Is it just my area...I see a LOT of 30-something men at nightclubs
 

When I go to bars, there seems to be more age diversity in both genders. But, when I go to nightclubs it will be hard to locate five women over 26 or 27. This is something I never really paid attention to until I got older. However, when it comes to guys I notice that the age distribution is more even. You have your college age guys, guys in their mid and late 20s, and then you have guys in their early to mid 30s.

I don't find anything wrong with this at all, no one should stop partying because they get older, unless they WANT to...but, the fact that there's a decent amount of "older" guys in clubs, yet the presence of "older" women in clubs is almost non-existant...really catches my attention.

I think there are probably a lot more older women there than you realize. They just don't look it.

it could just be a gross phenomena. There is this "upper class" bar here that has a lot of older men like that and lots of younger women. Male friends of mine have joked about "transactions" going on. four years ago I was in there and was hit on by someone in his late thirties to early 40's and I found the behavior disgusting. i swore I would never go back and I havent. I dont know how the clubs are here. i dont go to those.

This reminds me of the time my friends and I went to this supposedly hot club in the city. At the beginning of the night, the club was packed with lots of hot young people. Towards the end of the night, there weren't many people left and all the guys left were older and creepy and very bad dancers. There was one white-haired, white-bearded man that kept trying to get us to dance with him. His "dance move" was making the "come here" motion with his index fingers. There was another older guy who was dancing with his hands in his pockets. I was complaining to my one friend about how creepy old men should go find women their own age, and my friend said "Why? Yeah, they're older but that doesn't mean they're going to stop desiring hot young women." :p That friend always cracks me up.

That's true, many women are good at hiding their age, but when I go to clubs' myspaces, it seems to confirm that many of the young looking girls are young. I rarely find a myspace that belongs to a woman who's around 30, but I find several myspace pages that belongs to men around 30. Maybe the 30-something women don't add club pages to their myspace friends.

Yeah...but do they have much choice? I think many men would prefer a younger woman, on the other hand if they are looking for single women period, they'll more likely find them at a nightclub. For some reason, it seems that women over 25 or so do not use this strategy to find single guys.

I think that it's a reflection of it being more culturally acceptable for guys to date people younger than they are, especially for sort of low commitment dating. So single guys can hit the clubs no matter what their age and are likely to find what they are looking for: pretty young things who they hope are likely to hook up with them short term.

On the other hand, women don't have much use for younger guys when the women get to an age where they might be thinking about settling down, and the older guys at the nightclubs are pretty creepy on average if my six trips to a dance club in my 20s were representative. So nightclubs aren't as likely to deliver the type of people older women are looking for (ETA: on average): emotionally mature men who are looking for partners for longer term relationships.

Unless you were there primarily for the dancing and I've known even married women who were or you wanted to pick up a guy younger than 25, why would go to dance club if you were older?

ETA: I'm not saying every women older than 25 is looking to settle down, but you may not be looking for attention from 23 years olds at a certain point.

Yeah - this is pretty much a picture-perfect portrayal of selection bias. I wouldn't even consider it.

Not all nightclubs cater to people 25 and under.

As someone who remembers such guys from her nights at some clubs on Sunset Blvd in college, here's my take. A lot of those single 30-something guys aren't ready to grow up and settle down, so they go to the clubs to prowl for sweet young thangs, thinking for some reason that those girls will be interested in them. The women in their age group have moved on to serious relationships or marriage with men that ARE ready to grow up, so now these guys are alone. Sad thing is they don't realize how silly and immature they look.

ETA: Oh, and when we went to clubs in college, it was usually to dance and flirt with boys from UCLA and USC...not upper 30s-mid-40s divorced lawyers.

Trust me, the "women their own age" don't want them either.

Oh no doubt, but I just wished they would get out of the clubs, go somewhere else, and go be creepy to women their own age instead. :p

Oh and this topic reminds me of a funny story. Back in the day, we used to go to Player's Nightclub all the time. One of my sisters is a townie. Her mom was out of the country for several weeks, and her dad got bored and lonely at home by himself so he went to Player's for a drink. She was horrified to see her dad there. And our friend who was bartender at the time was teasing her by telling her that her dad was hitting on a bunch of girls earlier that night. She was like "No!! I don't believe you!! My dad loves my mom!!"

Yes. the guy that hit on me had on white chinos and a white collared button down shirt that was unbuttoned to the mid chest and had the sleeves rolled up. I'm fairly sure he totally thought he was cool.......totally creepy. He reached otu and grabbed my arm and started talking to me like he knew me. Freaked me out.

It's weird, but my perception is that in Atlanta we've got dance clubs for the young crowd that Dionysus was describing and then we've got dance clubs for older divorced people, but if you were younger than forty five you'd feel out of place. (and of course, we've got gay dance clubs for any age).

There are a lot of bars and places to see live music that would have a range between the two which you might characterize as nightclubs, but not dance clubs. I kind of thought we were just talking about dance clubs.

My first thought was that the women that age are home taking care of the kids while their current or ex-husbands are hitting the bars trying to find someone to "hit it" with...

yeah, I'm jaded :)