It's a common cliche that older men chase much younger women, but charts from the book "Dataclysm" provide real evidence that men at every age are consistently most attracted to women in their early 20s.
"Dataclysm" author Christian Rudder uses numbers from OkCupid to show how women and men differ in the ages of the people they're attracted to.
Men, regardless of their age, tend to say women in their early 20s look best, while women are most attracted to men their own age.
Dataclysm: Who We Are When We Think No One's Looking / Christian Rudder
To make these charts, Rudder looked at the preferences of OkCupid users. As you can see, a woman's taste in men typically evolves as she ages, while a man's taste in women stays the same no matter how old he gets.
But there's another layer to this data. Although men at every age seem to be attracted to very young women, they most often message women who are closer to their own age.
The age range of women men say they're most interested in tends to fall within their own age range:
The same goes for the women men message the most:
And hardly any men in their 30s message 20-year-old women:
Still, it's harder for women to find a mate as they get older. Rudder wrote in a blog post for OkCupid in 2010: "a man, as he gets older, searches for relatively younger and younger women. Meanwhile his upper acceptable limit hovers only a token amount above his own age."
Charts reprinted from "Dataclysm: Who We Are When We Think No One's Looking." Copyright © 2014 by Christian Rudder. Published by Crown Publishers, an imprint of Random House LLC.