Men are attracted to health and youth because it is correlated with fertility
Women are attracted to status, wealth, and power, more common with age, because they are guarantees that the father can protect and provide for his children
Human brains don't do cost-benefit analyses like these but we are attracted to those things for those reasons. Our ancestors who were slightly more attracted to sickly or unhealthy or old women were less successful at producing fit, capable offspring. Any female ancestors who had subtle psychological predispositions for attraction to power and status tended to mate more "wisely" (from a long term genetic perspective) than other women, even, theoretically, women who didn't mate at all, which was actually safer for THEM.
In terms of the continuance of your line, being subjectively attracted to what objectively correlates with greater probability of offspring survival and success is beneficial, even if it is not always beneficial to the individual (e.g., in human and other primate males, which are basically designed to be expendable so that only the top dogs mate).
Pic related:
http://denisdutton.com/baumeister.htmEven today, a woman's chance of miscarriage and producing autistic retard babies skyrockets in her 30s and starts doing so in her late 20s. Women are fertile, at great cost to their survivability and usefulness to human groups that evolved in conditions of scarce resources and the need to move around quickly, as young as 10-12. They don't become fertile that early for no reason. It has been theorised that periods are basically punishing women for not getting pregnant, because women who comparatively COULD shrug off periods would simply do so, therefore not have any pressure to stop them via pregnancy, therefore have fewer kids, therefore make less of a genetic footprint and eventually "die off."
