The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating

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.

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.

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.

Our study included 10,047 people worldwide.

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.

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.

Because only 5 percent of the males monopolize 85 percent of the females, sexual selection pressures remain intense even today.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Tags: #evolution #psychology

“Heterosexual orientation is a paradigmatic psychological adaptation,” writes Michael Bailey, one of the world’s most prominent experts on sexual orientation.

A number of twin studies show that sexual orientation is moderately heritable, suggesting a partial genetic basis.

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.

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.

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.

Our evolved mating strategies, just like our survival strategies, may now be maladaptive in some ways with respect to survival and reproduction.

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.

Males are defined as the ones with the small sex cells, females as the ones with the large sex cells.

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.

Wherever females show a mate preference, the male’s resources are often, although not always, the key criterion.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In all thirty-seven cultures in the international study on choosing a mate, women preferred men who were older than they were.

American women far more often than men desire mates who enjoy their work, show career orientation, demonstrate industriousness, and display ambition.

Women regard men who lack ambition as extremely undesirable, whereas men view the lack of ambition in a wife as neither desirable nor undesirable.

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.

Women valued intelligence more than men in ten out of the thirty-seven cultures.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Kindness, in other words, signals the ability and willingness of a potential mate to commit energy and resources selflessly to a partner.