Older Singles Eye Younger Partners

Close to a third of unmarried American woman in their 40s through 60s who date are going out with younger men, according to one of the most sweeping surveys ever conducted on the dating habits and sex lives of mid-life singles.

Sex on a first date? Only 2 percent of single women in the age group approved, while 20 percent of the men were amenable. Frequency of sex? Sixty percent of the women and 45 percent of the men said they hadn't had any in the past six months.

The survey, sampling the views of 1,407 men and 2,094 women aged 40 to 69, is being released Monday in the new edition of AARP The Magazine, the flagship publication of the nation's biggest advocacy group for Americans over 50.

The magazine has conducted large-scale surveys before, said editor Steve Slon, but never specifically targeting singles.

"Usually when people talk about singles, it's about people in their 20s and 30s," he said.

According to the survey, 60 percent of singles aged 40-69 are women, a majority of them divorced. Forty-two percent of the men and 24 percent of the women had never been married.

"Thirty-four percent of women say they're dating younger men," Slon told CBS Radio News.

The dating pool of available men diminishes as you get older," he said. "Men are either married or they're not around — as you know, men don't live as long as women — so just to find men, women have to go to where the men are, and they're younger."

Among the hundreds of findings in the survey, Slon said he was most surprised by the large portion of women who reported dating younger men — a trend recently glamorized by 40-year-old Demi Moore's romance with actor Ashton Kutcher, 15 years her junior.

"I think in a few years that would barely be remarked on," he said.

"There seems to be no stigma now for dating men a few years younger," Slon said. "Twenty years ago, men earned more money, had bigger jobs, more important, they got to call the shots. Now, as women have kind of come to be equal to men — not quite, but they're getting there — the power has shift and women can call the shots about who they're dating."

Among the men, 66 percent said they were dating younger women.

For both men and women, the top reason for dating was to find fun and companionship. Only 11 percent of the men and 2 percent of the women cited sex as the main motive.

"About 8 percent of the respondents — only that many — said they were dating in order to find a marriage partner," Slon said. "Another 9 percent said they were looking for someone to live with, they hoped, one day."

And the rest? "It's people who have made a life, live a complicated life, and found interests, and really don't want to be tied down with somebody else's complications," he told CBS Radio News.

Other notable findings:

• About 60 percent of the men felt they didn't have sex often enough, while 35 percent of the women felt that way.
• More than twice as many men as women — 46 percent to 21 percent — said they had sexual relations with more than one person during the same time period.

His magazine is trying to encourage that trend with some new dating-related features on its Web site, including an interactive area aimed at helping people compose personal ads. A message-board section will offer tips for a successful first date, as well as some first-date horror stories.

In their introduction, the survey's authors said many of the trends were linked to the increased prevalence of divorce — a phenomenon which means the ranks of mid-life singles are no longer dominated by widows and those who never married.

"These changes in attitudes coincide with the aging of the baby boomers, the generation that first adopted liberalized sexual attitudes en masse," the survey said. "This is the same generation that became more accepting of divorce and changed the perception of older unmarried women from being 'old maids' to emancipated feminists."

The survey was conducted for the magazine in June by Knowledge Networks Inc. Its margin of error, for questions asked of the entire sampling, was 2.4 percentage points, and slightly higher for questions directed at subgroups.