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Ohplease47 If we stick to stereotypes, I'd say that young people have high expectations from love and higher tendency to idealize others and are much more easily hurt emotionally, both men and women, but for older people there's also the material aspect in it. Everyone needs to fend for oneself some way and picking a partner poses certain risks. For example, if you think of a man whose motivation to work really hard, take 2 jobs, work abroad is primarily to be able to marry a girl he loves and imagines future with, building a house and have children with and then she would reject him...isn't that building a life around one's dream about love? He could say to himself: "I could have just work one job and spend my free time on my hobby instead of saving for a house and to impress this person." I think you can tell a lot by how people react in such situations. If they crumble and fall into depression, quit a job or drop out of school, abandon their hobbies, it's a good indicator that their primary motivation was to impress their partner to achieve their dream love, not to work primarily on themselves because it was something that they were genuinely interested in and wanted to do no matter what.
For women there might be the fear of aging and becoming too unattractive to men to be loved or at least lusted after at all or missing the time when it would be appropriate to have a child, which is the theme of its own because that's another type of love that for some can entirely replace the love for a man. So if a woman goes through a break up after many years, she might think: "I lost so much time with this person while I could have been with someone else and already have a child and now it'll take so much time to get to know someone else and before it happens I'll be too old for a child." In that case though one might wonder if that big dream is the man's love at all or if she just needs it in order to reach the love for her child. Technically, if the main purpose was obtaining a man's love, then it should work at any age, no? And if she is incapable of finding a partner due to her older age despite having a pleasant personality, then it would prove that for men it has always only been about lust, not love.
Anyway, I think everyone who thinks about love at all has at least some idea of the ideal relationship. I interpret your initial question as that if women perhaps daydream more about such topics and therefore build a rather detailed image of the ideal love whether they decide to actively chase it or not, whereas men maybe focus more on what is right in front of them and go with the flow without comparing a potential partner to some dreamt-up ideal girl or expecting some particular treatment from them. More in "this is fine as well" way.
I am definitely that type of woman but as for men, we would have to ask them how do they have it.
