Relationship views changing with age

[brainstorm]

This is probably going to come across as stereotyping in some way but it's not intended. I am just wondering if anyone else has noticed a pattern with male and female attitudes toward relationships changing as people age. Specifically, it seems like when I was @20 women were generally sexually conservative and primarily interested in emotional bonding/relationships (what some would call "clingy"). Now, @10 years later, it seems as though women mature into the self-confident ones who want space and dislike "clingy" emotional-relationship oriented men, who may also be seen as "controlling."

Is this a general pattern that others have observed too? If so, could this be due to (heterosexuals) learning about the patterns of the other gender and adapting to it during their 20s? Could it be purely a result of male libido peaking early while female libido supposedly rises slowly and peaks @30-40? These are vague hypotheses and I'm not even sure this is a widespread pattern. Has anyone noticed this or something similar?

 

[FlexGunship]

I've noticed that there are just fundamentally two classes of women. By age group I seem to bump into more "free radicals" of one group than the other. I'm not sure it's a fundamental shift by age, more a measure of which ones are most often spotted in the wild by age group.

 

[bd7878]

i think that women are a bit more varied than two types... clingy and non clingy... that being said as you get into your 30's those inclined for relationships and marriage end up just so - those not into that are out and about and the ones you are coming across.

Also there is a phenomenon of people in their early 30's (present company included) who have gone through a marriage (called starter marriages:) and now single again would be much more wary of getting into something that serious again.

 

[brainstorm]

i think that women are a bit more varied than two types... clingy and non clingy... that being said as you get into your 30's those inclined for relationships and marriage end up just so - those not into that are out and about and the ones you are coming across.

Also there is a phenomenon of people in their early 30's (present company included) who have gone through a marriage (called starter marriages:) and now single again would be much more wary of getting into something that serious again.

Yes, I think it is the starter-marriage-wearies that fear clingy/controlling men. Maybe this has something to do with becoming distanced from their own clinginess/controllingness that got them into an early marriage to start with. Either way, the interesting thing to me is how people think it is possible to get into a relationship without clinging to and controlling each other to some degree. I would love to say that it is dysfunctional to believe that is all a relationship amounts to but, at least at some level, they aren't possible without that. The best you can really hope for if you don't like it is to find someone who is willing to actively resist that tendency.

Still, I think such resistance is ultimately self-delusion. Why? Because once a woman (could be a man too, actually) finds someone who is not clingy and controlling, they themselves will become that way. Why? Because as long as they are resisting clinginess and controllingness, they will feel extremely desirable as the object of desperation. So when they find someone who's not desperate enough to cling and try to control them, they will become that way out of loss of self-confidence. Could this be overly assumptive or does this seem to make sense?

Then, when the shoe is on the other foot and they're the clingy/controlling once again, they will complain about men being emotionally unavailable and afraid of commitment. It's all complex ideological manipulation (perhaps subconscious), I'm cynically inclined to believe.