University of Michigan Study: Why Online Dating okCupid Men Message Teens

Maya Salam related in her New York Times piece the results of Bruch and Newman's study, "Aspirational pursuit of mates in online dating markets", that was published in the journal Science Advances.

But before Salam shared the results of the study, she related from comedian Hannah Gadsby that 40-year-old Picasso had an affair with 17-year-old Marie-Thérèse Walter. 

Here are some highlights\excerpts from the article:

The researchers determined that while men’s sexual desirability peaks at age 50, women’s starts high at 18 and falls from there.

In other words, not so far from the ages of Walter and Picasso.

“The age gradient for women definitely surprised us — both in terms of the fact that it steadily declined from the time women were 18 to the time they were 65, and also how steep it was,” said Elizabeth Bruch, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Michigan and an author of the study.

The study results echoed data shared by the dating behemoth OkCupid in 2010, in which the service found that men from the ages of 22 to 30 focus almost entirely on women who are younger than them.

“The median 30-year-old man spends as much time messaging teenage girls as he does women his own age,” OkCupid wrote in a blog post at the time.

OkCupid also reported that as a man gets older, he searches for relatively younger and younger women, while his upper acceptable age limit hovers just above his own age.

[Interestingly] [s]peaking of earning potential, Dr. Bruch also found that a man’s desirability increased the more education he attained.