Men are always into younger ladies, amirite? Played out comedy trope or now, age is inevitably a factor in how we choose a partner. This data collected by dating service Coffee Meets Bagel examines the relationship between age and sexual or romantic interest.
Many of the findings in the data are not terribly surprising. As you can see in the chart above, men overwhelmingly prefer women who are younger than themselves. The "Threshold of Creepiness" (which marks the less-than-scientific half-your-age-plus-seven rule) seems to also mark roughly where men found women most attractive.
On the other side of the gender lines, Coffee Meets Bagel found that women seemed to favor men their own age or slightly older most.
Unsurprisingly, the younger a man is than a woman, the less favorably she viewed him. The harshness with which a young man is viewed is almost as stark as how favorably a younger woman is seen. For example, 24-year-old women rated 22-year-old men—a difference of only two years—the most poorly of any age group. According to this data, if you want to attract a 24-year-old woman, you have a better shot if you're 32 than 22.
That's not to say that the sexy older man trope is your best bet, either. While much older may be better than slightly younger, the most positive age range is the same or slightly older.
As with any data, though, it's easy to take the first assumption and run with it. Coffee Meets Bagel follows up this initial analysis with advice nearly everyone in the dating pool could use: despite what the data says (or perhaps because of it), you are more than just your age.
While the site's blog post suggests that the reason men find younger women more attractive is due to fertility (whereas women would find older men more attractive due to potential caretaker status), the above chart demonstrates a key point, regardless of the reason for these distributions. Even if younger women and older men are more attractive to the opposite sex, it's only one of many factors.
Unfortunately, age is one of the few factors we can't do much about. We can attempt to look younger or older, but we can never actually be that age. That darker block in the chart above, though (and the correlating block for men) can be played up, enhanced, or improved on. If you're a data nut, it may help to narrow your dating search to the age ranges you might find the most luck in, but don't neglect the most important dating advice of all: be someone worth dating.
You can read more about Coffee Meets Bagel's findings, with several more charts at the source link below.