What should you look for when deciding to date someone? You may fantasize about a hot first date but how about finding someone, hot, that you can spend your life with? A question that came up recently is if the same level of education is important when you are dating? Does education matter wonders Science Daily?

Online daters are most likely to contact people with the same level of education as them, but are less fussy about an intellectual match as they get older, according to QUT research.

The comprehensive study analyzed the online dating interactions of more than 41,000 Australians aged between 18-80, with the findings now published by leading international journal Personality and Individual Differences.

To a degree it is normal to be dating someone with a similar level of education because we date in high school, college or we have just entered the workplace. The pool of available partners will typically have similar interests and a similar level of education. But when we use online dating as a tool to find new people we are moving outside of our immediate peer group. What does educational level have to do with our choices now? Science Daily quotes the study.

“Cyber dating permits multiple partner choices in real time, which allows for a significantly greater available choice of potential mates. This increased pool means greater opportunity for selection of partners with lower, similar or even higher levels of certain characteristics.

“This includes education, which is commonly used in human mating behavior as a proxy for resources and future provision as it can represent economic advantages.”

If a young woman or man dreams of upward social mobility, educational level may be important. For example, do you want to marry a doctor? Then you want someone on their way to a medical degree with good grades and a lot of stamina. You also want someone who is not so buried in their career that they will ignore you over the years. After all, the famous physician William Osler said that “medicine is a jealous mistress!”

How about When We Get Older?

Is level of education always important to online daters? According to the study the level of importance of how much education you have drops off over the years.

“The more educated cohort tends to care less about matching the same level of education as they get older,” Mr Whyte explained.

“Older women in particular have a greater likelihood of contacting potential partners who are less educated than themselves but conversely, younger males fall into this category as well.”

This makes sense in that older people have established themselves in their lives and may not need a partner for economic security but are looking for an agreeable and hopefully sexy companion. And with age we become less fussy as being too picky in our choices of mates has left us alone in our later years. And with age may come the wisdom that says a compatible partner in life is more important than a degree from a university or school of medicine.