Very true — but I get the sense that men are more aware than women that these trends aren’t so much socialized, as much as they’re evolutionarily driven. They reflect dating/mating patterns that go back further than even primitive, early human societies — in fact, they date to way before humans.

A few of the key points in thinking evolutionarily about dating/mating:

• Females are usually the sexual selectors in mammals (not always though!), including in humans. In other words, males seek to impress females so they will be sexually selected, and females are the ones in control of that outcome.
• This is how each sex seeks to propagate their genetic material: males seek every opportunity to spread it around, prioritizing highly-fertile females; females seek to select males who will give them (a) lots of offspring, with (b) greater chances of “success” (which is defined as (1) surviving, (2) long enough to have and raise additional successful generations). Together, these two instincts ensure the greatest chance of reproductive success and group survival.
• Males, therefore, are attracted to females with characteristics that suggest fertility. These are mostly physical characteristics, and they tend to prioritize young, physically fit females.
• Females, meanwhile, are attracted to men whose physical characteristics suggest strong genetics (think peacock plumage), as well as physical and behavioral characteristics related to provision and protection. Thus, they prefer to select physically imposing and strong, aggressive and behaviorally dominant males who are successful providers.
• We still have these instincts. Today, men prefer young women at peak childbearing age, particularly those whose physical characteristics subconsciously and socially suggest fertility — and their dating behavior often reflects that ancient need to spread their seed and propagate their genetic material. This may seem immoral or distasteful by modern human ideals, but it’s not caused by “the patriarchy,” but rather by evolution by natural selection. Women, meanwhile, prioritize physical size and strength, and income, because the former suggest strong genetics and protection, and the latter relate to provision, leading to better outcomes for her children both in the present, and throughout their entire adult life, and even down through multiple generations.
• Both of these sets of gendered mating instincts/dating preferences/roles seek to accomplish the same goal: long-term reproductive success ensuring group survival. Both sexes are essentially working together toward the same objective, each doing their part.
• It’s far less common, but in the animal kingdom, these instincts, preferences, and roles tend to flip among animals or human societies in which the females are larger/more dominant, and/or the males are the primary caregivers of offspring.

This is why men don’t generally value or look for women with more education or higher earnings, and why male attraction focuses on women in their twenties even as men age into their 30s, 40s, and 50s: men are evolutionarily driven to seek out women in peak childbearing condition, while simultaneously lacking the instincts women have developed to value and seek out protection and provision. Education and economic success are markers of security and provision, which explains why women value these things, and men generally don’t.

Evolutionary mating instincts also explain fairly well a question often asked by both men and women: Why do women often choose men who are bad for them? And really, we should be asking the same question about men, but we often don’t — these evolutionary instincts unquestionably lead to similar dating problems for men, as they also prioritize women who, in the context of modern society, may not be the best partners for them.

And yes, all of these gendered trends have also been socially reinforced and maintained, without a doubt — but even this is a function of biological, evolutionary instincts, as it is those instincts that have compelled human societies to reinforce these gender roles and attitudes since before the Agrarian Revolution.

This is really important to understand, but social progress movements tend to get it precisely backward, viewing these instincts as socialized in the context of a patriarchal social structure. In fact, this is exactly backwards: Gender roles in our society are not the result of men using their size and strength to oppress and control women — rather, they’re the result of evolutionary biology, and those instincts are what have then led humans to create societies that reflect and reinforce those long pre-existing instincts.

Here’s where this becomes really important to the current conversation about gender, men and women, dating, society, oppression, patriarchy, etc.: It affects the empathy we have for each other, the tone of this conversation, and our ability/willingness to work together to make positive changes, rather than as adversaries with conflicting values and objectives.

Here’s what I mean. Since long before humans existed, all the way up to the present, the development and reinforcement of these gendered instincts has been driven as much, if not more, by females — in the traits they have selected for in males. If females sought out and selected for an entirely entirely different set of traits and behaviors… (a) males would have sought to develop those traits and behaviors in themselves, (b) female sexual selection of those traits would have led to future generations having more of those traits (and fewer of these traits that we actually have).

And yet, the current narrative is that our current dynamics were created, and are currently maintained, by men seeking to use their power to dominate and control women. (And not just a handful of extremely powerful men, but all men — will not all men, but enough men, right?) How can we hope to find a solution and make positive changes to these dynamics, if we can’t even identify the root of the problems, and end up acting as adversaries in a battle of the sexes, rather than partners in one of the greatest cooperative endeavors of human flourishing?

In the end, human mating patterns represent just one of dozens of instincts that humans (and our evolutionary ancestors) developed over millions of years, which were critical to survival during eons of evolution but can actually be quite detrimental to flourishing in modern human societies.

So many of our evolutionarily-developed instincts are the reason we’re here, and yet now that we’re here, they often really screw us over as humans living in modern societies.