No gender differences in attraction to young partners: A study of 4,500 blind dates
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In mixed-gender couples, men are older than women on average. Scholars and laypeople presume that this arrangement reflects mirrored preferences such that men desire younger partners and women desire older partners. Nevertheless, relevant published data on in-person romantic evaluations—that is, studies where adults interact in person and report their initial attraction to each other—are nearly nonexistent. We examined the association of a partner’s age with romantic desire ( N = 9,084 dyadic reports) among N = 6,262 blind daters who used a matchmaking service in hopes of finding a long-term partner. Preregistered tests revealed that people were (slightly) attracted to younger partners on average—and this association did not differ by gender. Conclusions were identical if we examined a) age difference from one’s own age, and b) a dataset limited to women 40-and-under and mixed-gender dates. Furthermore, participant’s self-reported “upper-age limits” played no meaningful role: Participants had a modest preference for youth overall, but it did not matter whether the partner’s age fell below or above this personal maximum. We discuss the implications of the nonexistent initial-attraction gender difference for the age difference in mixed-gender couples.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".