# Xkcd dating formula

Although this is a fun rule of thumb, what does research say about age preferences for potential mates?There are two things that predict a preferred partner’s age: (a) your age and (b) your biological sex (male vs. From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense for women to prefer mates with resources and to like partners who are more established, both of which are more likely in older partners. It turns out that, on average, women tend to be married to men a few years older than themselves (2-5 years).Formally, we can denote these two bounds as: Still more mathematically, if we denote the creepiness rule by $f$, upper and lower bounds by $\text$ and $\text$ and your age by $x$ then we have: $$\text = f(x)$$$$f(\text) = x \Leftrightarrow \text = f^(x)$$This can be easily implemented, as the inverse creepiness rule is "you can't date people older than twice (your age minus 7 years)".As one can see from the plot above, the dating interval is getting larger with your age.

Our goal in this post is to replicate the analysis that leads to these curves.Downloading the excel file at A1-all.xls, we can continue the analysis and replicate Randall's findings.I edited the data found in the csv file to compute the age pools of singles by considering that the "single person" category is the union of the categories "Married Spouse Absent", "Widowed", "Divorced", "Separated" and "Never Married".The “half your age plus seven” rule of thumb probably helps you avoid being a creep, but is it accurate?Much to my surprise, when overlaying a line representing the rule of thumb on Kenrick and Keefe’s results (see red line in the figure below), you can see it closely matches the low end of the range (i.e., youngest preferred) for all but the oldest men.

Xkcd dating formula