The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating

by David M. Buss

The distribution of men’s average income in the United States, broken down by age, shows that income tends to be quite low among men in their teens and early twenties. In the decade between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four, men’s income attains only two-thirds of its eventual peak. Not until the decades from ages thirty-five to fifty-four does men’s income in the United States achieve its peak. From age fifty-five on, men’s income declines, undoubtedly because some men retire, become incapacitated, or lose the ability to command their previous salaries.49 These income averages conceal great variability, because some men’s resources continue to increase throughout their old age, whereas other men remain poor throughout their lives. Because older men tend to have more status and resources than younger men, men and women of the same age differ on average in their value as mates. In the same decade between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five when women peak in fertility and reproductive value, men’s income and status are typically the lowest that they will be in their adult lives. When most women between the ages of thirty-five and forty-four are rapidly approaching the end of their reproductive years, most men in the same decade are just approaching the peak of their earning capacity. To the extent that the central ingredients of desirability are a woman’s reproductive value and a man’s resource capacity, men and women of comparable age are not typically comparable in ...