The Current Study
e., unpartnered) women, the main goal of our study was to conceptually replicate and extend the study by Schwarz and Hassebrauck (2012). Those researchers investigated sex and age effects on partner preferences in a sample of 21,245 single, heterosexual participants from Germany (18–65 years old) using 82 mate selection criteria evaluated in earlier studies. Their findings were clear: sex was a major explanatory factor in partner preferences, but age explained very little of the variability in reported partner preferences.
Our study included partner preferences conceptually similar to those investigated by Schwarz and Hassebrauck (2012). In addition, however, we assessed the strength of respondents’ preference regarding parenting by asking them to rate (1) the importance of a partner sharing their preferred number of children and (2) the importance of a partner’s parenting intentions. Finally, we investigated age effects on the age range deemed acceptable (age of oldest and youngest partner deemed acceptable). All main analyses focused on heterosexual single women (note that participants were explicitly asked about their gender and not about their biological sex). We also explored the links between age and partner preferences, parenting intention, as well as age range in lesbian and bisexual single women.
We restricted our main analyses to heterosexual and single participants to replicate the study by Schwarz and Hassebrauck (2012) as closely as possible. We additionally restricted our analyses to women because of low participation rates of men. The age range of women was from 18 to around 50, the average age at menopause (e.g., Bromberger et al., 1997; Palacios et al., 2010). No data are available before the age of 18, meaning that we do not cover the very interesting phase of life from menarche (i.e., around 12 years of age in resource-rich populations; Biro et al., 2018), to the later phase of adolescence. In addition, very little data is available from women over the age of 50, therefore not adequately covering a second very interesting phase of life that includes developmental milestones such as becoming a grandparent, retirement, and the emergence of health issues. Nevertheless, this means the current study covers nearly the entire reproductive life span of women.
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Hypotheses
Dovetailing with the results by Schwarz and Hassebrauck (2012), we expected no relationship between age and any of the psychological attributes summarized in H1–H5. Most studies about partner preferences have examined either importance ratings or preferred levels of an attribute. In our study, although we anticipated no differences between the two measurements, we included both scales and investigated them in parallel. Based on quadratic fertility patterns across the life span for women, we expected a positive linear relationship and a negative quadratic relationship between age and parenting intention (H6 and H7). Footnote 2 Parenting intention was measured as (a) partner sharing the preference for number of children and (b) partner’s intention of becoming a parent. Following Schwarz and Hassebrauck (2012), we expected no relationship between age and age range deemed acceptable by women in an ideal partner (H8). We further expected that, with increasing age, women find younger men more acceptable (H9), while their acceptance for older men decreases (H10).
Methods
This study is part of a larger project, the Ideal Partner Survey, for which supporting information can be found on the Open Science Framework (OSF): The hypotheses and methods of the current study were preregistered at Deviations from our preregistration are noted in footnotes throughout the manuscript and described in more detail in the Electronic Supplemental Materials (ESM Table S1, inspired by Van’t Veer et al., 2019). The authors of the preregistration (i.e., first and last author of this manuscript) did not have access to the data prior to uploading the preregistration; the data-sharing agreement is available at
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