How Women's Tastes in Men Change as They Age

As a woman ages, her tastes in men change. What does an under-21 girl prefer that women 32+ do not? Read on and find out.

As a man, your taste in women may or may not have changed as you’ve aged. I know a few guys whose tastes have changed over the years. Though I know many more guys whose tastes haven’t. I can tell you the only difference between the women I’m drawn to now and those I was drawn to 10 years ago is the girls I’m drawn to now are usually cuter. That is more simply a factor of having more choice with women now than I had when I was young, overweight, and romantically unskilled.

Women’s tastes in men, on the other hand, go through some major evolutions as they age. From between a girl’s late teens to her mid-30s, she shifts her tastes often dramatically.

Talk to most single women in their 30s about younger women and you’ll hear such women pan younger women’s standards in men. “Young women have the worst taste in men,” they’ll tell you. “The guys they go for are assholes with attitude. They have no taste.”

Male pundits normally regard this as a way for an older woman to make herself look more valuable in the dating market (i.e., she is more ‘refined’ than ignorant younger women) in order to make up for some of the lost value of her faded youth. And this “younger women are silly and foolish” frame does help older women do that. But there is a deeper reason so many single women in their 30s feel this way about those younger versions of themselves on the dating scene.

Before we talk about that though, we’ll talk about the different sorts of men women at different ages are most drawn toward. As always, game and fundamentals play a huge role here – the better yours are, the less you need to worry about fitting a certain template, and the better you’ll do even within that template.

Note that the age ranges we’ll discuss below are generalities. Some women may be more or less ‘mature’ than their ages (we’ll talk about that a bit below too). But in general, for the majority of women, you should find these age ranges fairly accurate.

Under 21: Bad Boys, OMG! So Dreamy! ❤ ❤ ❤

She’ll take her men bold, jerk-like, and self-concerned, thank you very much.

Women under 21 love the bad boy. All girls love bad boys, but if she’s 21 or under he is her ideal. Different women have different standards for ‘bad boy’ of course. A girl from a broken home who’s done drugs and tattooed and pierced herself and dyed her hair lime green since she was 15 has a very different idea of who is the ‘ideal bad boy’ than a girl from a stable two-parent family raised with religious ideals and who is a relatively conservative person by nature herself.

The tattooed drug-using girl’s ideal bad boy will usually be too dangerous/wild for the traditional girl. And the traditional girl’s ideal bad boy will usually be too milquetoast for the tattooed drug-using girl. Each girl has an upper bound and a lower bound for how ‘risky’ her ideal should be (even most tattooed drug-using girls won’t want to date a guy who lives on the street because fuck the system, for instance). The important point is that the guy each of these girls is into most is one who feels to them like an exciting, risqué male.

One nice advantage of getting older is if you’re a sexy guy and you’re outside the ‘acceptable’ age range for a younger girl, that alone can make you enough of a ‘bad boy’ to hook up with. This is a big part of why most self-improving older men find younger women are easier for them in their late 20s, their 30s, and their 40s than they were when these men were the same age as these girls.

If you’re in the under-21 age range yourself and you want to do well with girls in your age range, you must cultivate enough of an asshole persona. Do that (mixed with tight fundamentals and game), and you become the dreamboat jerk she adores.

There are a few reasons under-21 women love bad boys to such a high degree. A review of the scientific literature on this came up with a few key factors:

• Successful first dates are key to dating success, and bad boys do better on their first dates (more experienced so they know what to do more, more flirtatious and thus more fun/interesting, etc.)

• Nice men are positioned as men women ‘should’ want to date (which makes them kind of boring, plain, and vanilla), while bad boys are men they ‘should not’ want to date but who are fun and sexy and can still position themselves as viable-enough dating options that a girl can excuse herself for dating them (which makes them the risky, exciting options who are still just inside the range of acceptability)

• Younger women in general are in search of more excitement and often less lasting/serious commitments... which the bad boy can offer (nicer men often want to be with their gals forever)
  

The researchers from that review also took a group of 95 young women of an average age of 20.2 years old, half single, and half in committed relationships, and presented the women with two different scenarios in questionnaire format. Scenario one was a respectful, gentlemanly man. Scenario two was a bad boy.

Here’s the first scenario, the nice guy:

“Thursday evening you meet a man at a mutual friend’s house and spend the whole night engaged in lively and interesting conversation. Before the two of you part for the evening, he asks you for your telephone number and you give it to him. The next day he calls you to tell you that he had a great time talking to you the night before and asks you out for dinner. You agree to go out with him the following evening (Saturday night). The date is wonderful. He greets you at your door appropriately dressed and compliments you on your attire. He takes you to a very nice restaurant where you enjoy good food and lots of humorous conversation. At the end of the evening, he walks you to your door and says, “I had a really good time tonight. Can I call you again tomorrow?” You say, “yes” and, happily, he leaves.”

Here’s the second scenario, the bad boy:

“Thursday evening you meet a very attractive man at a mutual friend’s house and spend the whole night engaged in lively and interesting conversation. Before the two of you part for the evening, he asks you for your telephone number and you give it to him. The next day he calls you to tell you that he had a great time talking to you the night before and asks you out for a movie. You agree to go out with him the following evening (Saturday night). The date is wonderful. He greets you at your door looking better than he did when you met him and presents you with a single red rose. He takes you to a popular movie and, on the drive home, you enjoy more entertaining conversation. At the end of the evening, he walks you to your door and kisses you passionately. Afterward, he looks deeply into your eyes and says, “I had a great time tonight. I’ll call you tomorrow.” He waits for you to say, “okay,” then he leaves.”

Here’s how the women felt differently about each man:

• The first guy was viewed as more intelligent and sweet/nice. The second guy was viewed as more confident, aggressive, and physically attractive

• Women were 3.5x more likely to want to date the second guy if they were lonely, 13.5x more likely to want to date him if they wanted to “go somewhere” or “do something interesting”, 15x more likely to want to date him if they were bored, 39x more likely to want to date him if they wanted to have fun, and 42x more likely to want to date him if they wanted physical contact

• The only thing women were more likely to want to date the first guy for was if they wanted to have a “stimulating conversation” – they were 16x more likely to pick the first guy if they wanted this. That said, it was about even for “want to get to know someone better” and “want an exclusive relationship” – both men had almost the same score on each. And on the whole, women were about 14% more likely to want a second date with the nice guy than the bad boy (bad boys have more pressure to do it in one date)
  

Unless she’s in “find a stimulating conversation partner” mode, you want to be a jerk for a 20-year-old girl.

Also, you’ll want to touch her as much as possible; more than you would older women. As we’ll discuss when we get to the 24-27 age range, the younger a woman is the more a challenge she is to turn sexual.

More on girls in this age range here:

• How to Pick Up Younger Women (18-22)
  

21 to 24: Rapscallions and Knaves

She’s a bit more mature, but she still likes to have fun.

By the time a girl’s hit 21, she’s begun to no longer be entranced by the same brooding skulkers and boorish assholes who captivated her in her under-21 years.

She still likes men who are flirtatious, arrogant jerks. But now she just likes them to have a bit more social savvy and a modicum of class.

If a guy is too brooding or too much a boor, she won’t appreciate him. He seems immature: “He’s such a child.” That might still be okay for the occasional fling here and there – she is, after all, not that far removed from her under-21 days – but usually she won’t be too excited for this guy.

The guy she likes at this age is the confident rapscallion. The knave with a bit more social savvy.

Again, different girls will have different degrees of this they like. One general way to differentiate this girl from the under-21 girl is the under-21 girl has little or no understanding of ‘mission’ and does not much care if a man is on one. Over 21 though, she starts to desire a man with some sort of drive in his life.

You can tell a girl under 21 you want to do great things, and she either won’t care, or can appreciate this intellectually but it has no impact on her emotions. Girls in the 21-24 age start to wake up to this as a major attraction factor. They aren’t at a point yet where they screen for or appreciate specific missions; big/vague is fine. So you can tell girls in this age range about big general missions you have and they will eat it up:

• “I want to conquer the world”
• “I’m going to live in 30 countries”
• “I’m building a harem of 20 nubile women”
  

She’ll laugh at how exaggerated it sounds, but she likes it.

Past this age range, vague and extravagant goals like this can make you sound like a guy with little experience actually doing anything, who hasn’t yet begun to crash into the limitations of the world. But in this age range, great goals mark you as a man with drive and vision, and this is sexy.

Beyond mission focus, girls in this range simply like men who are able to break the routine without being totally alien to them. Most of these girls are preparing for their final year in school, interviewing for companies to work, or are in one of the first few years of their careers. Everyone around them is much more serious and ‘adult’; people are stressed out; the world is more constrained. So long as you can seem grounded (i.e., you’re not the adult child who runs from the increasing responsibilities life places on men as they age), if you are playful and irreverent, confident and strong, you are her ideal.

24 to 27: Stylish Playboys and Rogues

She’s begun to tire of men who are too asshole-ish... but you... you seem sexy...

A girl’s mid-20s are the age an important taste begins to come more into play, that further shifts her desires in men.

Women start off their lives with a different approach to dating than men do. Young men’s romantic approach is both ‘psychosexual’ and ‘psychoaffectional’; their approach to dating is both sexual and emotional. Younger women’s approach, however, is largely emotional, not sexual.

The sexual aspect for younger women is mostly cerebral. She wants to explore, she’s curious, she feels attached to a guy and wants to make him feel happy. She doesn’t have an enormous desire for sex herself. Not yet.

Yet as women age, their approach to dating becomes increasingly sexual. The older a woman, the less dating is about emotions, and the more it is about sex and emotions – just like it is for men.

Loud, mouthy jerks aren’t particularly sexually attractive, even if they are emotionally titillating. And as a woman’s sex drive comes online more, she begins to desire more sexually attractive men, in addition to simply whichever men titillate her most. Sexiness begins to beat out boorishness.

Some girls at this age have also begun to feel bitter toward jerk-like men (for having hurt them in the past). In general, you want to avoid women with bitterness toward men; people generally harbor unrequited desires for whatever it is they’re bitter about, which makes such a woman a liability should a man ever come along who fits that mold and can get past her bitterness. It’s also good to not have people who carry negativity around with them in your life. Even if it’s not directed at you, it will affect you.

Another thing that affects a woman’s taste is women in their middle 20s have “seen it all before”: they’ve been around loud, confident jerks, dated those guys, and spent time with them, and the in-your-face approach works less well on them. Their romantic sensibilities become more honed, and they appreciate an increasing amount of subtlety. While a 19-year-old has trouble with anything more subtle than a proverbial brick-in-the-face, a 26-year-old is better able to sense and respond to subtlety, and is less appreciative of 20-year-old male boorishness.

These women still want you to be the untamed, roguish bad boy! However, at this age, they expect you to have a bit more class. A bit more style; more refinement. And they are better connoisseurs of men’s sexual vibes and other social subtleties.

Women at this age don’t yet expect you to have your life figured out when you are in the West (this is different, however, outside the West). They still expect you to be in the earlier stages of your professional life, still with grand aims, but enjoying yourself and not with a nailed down mission yet. Some women who are more mature than their age can start to want men with clearer missions in this age range, but they will often lean toward dating older men.

For women in the 24 to 27 age range, you will generally want to be confident, sexy, and ballsy, but also with more subtlety and social savvy than the rougher men women of younger ages go for.

27 to 32: Sexy Ambitious Men

You seem like the kind of guy who’s got something going on.

After 27, women’s focus begins to shift out of exploratory mode and into settle down mode. The shift has only started, but now women start to care much more about signals of a man’s long-term quality. Items such as:

• His career / where in town he lives
  
• How driven/focused he is
• The clarity of his vision for his future
• His worldliness and life experiences
  

... all start to play a much larger role in how attractive a man is to a woman at this age. While these elements can play a role with younger women, they’re typically more minor. With women at this age, these items start to gain more weight in her “how much do I like this guy?” calculations.

Of course, all the other stuff from before still applies as well. She still wants a man who is attractive, sexy, confident, and flirtatious. One who is socially savvy and adroit. However, these elements can be less important if the man is extremely driven with strong clarity of vision.

This is the age you start to see women go for driven nerds who are not traditionally charismatic, yet who are on a mission and who exude busyness and mission focus. The guy who isn’t necessarily charming, but is not awkward, and is instead mostly focused on accomplishing whatever he’s set out to achieve – this guy is a lot more attractive to women in this age group. He strikes her as the kind of man she’d like to hitch her wagon to, and whose company she would enjoy (now that she’s bored of jerks).

Women at this age have begun to hit ‘club fatigue’, where girls who used to like to go out and party a lot don’t have the same appetite for it they did when younger. They aren’t able to get as immersed in the club environment when they go out, aren’t as amazed by lights, crowds, and music, and have decided the drunken hookups they’ve had over the years were not that exciting and the men they had these hookups with were not that great – not the smartest, not the handsomest, not the most driven. Those were mostly men they went with due to beer goggles and the guy’s persistence, and they don’t want to do that anymore. (not every girl parties a lot while younger, so not every girl hits ‘club fatigue’ – some girls never get into the scene to begin with. But among girls who do get into it, this is the age they start to get over it)

Women in the 27 to 32 age group have also begun to screen men harder, and have a higher guard up to male advances. They are more careful about not going for the wrong guy – they have less free time to waste on uninspiring dates and lovers, they’re no longer excited about the ‘potential’ of most of the men they meet (they want men who already have their acts together), and they’ve seen enough now that they know what they like in men and what they don’t.

Most single women have also been burned a few times at this age by men they very much liked and wanted commitment from but who refused to commit to them. They will tend to screen men harder for signs they may be like these men. Girls at this age may even ask you outright if you are “still playing around”, especially if you’re the same age as them (they’d hoped guys their age had ‘grown up’ and gotten over lots of random hooking up, now that they themselves [mostly] have).

For this reason, you’ll often find when you yourself are in the 27 to 32 age range, you do better with girls under 27 and over 32 than you do your female peers. Women who are your age are scrutinizing you – not just as a potential committed partner, but also to use you as a barometer for other men your and her age: have her male peers ‘grown up’ or are they still messing around?

If you are not in the 27 to 32 range, you’ll find women in this age range scrutinize you less than they do their peers. If you’re younger, there’s probably not a future with you, but if you’re sexy you may be good for a quick release from the pressures of her life. If you’re older, you may offer either a release (if you fit the right template for her) or a welcome reprieve from the immature men of her age and a potential committed partner (whom she won’t screen as hard because she figures as an older male you must ‘already have grown up’).

32+: Established Alpha Males

Her big thing is “Have you made it, or are you about to?”

Women over 32 who are still single have shifted their focus further. They’re in search of established alpha males. Men who will take charge with them and are able to be the alpha to the woman’s beta – which isn’t always a small task, as women still single at this age are a lot more opinionated, established, and used to taking charge of things themselves.

She’s searching, in essence, for a man who will treat her like a little girl, and also take care of her. She wants an alpha provider.

As such, she’s on the hunt for men who are established: men who aren’t dreaming about the future, but who are actually working hard to create the future they envision. Men with tangible results to show for their labors.

She still wants the man to be confident, sexy, playful, and the like. A man who’s built a company or progressed in his career, but who remains meek, boring, and unlikeable will not attract the best quality women (he will end up with either equally unattractive and boring women, or gold diggers / hypergamous women). However, at this age she’s much more careful about screening out men who don’t seem to be on a good path somewhere.

As with women in the last age group, it’s easier to sleep with and date these women if you are not age-matched (it’s true for pretty much every age group; the closer you are in age to her, the harder she screens you for long-term fit and the more reference points she has to compare you against [”He’s less mature than me and we’re the same age” “He doesn’t have his act together the way some of my former classmates do”]).

You start to encounter single mothers, cougars, and divorcées in much greater numbers after 32. These women operate differently than never-married 32+ women. If they’re recently divorced, they may be out to have fun or looking for rebound sex. If they’re single mothers, they may be too frazzled to worry about regular dating and much more down to hook up quick – many men are scared off by them (“I don’t want to be some kid’s dad!”), which means they lack the level of abundance other women have with men, and they have a lot less free time in general and may also view themselves as less attractive long-term mates (thus, lower standards and expectations, and they cut you more slack). Cougars can be either divorcées or single mothers, or they may sometimes be never-married career women with high sex drives who enjoy the vitality of younger men.

Women at this age often look down on younger women and malign their tastes. An excellent example are the female perspectives on this page; the words ‘mature’ or ‘immature’ appear in a quarter of the first page remarks alone:

“Until a woman is mature enough, really knows herself and is ready for a solid relationship, I believe she will gravitate towards the “bad boys.” Those relationships don’t last, which deep down is fine with her because she doesn’t really want it to.

...

“Jerks” are immature, and you can’t relax around them. They’re always trying too hard, and they probably won’t amount to much at all.

...

I like nice guys... perhaps when I was younger and immature I would have liked jerks... because I didn’t know then what I know now. I don’t have to settle for a jerk as a date or a lover ~~ I can have a nice guy that treats me how I deserve to be treated... NICELY... in all aspects. Jerks want sex to please them. Nice guys will please the woman too.”

Men in the Manosphere often portray this “younger women’s tastes in men are so immature, ugh” and “I would never go for a guy like that anymore – as if!” posturing women do as reputation management plus female competition. And it is those things – by maligning the competition, a woman makes herself look better. Also, by maligning jerks, a woman always wins. Jerks don’t care if a girl says she doesn’t like jerks. A jerk will always assume her distaste applies to other men and not him. Meanwhile, nice guys feel heartened and continue to chuck time, energy, and resources at women who claim to be “so over” jerks.

But there is a non-reputation, non-competition element to why women say this, too. They say it at every age; a 17-year-old girl who rolls her eyes at a bunch of 14-year-olds swooning over the latest boy band hottie is as likely to say “Ugh – SO immature!” as a 32 year-old-woman is who rolls her eyes at the 17-year-old. The taste-based reason for this is that women’s tastes in men do evolve as women age. Their tastes move away from “who is the loudest, boldest, and most aggressive?” and, to an extent, “who is the one every other woman wants?” (preselection works best on younger girls) to, increasingly, “who is the one I feel most comfortable with, most connected to, and most turned on by, and who also appreciates me and wants to offer me the sort of relationship I want?”

As a woman’s tastes evolve, she will tend to look back on her own earlier tastes with dismissal, disbelief she ever could’ve went for that, or sometimes shame or disgust.

And she will view both the men those younger women swoon for, as well as the women themselves, as “so immature” for not realizing what she realizes now. (meanwhile, she’ll view the older women who view her preferences as “immature” as tired spinsters who go for boring guys and hope she doesn’t end up like them)

It isn’t just competition and reputation management (though it is that too).

It’s just that women always change – and so too do their preferences.

(it’s kind of a weird thing to wrap your head around as a guy, since as a guy the women you want at 40 are usually more or less the women you wanted at 20. Women are funny, huh?)

One final perspective on this you may find useful: women use a man’s personality as a way to gauge his mating objectives. If he’s a bold, devil may care jerk, odds are he’s just out for fun and cheap thrills. If he’s suave and sophisticated, he’s out for pleasure, but offers a more intellectual experience as well as a carnal one. If he’s focused and driven, he’s a no-bullshit guy she might have a future with... if she passes his screens. Women in different life stages have more desire for men in search of different mating objectives, and your comportment and behavior with and around her clues her in to what yours are.

Adjustment Needed?

Some calibration required.

How much should you adjust yourself for women of different age ranges?

Odds are you likely have an age range of women you do best with. A majority of your dates, lays, and girlfriends come from this age range. And the women who fall outside it behave in ways more characteristic of women in your target range... if you usually date 27- to 32-year-olds, for instance, and hook up with a 23-year-old, you may notice she’s more aspirational and tries to position herself as “so over” the stuff other girls her age are into. Meanwhile, hook up with a 35-year-old, and she’ll have uncharacteristically youthful energy and far lower screening requirements than most of her female peers.

Most men don’t consciously adjust themselves to appeal to women of this age range or that. They instead adapt to the women they spend the most time around. A 40-year-old DJ who is always around women 22 to 26 will have a personality and style that appeals much more to women in this age group than it does to women closer to his age.

The chief thing to keep in mind is if you want women of a certain age group, you will probably want to immerse yourself among people in that age range as much as possible in social situations (and date as many women in this age range as you can). This is the easiest way to calibrate yourself to your desired range.

Also remember game and fundamentals are the great equalizers. A man with exceptional game, or exceptional fundamentals, or (better still) both can cross between age groups with more ease and less need for too much calibration.

You’ll still want to adjust a bit, even if you’re solid in these areas. Be a bit more ‘bold, conceited asshole’ with younger women and a bit more ‘driven, established alpha male’ with older women.

Women are women, of course. The stuff that works on one group of women will work on another. But with a few tweaks, you can make it work better – and elevate your chances with women her age.

Chase