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. Weiterlesen