It's a little hard to apply in practice because a.) nobody knows just how many candidates there will be in their lifetime and b.) your idea of who the "best" candidate will be changes over time, based on your life experiences. Someone who you thought annoyingly plain in college may be a great life partner 10 years later, while the girl who was fun and exciting in college seems more than just a little crazy if she's still doing the same stuff a decade later.
There's also the question of evolving mate quality. Are the people who are available at 30 worse in quality than at 20, as most people tend to believe ("all the good ones" are or get "taken")? Or are they better (which is possible, too)?
It did seem, as a man, that women with good personalities improved with age, but that women with average or bad personalities became worse. Age seems to spread people out, in that way, but the well-adjusted people being selected out tended to push down the mode. There were a lot of women I dated in their late 20s who had way too many psychological cigarette burns from Biffs and Jedds ("two D's because..."). Partners of low moral character definitely do lasting damage-- that's obvious in all genders-- and women have more opportunity to get fucked up (and fucked literally) than men in college and their early 20s.
That said, "all the good ones are taken" is probably more panic than reality. I remember in college, people used to descend on the freshman girls "before they get snapped up". It's a fucked-up way to think and maybe it actually has the opposite effect of taking bad people out of the market, because only a fucked-up person would think that for a college senior to stalk September-frosh ("froshing", it was called) is OK.
I'm 29, turning 30 in a few weeks, but I'm meeting more women now, and in general it seems that most have grown up, so much so that I wonder where these women were in my early 20's. I mean I had my growing up to do as well, but I was never big into the college party scene etc.
Hmm... I think it's probably (at least) a bimodal distribution. Some of the untaken ones are untaken because they have issues that render them unappealing for a long term relationship (physical attractiveness is far from the only criterion, by the way). Others may be highly appealing, but have such high standards of their own that they haven't yet met anyone who qualifies.
If you like active, professional women, you also have the phenomena of many women entering the "serious relationship" pool around age 30 because they spent their twenties traveling, or concentrating on their career, or getting advanced degrees, all of which take a significant amount of focus and often involve life changes which tend to end existing relationships.
This is a topic that's really sensitive, and what kinds of experiences "permanently ruin" someone, and which can be bounced back from, are subjective and hotly debated, so... I'll try to tread lightly. And I really hate the stud/slut dichotomy. If a woman who hung out with typical frat boys in college and got flash-lighted is untouchable, then why aren't those frat boys, who did the flash-lighting, likewise? They should be. The idea that horrible men are "cool" because they "got away with it" is revolting. That double standard makes me angry.
The problem isn't physically abusive partners alone. There's more to it than that. If dating a jerk or a crazy person or even a physically abusive person made someone "permanently damaged" there'd be almost no one left.
The main issue that is gendered is that women have more opportunities, when they're young, to involve themselves with really terrible people and for things to go seriously wrong. We're all bad judges of character when we're really young. The typical 15-year-old boy isn't any morally better than a 15-year-old girl, and would probably make choices that would destroy him if given the chance... but typical 15-year-old boys are considered unattractive (even to girls of the same age) and don't get those opportunities. I was a fucking idiot at that age, but no one wanted to be a fucking idiot with me. For women... it's a different story. The opportunities to make really bad choices and ruin yourself, if you're a young woman, are quite available.
I don't think it's even sex itself that does the damage. I used to think that, but I think casual social contact is what erodes the person's values. Being around bad people makes a person bad. What makes college casual sex evil isn't the sex itself (the sex is vanilla) but the acquisitive, manipulative, and dishonest culture around it. I have no problem with swingers or people in open relationships or above-board promiscuous adults, because there's nothing gross or wrong about sex itself. But the culture around college casual sex (the alcohol abuse, the focus on man as conquerer and woman as defeated, the "gray rape" that isn't "gray" at all, the fights, the "pickup artist" nonsense, and the reward of bad behavior in both sexes) is pretty disgusting.
The traditional solution to this problem is that the father and/or brother would protect the young woman and maim or kill the louts who would try manipulate and take advantage of her. Colleges also had the power of "In loco parentis" to prevent parties that were full of alcohol abuse and casual sex. All such powers were stripped by law in the late 60's and 70's with the results you see now. So if you want to see this problem fixed you would need either to return to patriarchy, or invent some novel way of guiding the young down the right path.
