting partners more often than they were rejected (70% of women over 32 said this described their romantic reality, if those were the only two options.) So two things are possible: either never-married women over 32 are never-married because they’re picky, or the available men in their desired age pool aren’t as attractive. Or perhaps some combination.

One stereotype that I’ve long believed is that women are more likely to be happy single, and would rather be single than commit to someone they aren’t crazy about, whereas men are more likely to compromise on their standards than stay single indefinitely. This was reflected in the data. 55% of men reported that they’d prefer to stay single than date someone who is completely mediocre in every way, compared with 69% of women.