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Again, stop saying the age gap is a compromise. He typically wants 2 to 3 years younger while she wants 1 to 2 years older. The more developed the country, the smaller the DESIRED gap. This is from your own meta study. Actual gap? 2.1 years. Not a huge compromise

Are we reading the same study ?

The 2.99 year average age difference between spouses found in Buss (1989) corresponds well to women’s preference that their partners be 3.42 years older than themselves. In fact, the average difference preferred by men and women was the wife 3.04 years younger than her husband, suggesting ac- tual marriage age may represent a compromise between men and women’s desi

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Men are also more likely than their exwives to acquire partners who better match their mate preferences both absolutely and relative to their first partners. These sex differences occur because remarrying men are able to leverage their in- creased age, presumably tracking their on-average increased resource holding potential, into higher mate value and better mate choices. Women’s increased age lowers their overall mate value as a function of decreased fecundity and reproductive value, forcing them to compromise. Coupled with findings indicating that men and women each pre- fer and pursue partners younger and older than themselves, respectively, remarriage data provides evidence that age preferences are robustly mani- fested in mating behavior—a translation of pref- erences into actual matings that is moderated by mate value.

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I cited the exact ages above for the US, 27.4 for women, 29.5 for men. That is for ALL couples. Highly educated couples are marrying LATER. What does education level have to do with it? Lots. You keep going on about a woman’s highest mate value. What we have in developed western countries is assortive mating where highly educated marry highly educated. That’s a fact, not what any study says SHOULD be a preference based on 20 year old data. Doctors marry other doctors today, not 21 year olds OR 27 year olds.

Yes, higher status women want higher status men. But higher status men want prettier women.

There is nothing you’ve proposed above that’s stop 30 yo doctors marrying 24 yo women.

The fact that they’re higher status may affect the age at which they actually marry but it doesn’t affect their instinctive preference for younger women.

They don’t stop being men just because they’re UMC.

Mate value. Personal age affects the extent to which men and women are able to satisfy their preferences for age because age is an im- portant component of mate value. But age, of course, is not the only component of mate value. If high mate value people are better able to translate their preferences for age into actual mate selections, determinants of mate value in general should predict partner age alongside personal age. Status and resources are relatively important components of male mate value (Buss, 1989; Kenrick et al., 1990; Symons,1979), so men possessing these qualities should be more able than men lacking these qualities to implement their mate preferences in actual mat- ing outcomes. Among 19th century Swedish men, age of wife was a near direct function of the man’s resources, with the youngest wives on average (24.5 years) going to upper-class men who had the most land or largest businesses and progressively older wives going to men of lower classes: 25.0 years, 25.7 years, 26.9 years, and 25.5 years, respectively, for descending re- source classes (Low, 1991). These mate value effects can be so strong that traditional societies like the Tiwi of Australia can at first appear to flout the broader trends of age preferences. Among the Tiwi, young men marry the oldest women, in contrast to their predicted preference for youthful brides. How- ever, this occurs only because the older, highest status men marry the youngest women before younger men get the chance. For Tiwi men under 30, marrying older women is a political strategy: By marrying these women, young men get the political clout and connections they need for the opportunity to marry younger women later in life (Hart, Pilling, & Goodale, 1960; Kenrick, Nieuweboer, & Buunk, 2010). Another interesting source of evidence comes from studies of kings and other men of excep- tionally high status or power. Theoretically, we expect these men to be in the best position to translate their mate preferences into actual mate selections. In the 1700s and 1800s, wealthier men from the Kummerhorn population of Ger- many married younger brides than did men lacking wealth (Voland & Engel, 1990). Histor- ical studies of kings and despots found that they routinely stocked their harems with young, at- tractive, nubile women (Betzig, 1992). The Mo- roccan emperor Moulay Ismail, for example, reportedly sired some 888 children with roughly 500 women. When a woman in his harem reached the age of 30, she was moved out of the emperor’s harem and into a lower-level leader’s harem, and then replaced with a younger wom- an. Roman, Babylonian, Egyptian, Incan, In- dian, and Chinese emperors all apparently shared the preferences of Emperor Ismail and enjoined their trustees to scour their lands for as many pretty young woman as could be found (Betzig, 1992). A subtler prediction concerns the relationship between age and mate preferences. People who embody the age preferences of the opposite sex have more bargaining power on the mating mar- ket and therefore are able to get away with setting higher standards. Theory therefore pre- dicts that these individuals—younger women and older men—would have more stringent mate preferences in general. Munro, Flood, McKellar, and Reudink (2014) analyzed prefer- ences sought as a function of age in a sample of 1,275 female personal advertisements from cit- ies across Canada. They found that younger women placed more emphasis on the resources of potential mates in their ads. In a separate study, women of the highest market value, those closest to peak fecundity and reproductive value, demand the largest number of traits in their personal advertisements (Pawlowski & Dunbar, 1999a). High market value men also demanded more traits in their advertisements with the exception of a single outlier.