Abstract
According to evolutionary theory, men and women differ in the characteristics valued in potential partner. There has been plenty of studies look at this topic throught analyzing online advertisements.
Conventional findings are that women seek resources while men seek physical attractiveness and similarly women offer physical attractiveness and men offer resources more often than opposite. The aim of our study was to test whether the required and mentioned characteristics, stated in advertisements, differ also between men and women in post-reproductive age (over 50).
We colected 175 women´s and 137 men´s online dating advertisements and we looked at offered and requested characteristics in thein adverts. We found that men were more likely than women to request physical appearance, with 42 % of men mentioning physical appearance compared with 23 % of women (Chi2=13,533, p=.000) and women were more likely than men request resources, with 14 % of women compared to 4 % of men mentioning resources (Chi=10,002, p=0,001).
Men were also more likely offering resources (47%) than women (29%) were (Chi2=10,196, p=0,001). These results are consistent with studies carried out on the population of reproductive age.
But our most surprising result showed that men over 50 years reported more informations about their physical appearance (56%) than women (35%) in post-reproductive age (Chi2=13,427, p=.000). Our finding could be as a consequence of a fact that while women over 50 years loose fecundity as a result of menopause, men can have children ordinarily throughout life.
Considering men choose younger partners it seems men state characteristics related to physical appearance, because these can be indicators of fertility and health and therefore signals of posibility for having children.