Attraction is a multi-faceted, brilliant crystal butterfly dancing outside the laced borders of our waking mind. When you find yourself drawn to someone the colours of attraction pirouette into your vision and clothe your world in Monet swirls until they trickle out again and a more sober palette resumes. This experience is universal yet it is also unique and although we have all fallen into the hypnosis of attraction still we look at others in the midst of infatuation and can’t help but ask, “What does she see in him?†Yet for all the individual quirkeries of adoration and “in-loveness†there are some commonalities that lie beneath it with roots on our evolutionary emotions and a new study has found that in one aspect of attraction to others women and men are fundamentally different; and that is in the age of the people we tend to be attracted to.
The study was based in Finland so maybe we need to be a little careful in directly translating Scandinavian proclivities to the rest of the world but there is surely some lessons here for us all. Reassuringly, the study was large, involving 12,656 Finns and it looked at heterosexual preferences and heterosexual activity.
It found that men of all ages are most sexually attracted to women in their mid-20s, around 24 and 25. This was true for men in their late teens, 20s, and then into their 30s and beyond. The researchers believe this results from a basic biological urge for men to mate with women at their most fertile.
For women the case was different. Women of all ages tended to prefer men who were slightly older than themselves; not “sugar-daddy†older but a few years and interestingly the preferred age gap for women was at its biggest (around four years) at precisely the time when they are at their most sexually attractive to men, that is, in their late teens and early twenties. The theory here is that a slightly older man will be more stable and be more likely to have the resources to raise a family. Don’t get excited though you prospective sugar-daddies out there because much older men are also more likely to die and that takes the lustre off the appeal of your shiny new sports car.
Importantly, what we have been talking about so far was sexual preferences, as far as sexual behaviour goes the results were very different. While men of all ages may well prefer women in their mid-20s in reality men’s sexual partner’s tended be around their own age. This happens of course, because we are more than our primal instincts. A whole heap of rational, social, and spiritual factors intercede before evolutionary urges get their way. So in the end societal sexual behaviour more closely approaches women’s sexual preferences than men’s.
It just goes to prove, men can muddle about with politics, money and war all they want; it is women who rule the things that matter.
