The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating - David M. Buss  ## Metadata - Author: **David M. Buss** - Full Title: The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating - Category: #books - Tags: #biology #evolution #psychology ## Highlights - Discord and dissolution in mating relationships are typically seen as signs of failure. Regarded as distortions or perversions of the natural state of mating life, they are thought to signal personal inadequacy, immaturity, neurosis, failure of will, or simply poor judgment in the choice of a mate. This view is radically wrong. Conflict in mating is the norm and not the exception. (Location 56) - He had become intrigued by the puzzling fact that some animals have characteristics that hinder their survival. The elaborate plumage, large antlers, and other conspicuous features displayed by many species seem costly in the currency of survival. (Location 73) - The breakthrough in applying sexual selection to humans came in the late 1970s and 1980s, in the form of theoretical advances initiated by my colleagues and myself in the fields of psychology and anthropology.We tried to identify underlying psychological mechanisms that were the products of evolution— adaptations that would help to explain both the extraordinary flexibility of human behavior and the active mating strategies women and men pursue. This new discipline is called evolutionary psychology. (Location 93) - Our study included 10,047 people worldwide. (Location 114) - Earlier humans whose preferences ever so slightly tilted them toward nutritious objects survived more often than their counterparts and hence passed on their eating proclivities to offspring. Our actual food preferences bear out this evolutionary process. We show great fondness for substances rich in fat, sugar, protein, and salt and an aversion to substances that are bitter, sour, pathogenic, or toxic. (Location 154) - A woman who preferred to mate with a reliable man, one willing to commit to her over the long run, was more likely to have children who survived and thrived. Over thousands of generations, a preference for men who showed signs of being willing and able to commit to them evolved in women, just as preferences for mates with adequate nests evolved in weaverbirds. This preference solved key reproductive problems, just as food preferences solved key survival problems. (Location 176) - Because only 5 percent of the males monopolize 85 percent of the females, sexual selection pressures remain intense even today. (Location 197) - If females did not mind mating with smaller, weaker males, then they would not alert the dominant male, and there would be less intense selection pressure for size and strength. Female preferences, in short, determine many of the ground rules of the male contests. (Location 201) - Male elephant seals strive to monopolize harems of females, and the winners remain victorious for only a season or two, whereas many humans form enduring unions that last for years and decades. But men and male elephant seals share a key characteristic: both must compete to attract females. Males who fail to attract females risk being shut out of mating. (Location 205) - One psychological strategy that evolved to combat infidelity was jealousy. Ancestral people who became enraged at signs of their mate’s potential defection and who acted to prevent it had a selective advantage over their nonjealous peers. People who failed to prevent a mate’s infidelity had less reproductive success. (Location 232) - We are the descendants of those who knew when to cut their losses. Getting rid of a mate has precedent in the animal world. Ring doves, for example, are generally monogamous from one breeding season to the next, but they break up under certain circumstances. The doves experience a divorce rate of about 25 percent every season. The major reason for breaking their bond is infertility. (Location 247) - People reenter the mating market at a different age and with different assets and liabilities. Increased status and resources may help a person to attract a mate who was previously out of range. Alternatively, older age, the presence of children, or psychological baggage from a previous mateship may detract from a person’s ability to attract a new mate. (Location 263) - Because children from previous unions are usually seen as burdens rather than benefits when it comes to mating, a woman’s ability to attract a desirable mate often suffers more than a man’s. Consequently, fewer divorced women than men remarry, and this disparity gets larger with increasing age. (Location 267) - Although there are many exceptions and individual differences, men generally have lower thresholds for engaging in sex. For example, men often express the desire and willingness to have sex with an attractive stranger, whereas most women refuse anonymous encounters and prefer to know something about the potential mate prior to sex. (Location 283) - There is a fundamental conflict between these different sexual strategies: men cannot fulfill their short-term wishes without simultaneously interfering with women’s long-term goals. An insistence on immediate sex interferes with the goal of a longer courtship phase. The interference is reciprocal, since any delay also obstructs the goal of those seeking short-term sex. (Location 286) - There are conditions that minimize conflict and produce harmony between the sexes. Knowledge of our evolved sexual strategies gives us tremendous power to better our own lives by choosing actions and circumstances that activate some strategies and deactivate others. (Location 293) - Tags: #evolution #psychology - “Heterosexual orientation is a paradigmatic psychological adaptation,” writes Michael Bailey, one of the world’s most prominent experts on sexual orientation. (Location 296) - A number of twin studies show that sexual orientation is moderately heritable, suggesting a partial genetic basis. (Location 304) - First, there are at least three different senses of the phrase “sexual orientation.” One can be called primary sexual orientation and refers to whom one is sexually attracted to—men, women, both (bisexual), or neither (asexual). Another is gender identity—whether one subjectively feels like a man or woman, feels like both, or neither. Still another is sexual behavior, referring to the gender of the individuals with whom one actually has sex. (Location 309) - Another difference is that women appear able to switch orientations more easily, evidence of the greater flexibility of their sexuality. Anecdotally, there is the “LUG” phenomenon found in women’s colleges—Lesbian Until Graduation. The actress Anne Heche lived for several years in a lesbian relationship with comedienne and actress Ellen Degeneres. After they broke up, Heche married a man and had a child with him. Similarly, some women marry when they are young, have children, and then in middle age switch to a lesbian lifestyle. (Location 319) - We consume vast quantities of fat, sugar, protein, and salt in the form of burgers, shakes, fries, and pies. Fast-food chains are popular precisely because they serve these nutritional elements in concentrated quantities. They reveal the food preferences that evolved in a past environment of scarcity. Today, however, we overconsume these elements because of their unprecedented abundance, and the old survival strategies now hurt our health. (Location 336) - Our evolved mating strategies, just like our survival strategies, may now be maladaptive in some ways with respect to survival and reproduction. (Location 343) - To an extraordinary degree, the predilections of the investing sex— females—potentially determine the direction in which species evolve. For it is the female who is the ultimate arbiter of when she mates and how often and with whom. (Location 424) - Males are defined as the ones with the small sex cells, females as the ones with the large sex cells. (Location 431) - Finally, women face the problem of integrating their knowledge about a prospective mate. Suppose that one man is generous but emotionally unstable. Another man is emotionally stable but stingy. Which man should a woman choose? Choosing a mate calls upon psychological mechanisms that make it possible to evaluate the relevant attributes and give each its appropriate weight in the whole. There are trade-offs. A masculine man might possess good genes but may be more likely to cheat. Some attributes are granted more weight than others in the final decision about whether to choose or reject a particular man. One of these heavily weighted components is the man’s resources. (Location 490) - Wherever females show a mate preference, the male’s resources are often, although not always, the key criterion. (Location 501) - Some men are cads, preferring to mate with many women while investing little in each. Other men are dads who prefer to channel all of their resources to one woman and her children. (Location 511) - In an attempt to replicate the studies from earlier decades, I surveyed 1,491 Americans in the mid-1980s using the same questionnaire. Women and men from Massachusetts, Michigan, Texas, and California rated eighteen personal characteristics for their value in a marriage partner. As in the previous decades, women still valued good financial prospects in a mate roughly twice as much as men did. Nor did these gender differences diminish in the 1990s or the 2000s, or in published studies through the year 2015. (Location 529) - There were some cultural variations. Women from Nigeria, Zambia, India, Indonesia, Iran, Japan, Taiwan, Colombia, and Venezuela valued good financial prospects a bit more than women from South Africa’s Zulu communities, the Netherlands, and Finland. In Japan, for example, women valued good financial prospects roughly 150 percent more than men did, whereas women from the Netherlands deemed financial prospects only 36 percent more important than their male counterparts did—less than women from any other country. Nonetheless, the sex difference remained invariant—women worldwide desired financial resources in a marriage partner more than men. (Location 552) - Women desire men who command a high position in society because social status is a universal cue to the control of resources. Along with status come better food, more abundant territory, and superior health care. Greater social status bestows on children social opportunities missed by the children of lower-ranked males. Male children in families of higher social status worldwide typically have access to more mates and better-quality mates. (Location 567) - American women also place great value on education and professional degrees in mates—characteristics that are strongly linked with social status. Women rate lack of education as highly undesirable in a potential husband. The cliché that women prefer to marry doctors, lawyers, professors, successful entrepreneurs, and other professionals seems to correspond with reality. Women shun men who are easily dominated by other men or who fail to command the respect of the group. (Location 582) - The age of a man also provides an important cue to his access to resources. Just as young male baboons must mature before they can enter the upper ranks in the baboon social hierarchy, human male adolescents and young men rarely command the respect, status, or position of more mature, older men. (Location 603) - In all thirty-seven cultures in the international study on choosing a mate, women preferred men who were older than they were. (Location 607) - American women far more often than men desire mates who enjoy their work, show career orientation, demonstrate industriousness, and display ambition. (Location 664) - Women regard men who lack ambition as extremely undesirable, whereas men view the lack of ambition in a wife as neither desirable nor undesirable. (Location 666) - All of these costs indicate that emotionally unstable mates will absorb their partner’s time and resources, divert their own time and resources elsewhere, and fail to channel resources consistently over time. (Location 688) - Women valued intelligence more than men in ten out of the thirty-seven cultures. (Location 709) - The 103 couples who broke up had more dissimilar values on sex roles, sexual attitudes, romanticism, and religious beliefs than did the 99 couples who stayed together. (Location 739) - Tags: #love - A female colleague complained that all the men she was attracted to were not interested in her, yet she was being pursued constantly by men she was not really interested in. Her friend told her: “You are an 8, going after 10s, but being sought by 6s.” This single observation proved more valuable to her on the mating market than three years of therapy. She adjusted her mating strategy accordingly. (Location 768) - In contrast, they find it very desirable for a potential mate to be tall, physically strong, and athletic. Tall men are consistently seen as more desirable dates and mates than men who are short or of average height. Two studies of personal ads revealed that, among women who mention height, 80 percent want a man who is six feet or taller. (Location 791) - In addition to height, women are especially attracted to athletic men with a V-shaped torso, that is broader shoulders relative to hips.48Interestingly, these female preferences may have exerted sexual selection pressure on men, since modern men currently show upper body strength that is roughly twice that of women. It is one of the most sexually dimorphic attributes of the human body. (Location 797) - Tall men tend to have a higher status in nearly all cultures. “Big men” in hunter-gatherer societies—men high in status—are physically big men as well.49In Western cultures, tall men make more money, advance in their professions more rapidly, and receive more and earlier promotions. (Location 800) - Women are especially attracted to men who show two observable markers of good health—symmetrical features and masculinity. Bodies are supposed to be bilaterally symmetric, so deviations in symmetry represent errors a body made in constructing itself. (Location 834) - Women find masculine features to be somewhat attractive in long-term mating, although they find these features even more attractive when choosing a casual sex partner. (Location 845) - Feelings and acts of love are not recent products of particular Western views, contrary to some conventional beliefs in the social sciences. Love is universal. Thoughts, emotions, and actions of love are experienced by people in all cultures worldwide—from the Zulu in the southern tip of Africa to the Inuit in the north of Alaska. In a survey of 168 diverse cultures from around the world, the anthropologist William Jankowiak found strong evidence for the presence of romantic love in nearly 90 percent of them. For the remaining 10 percent, the anthropological records were too sketchy to definitely verify the presence of love. (Location 870) - Emotional support is yet another facet of commitment, revealed by behavior such as being available in times of trouble and listening to the partner’s problems. (Location 887) - Only in Japan and Taiwan did men give greater emphasis than women to kindness. And only in Nigeria, Israel, and France did women give greater emphasis than men to kindness. In no culture, however, was kindness in a mate ranked lower than third out of thirteen for either sex. Women desired kindness in a mate especially when it was directed toward them, and less so when it was directed toward other people or other women. (Location 912) - Kindness, in other words, signals the ability and willingness of a potential mate to commit energy and resources selflessly to a partner. (Location 918) - Although most people experience the emotion of disgust when contemplating sex with close kin, women are especially repulsed. (Location 931) - This gender difference follows from the facts of parental investment —the costs of making a poor sexual decision are typically higher for women than for men. (Location 932) - A study of 1,670 Spanish women found that highresource women wanted mates with more status and more resources. (Location 963) - What may be less intuitively obvious is that women with high mate value are especially drawn to masculine men compared with their lowermate-value counterparts. This disparity has been found for vocal masculinity as well as facial masculinity. One speculation for this preference shift pivots on the finding that masculine men tend on average to be less faithful than less masculine men. (Location 1003) - Indeed, women may be less influenced by money per se than by qualities that lead to resources, such as ambition, drive, status, intelligence, emotional stability, and mature age. Women scrutinize these personal qualities carefully because they reveal a man’s potential. Potential, however, is not enough. Because many men with a high resource potential are themselves discriminating and are at times content with casual sex, women are faced with the problem of commitment. (Location 1031) - Why men would ever commit to just one woman poses a puzzle. Since all an ancestral man needed to do to reproduce was to impregnate a woman, casual sex without commitment would have achieved this goal. For evolution to produce men who desire commitment or marriage and who are willing to devote years of investment to one woman, powerful adaptive advantages to that strategy over one of seeking casual sex, at least under some circumstances, must have been present. (Location 1055) - Men also gain in two other ways by committing. One is an increase in social status. In many cultures, males are not considered “real men” until they have married. Increased status, of course, brings a man other bounties, including better resources for his children and sometimes an increased attractiveness to additional mates. A final benefit of commitment or marriage is the formation of a more expansive coalitional network that includes his spouse’s friends and kin. Men, in short, have much to gain by committing to one woman. (Location 1082) - As men get older, they prefer as mates women who are increasingly younger than they are. Consider the statistics derived from online personal advertisements.8A man’s age has a strong effect on his preferences: men in their thirties prefer women who are roughly five years younger, whereas men in their fifties prefer women ten to twenty years younger. (Location 1127) - In Sweden during the 1800s, for example, church documents reveal that men who remarried following a divorce selected new brides 10.6 years younger on average. (Location 1143) - A preference for youth is merely the most obvious of men’s preferences linked to a woman’s reproductive capacity. (Location 1152) - The average or symmetrical composite faces were more attractive than actual individual faces. (Location 1194) - Multi-decade mating studies in the United States from 1939 to 1996 found that men rate physical attractiveness and good looks as more important and desirable in a potential mate than do women. Men tend to see attractiveness as important, whereas women tend to see it as desirable but not very important. The gender difference in the importance of attractiveness remains constant from one generation to the next. Its size does not vary throughout the decades. Men’s greater preference for physically attractive mates is among the most consistently documented psychological sex differences. (Location 1252) - Men are particularly concerned about status, reputation, and hierarchies because elevated rank has always been an important means of acquiring the resources that make men attractive to women. It is reasonable, therefore, to expect that a man will be concerned about the effect that his mate has on his social status—an effect that has consequences for gaining additional resources and mating opportunities. (Location 1273) - In my study of human prestige criteria, dating someone who is physically attractive greatly increases a man’s status, whereas it increases a woman’s status only somewhat. In contrast, a man who dates an unattractive woman experiences a moderate decrease in status, whereas a woman who dates an unattractive man experiences only a trivial decrease in status. (Location 1284) - The sexologist Alfred Kinsey estimated that more than one-third of all men engage at some point in life in some form of homosexual activity. (Location 1296) - As men’s income goes up, they seek younger partners. (Location 1355) - Tags: #psychology #evolution - Advertisers perch a clear-skinned, regular-featured young woman on the hood of the latest-model car, or gather several attractive young women to stare fondly at a man drinking a brandname beer, because these images exploit men’s evolved psychological mechanisms and therefore sell cars and beer, not because advertisers want to promulgate a single standard of beauty. (Location 1367) - The men who had viewed pictures of attractive women thereafter judged their actual partner to be less attractive than did the men who had viewed analogous pictures of women who were average in attractiveness. (Location 1372) - Internet dating sites and apps such as Tinder, Match.com, and OKCupid may trick our psychology of mating into thinking that there is always someone better out there if only we can swipe or click through enough options. (Location 1387) - Although many men in Western culture cannot require virginity, they usually insist on sexual loyalty. (Location 1506) - The biological irony of the double standard is that males could not have been selected for promiscuity if historically females had always denied them opportunity for expression of the trait. (Location 1514) - When the couples spent 100 percent of their time together, men inseminated only 389 million sperm per ejaculate. But when the couples spent only 5 percent of their time together, men inseminated 712 million sperm per ejaculate, or almost double the amount. Sperm insemination increases when other men’s sperm might be inside the wife’s reproductive tract at the same time, as a consequence of the opportunity provided for extramarital sex by the couple’s separation. (Location 1567) - Kinsey found that women were almost twice as likely to achieve orgasms with their affair partners as with their husbands. (Location 1584) - Tags: #evolution #psychology - Within the next year, for example, men stated on average that ideally they would like to have more than six sex partners, whereas women said that they would like to have only one. (Location 1612) - Large time investments absorb more of a man’s mating effort and interfere with solving the problem of number and variety. In the business world, time is money. In the mating world, time is sexual opportunity. (Location 1629) - Having known a potential mate for only one week, men are still on average positive about the possibility of consenting to sex. Women, in sharp contrast, report being unlikely to have sex after knowing someone for just a week. Upon knowing a potential mate for merely one hour, men are slightly disinclined to consider having sex, but the disinclination is not strong. For most women, sex after just one hour is a virtual impossibility. (Location 1636) - Promiscuity, high sex drive, and sexual experience in a woman probably signal an increased likelihood that a man can gain sexual access for the short run. Prudishness and low sex drive, in contrast, signal a difficulty in gaining sexual access and thus interfere with men’s short-term sexual strategy. (Location 1666) - “Coolidge effect” was named—the male tendency to be sexually re-aroused upon the presentation of novel females, giving males an impulse to mate with multiple females. (Location 1679) - You don’t want to eat the same vegetable every day.”A Kgatla man from South Africa described his sexual desires about his two wives: “I find them both equally desirable, but when I have slept with one for three days, by the fourth day she has wearied me, and when I go to the other I find that I have greater passion, she seems more attractive than the first, but it is not really so, for when I return to the latter again there is the same renewed passion. (Location 1701) - The anthropologist Thomas Gregor describes the sexual feelings of Amazonian Mehinaku men in this way: “Women’s sexual attractiveness varies from ‘flavorless’ (mana) to the ‘delicious’ (awirintya) ... sad to say, sex with spouses is said to be mana, in contrast with sex with lovers, which is nearly always awirintyapa.” (Location 1705) - The modern explosion of Internet pornography, now a multibillion-dollar business, owes its success largely to hijacking men’s evolved sexual psychology. (Location 1712) - There seems to be no question but that the human male would be promiscuous in his choice of sexual partners throughout the whole of his life if there were no social restrictions. The human female is much less interested in a variety of partners. (Location 1714) - Women emphasize tenderness, romance, and personal involvement in their sexual fantasies. They also pay more attention to how their partner responds to them than to visual images of the partner. (Location 1740) - Women were more likely to regret sexual acts of commission, such as losing virginity to the wrong person, hooking up with a person with low mate value when drunk, and having sex with someone who was not interested in a relationship. (Location 1747) - Following hookups, women are more likely than men to report feeling “used” and experiencing depressed mood. (Location 1751) - Some men report viewing a sex partner as highly attractive before orgasm, but then after orgasm, a mere ten seconds later, viewing her as less attractive or even unappealing. Martie Haselton and I found that these shifts occur primarily among men who are dispositionally inclined to pursue a short-term mating strategy. (Location 1767) - Gay men are much more interested in casual sex with strangers than are lesbian women. Whereas male homosexuals often pursue brief encounters, lesbians rarely do. Whereas male homosexuals frequently search for new and varied sex partners, lesbians are more likely to settle into intimate, lasting, committed relationships. One study found that 94 percent of male homosexuals had more than fifteen sex partners, whereas only 15 percent of lesbians had that many. (Location 1775) - The psychological clues that reveal men’s strategies for casual sex are numerous: sexual fantasies, the Coolidge effect, lust, sex drive, inclination to seek intercourse rapidly, relaxation of standards, attitudes toward hookups, emotions of sexual regret, the closing time effect, post-orgasm shifts in judgments of women’s attractiveness, homosexual proclivities, and willingness to use prostitution as a sexual outlet. (Location 1796) - Women especially value four characteristics in temporary lovers more than in committed mates—spending a lot of money on them from the beginning, giving them gifts from the beginning, having an extravagant lifestyle, and being generous with their resources. (Location 1818) - Affairs prior to marriage allow a woman to assess the intentions of the prospective mate—whether he is seeking a brief sexual encounter or a marriage partner, and hence the likelihood that he will abandon her. (Location 1833) - A male may be inclined to protect the children of a married lover on the chance that his genes are represented among them. (Location 1865) - Women are more exacting with regard to physical attractiveness in a casual encounter than they are in a permanent mate. (Location 1897) - Unfaithful married men risk retaliatory affairs by their wives and costly divorces. Short-term sexual strategies also take time, energy, and economic resources. (Location 1917) - Short-term mating, in short, poses hazards for both sexes. But because there are powerful benefits as well, women and men have evolved psychological mechanisms to select circumstances in which the costs of short-term mating are minimized and the benefits increased. (Location 1933) - Because ancestral women valued high status in men, for example, men have evolved motivation for acquiring and displaying status. Because ancestral men desired youth and health in potential mates, women have evolved motivations to appear young and healthful. (Location 2014) - In long-term mating, both men and women prefer a long courtship—a process that permits evaluation of the nature and magnitude of the assets each person possesses and the costs they carry. (Location 2035) - Certain male insects offer females food, only to take it back after the copulation is complete. They then use the same resources to court another female. (Location 2165) - Of the 130 identified tactics to attract a female mate, three of the top ones suggest openness and honesty—acting truthful with the woman, communicating feelings to her directly and openly, and simply being oneself. All of these tactics are among the most effective 10 percent of all attraction tactics that men can use. (Location 2169) - Tags: #dating - Women do not compete to signal accurate information. Rather, they compete to activate men’s evolved psychological standards of beauty, which are keyed to youth and health. Because flushed cheeks and high color are cues that men use to gauge a woman’s health, women rouge their cheeks artificially to trigger men’s attraction. Because smooth, clear skin is one of men’s evolved desires, women cover up blemishes, use moisture cream, apply astringents, and get facelifts. Because lustrous hair is one of men’s evolved desires, women highlight, bleach, tint, or dye their hair, and they give it extra body with conditioners, egg yolks, beer, or weaves. Because full red lips trigger men’s evolved desires, women apply lipstick skillfully and even get injections to enlarge their lips for the “bee-stung” look. And because firm, youthful breasts stimulate men’s desires, women obtain breast implants and wear push-up bras. (Location 2256) - It is worth keeping in mind, when confronted with a sea of troubles in the mating game, that every one of us is an evolutionary success story. (Location 2322) - The more overt the sexual advances by men, the less attractive women find them. On a 7-point scale, men placed a woman’s action of rubbing her chest or pelvis up against a man at 6.07—the second most effective act of all 103 acts, exceeded only by simply agreeing to have sex with the man. Women, however, placed a man’s use of such an action at only 1.82, suggesting that it is highly ineffective. So-called dick-pics, sent by some men in the erroneous belief that they will turn a woman on, in fact repulse most women. (Location 2373) - Initiating visual contact also proves to be a highly effective tactic for women who seek to attract a sex partner. Looking intensely into a man’s eyes and allowing him to see her staring are judged to be among the top 15 percent of effective tactics women can use to attract short-term sex partners. In contrast, this tactic proves only moderately effective in attracting committed mates, scoring near the midpoint of the 7-point scale. (Location 2396) - Women sometimes bait men with sex. Because men’s psychological adaptations orient them so vigilantly to short-term sexual opportunities, women can exploit them as a first step toward luring them into a committed relationship. (Location 2432) - Verbal dexterity (a large and fluent vocabulary and facility with language and its nuances), intelligence, artistic ability, musicality, and creativity. Even displaying moral virtues such as honesty, cooperativeness, fairness, and conscientiousness can be signals. The fitness signaling hypothesis draws an analogy with the peacock’s tail—the tail is flashy, cumbersome, and costly, but only peacocks in the best condition, those with the highest fitness, can afford to produce these mesmerizing displays. (Location 2447) - Women sometimes hold out sexually, seek demonstrations of intentions and investment, and penetrate possible deceptions. Men conceal their emotions, disguise their external commitments, and remain uncommunicative and noncommittal. They try to abscond with the sexual benefit without paying the cost of commitment. (Location 2497) - 1One of the most frequent strategies insects use is to conceal their mate from competitors. Concealment tactics include physically removing a mate from an area dense with competitors, covering up the attractive cues of a mate, and reducing the conspicuousness of the courtship display. (Location 2529) - But mate poachers perceive additional benefits unique to the context of mate poaching. One is gaining revenge against a rival by stealing the rival’s mate. Vengeance could only have evolved as a motive, of course, if it served an adaptive function, such as inflicting a cost on a rival that lowered the rival’s relative reproductive success or deterring other potential rivals from inflicting costs. (Location 2578) - Sexual jealousy consists of emotions that are evoked by a perceived threat to a sexual relationship. The perception of a threat leads to actions designed to reduce or eliminate that threat.14These can range from vigilance, which functions to monitor the mate for signs of extra-pair involvement, to violence, which inflicts a heavy cost on the mate or rival. (Location 2615) - While for the wife it is socially acceptable to tolerate her unfaithful husband, it is not socially acceptable for a man to tolerate his unfaithful wife and if he does so, he is ridiculed as behaving in an unmanly manner.” (Location 2623) - He found that men more than women wanted to know, “Did you have sex with him?” whereas women more than men wanted to know, “Do you love her?” (Location 2699) - The sex differences become even more pronounced among those who have experienced an actual infidelity in their lives. (Location 2706) - Men have more difficulty than women in forgiving a sexual than an emotional infidelity and indicate a greater likelihood of ending a relationship following a sexual infidelity than an emotional one. (Location 2707) - Women go out of their way to make themselves attractive to their partners, making up their faces to look nice, dressing to maintain a partner’s interest, and acting sexy to distract a partner’s attention from other women. (Location 2757) - Tags: #women - Claustration, or the concealment of women to prevent their contact with potential sexual partners, provides a vivid example of mate monopolization. Historically, Indian men have secluded women in the interior of dwellings. Arab men have concealed the faces and bodies of women with veils or burkas. Japanese men have bound the feet of women to restrict their mobility. (Location 2814) - In Texas until 1974, for example, it was legal for a husband to kill his wife and her lover if he did so while the adulterers were engaging in the act of intercourse. (Location 2900) - Men who allow themselves to be cuckolded are subject to ridicule and damage to their reputation, especially if they take no retaliatory action. (Location 2928) - Humans live in an uncertain mating world. We must make inferences about others’ intentions and emotional states. How attracted is he to her? How committed is she to him? Does that smile signal sexual interest or mere friendliness? Some psychological states, such as smoldering passion for another person, are intentionally concealed, rendering uncertainty greater and speculation more tortuous. We are forced to make inferences about hidden intentions and concealed deeds using a collage of cues that are only probabilistically related to their actual existence. (Location 3001) - Men and women both err in cross-sex mindreading. These cognitive biases may result from false beliefs about the other gender, mistakenly extrapolating from their own projected reactions. Men seem to think that women are more like them than they really are, and women seem to think that men are more like them than they really are. (Location 3060) - It is often in a woman’s best interest, for example, to have a man so devoted to her that all of his energies are channeled to her and her children. It is often in a man’s best interest, however, to allocate only a portion of his resources to one woman, reserving the rest for additional adaptive problems, such as seeking additional mating opportunities or achieving higher social status. (Location 3083) - 45 percent of women, in contrast to only 24 percent of men, complain that their mates fail to express their true feelings. (Location 3088) - One reason men fail to express their emotions is that investing less emotionally in a relationship frees up resources that can be channeled toward other women or other goals. As in many negotiable exchanges, it is often in a man’s best interest not to reveal how strong his desires are or how intensely he is willing to commit. (Location 3096) - Getting a man to express himself emotionally represents one tactic that women use to gain access to the important information they need to discern a man’s degree of commitment. (Location 3107) - Especially noting their failure to buy them gifts. By the fifth year of marriage, roughly one-third of married women voice this complaint; (Location 3166) - Although women are more likely to be sexual deceivers, men are more likely to be commitment deceivers. (Location 3187) - When my lab asked 112 college men whether they had ever exaggerated the depth of their feelings for a woman in order to have sex with her, 71 percent admitted to having done so, compared with only 39 percent of the women who were asked a parallel question. When the women were asked whether a man had ever deceived them by his exaggeration of the depth of his feelings in order to have sex with her, 97 percent admitted that they had experienced this tactic at the hands of men; in contrast, only 59 percent of the men had experienced this tactic at the hands of women. (Location 3192) - We are the first species in the known history of three and a half billion years of life on earth with the capacity to control our own destiny. The prospect of designing our destiny remains excellent to the degree that we comprehend our evolutionary past. Only by examining the complex repertoire of human sexual strategies can we know where we came from. Only by understanding why these human strategies have evolved can we control where we are going. (Location 4635)