The Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology and Romantic Relationships (2023) presents the empirical and theoretical advancements in the evolutionary study of dating and romantic relationships.

Video Review

SUMMARY

About the Author:
Justin K. Mogilski and Todd K. Shackelford are the editors, both holding a PhD in evolutionary psychology.
As it’s often the case with handbooks, each chapter is written by different authors.

Selection Is Intrasexual & Intersexual

The two processes are:

• Intrasexual selection, where members of one sex compete with one another for greater sexual access to members of the opposite sex.
• Intersexual selection (AKA preferential mate choice), where one sex chooses a mate from the opposite sex based on certain traits they prefer

However, the two are interlinked:

First, if men compete with each other in physical contests (…) the informative variance produced can create or amplify women’s preferences for athletic prowess (…).
Second, the mate preferences of one sex can dictate the domains of intrasexual competition in the other sex.

Such as, for example, if women prefer bravery and generosity, that creates selection pressure on men to display honest indicators of bravery and generosity, likely leading to male competition for out-doing each other.

Dimorphism is a cue of sexual selection

The larger the difference between the sexes, the more evolution was because of mate choice, rather than survival:

When such large sexual dimorphism of a trait is observed, it typically means that there has been sexual selection driving the exaggeration of the trait (in contrast, viability selection, which is concerned with survival, tends to act more equally on the two sexes than sexual selection, since a trait useful for survival in one sex is typically also useful for survival in the other

This also means that mate choice may act against survival:

Parental Investment & Trivers’ Theory

An important sex difference among genders comes to who invests the most in child-rearing.

One of those key gender differences is which sex chooses.

Trivers originally explained why with the theory of parental investment and sexual selection:

The sex that invests more than the other, he argued, does the choosing, so the intersexual selection component applies mainly to that sex.
The sex that invests less, in contrast, is more competitive with members of their own sex for mating access to the higher investing sex.
Trivers’s theory was based on the work of Bateman (1948), and the key principle is termed the “Bateman gradient,” the steepness of the slope between mating success and reproductive success. Sexual access to additional mates (one form of mating success), according to Bateman and Trivers, pays more reproductive dividends for the low-investing sex than for the high-investing sex

And how about humans?
Well, women choose more, but… For long term, both genders choose.

Let’s see why:

Parental Investment & Choosing In Humans

In brief:

• Most men invest in their children, thus
• Men are also choosy for long-term partners
• Men are less choosy for short-term and uncommitted sex, but most men still are not completely undiscerning
• Women also compete with each other for high-value men: robust evidence also supports female–female mating competition for prospective mates (e.g. , Benenson, 2014; Buss, 1988; Buss & Schmitt, 1993; Campbell, 2002; Krems et al. , 2016; Vaillancourt, 2013; Vaillancourt & Krems, 2018)

In most animals, mate choice is mostly the female’s prerogative.

But in humans, both sexes exert strong preferential mate choice, so the causal process applies to both women and men.
However, a key difference comes down to whether we’re talking about long-term mating, or short-term sex.

In short term, men are less choosy than women.
However, Buss later explains, that because both sexes invest heavily in long-term mating contexts, we expect both sexes to be extremely choosy for long-term dating and relationships.

And later he says:

In long-term mating, both sexes typically invest heavily in offspring, so both sexes are predicted to be choosy or discriminating. And both sexes compete with members of their own sex for desirable members of the other sex.

And a little later:

Although men are not physiologically bound to invest in ofspring via gestation and lactation, they have evolved to provide resources given that ancestral environments were often harsh and that men’s resources and protective presence likely contributed to offspring survival (Buss, 1989; Buss & Schmitt, 1993; Geary, 2000, 2015)
(…)
Thus, men also evolved to be selective and cautious when considering long-term relationships (Kenrick et al. , 1990; Li & Kenrick, 2006)

Indeed, whenever I hear a guy who “wants a girl with a degree” or something similar, I know I’m in the presence of someone who’s thinking long-term and who is family-oriented.
Furthermore, I know he’s more likely to be more of a “modern” and egalitarian type of man for expecting his wife to work and contribute.

Women care more about his investment

Since:

1. Men do invest in their children, BUT
2. Not all men invest or can invest
3. Men’s investment is important for the wellbeing of women and children

Women may have adapted to care more about men’s investment.
And indeed:

Investment by a partner is linked to satisfaction, but only for women; this pattern is similarly observed for self-disclosure, as well as the ability to elicit a partner’s disclosures (Hendrick et al. , 1988)

Sexual Strategies Theory

Important premises of SST include:

1. Humans have evolved distinct mating-specific adaptations for specific problems. Solving them provides fitness benefits and avoiding them the fitness costs of pursuing each sexual strategy
2. Sex similarity in mating psychology. In domains in which the sexes confront similar adaptive challenges, such as solving the commitment problem in long-term mating, they have evolved a similar sexual psychology
3. Sex differences in mating psychology when the sexes have confronted different adaptive challenges (ie.: assessing the fertility or social status of a potential mate) they evolved distinct features of their sexual psychology
4. Common long-term mating challenges faced by both sexes. Ie.:
   • Identifying a partner able and willing to commit
   • Assessing long-term mate attributes such as an altruistically skewed welfare trade-of ratio (i.e. , one in which the partner makes decisions that reflect valuing your welfare more than their own) (Tooby et al. , 2008)
   • Identifying mates with similar mate value trajectories over time
   • Identifying mates who are not overly encumbered with costly commitments such as children from prior mateships or in the modern environment great financial debt
5. Male-specifc long-term mating challenges. Ie.:
   • Identifying potential partners high in reproductive value
   • Solving the paternity uncertainty problem.
6. Female-specifc long-term mating challenges. Ie.:
   • Identifying men who can acquire resources consistently over time
   • Identifying men willing to invest those resources in her and her children without diverting them to other women and their children
   • Identifying men able and willing to protect her and her children from harm and exploitation
7. Male-specifc short-term mating challenges. Ie.:
   • Desiring/finding a larger number of partners
   • Letting less time and commitment elapse before sex
   • Minimizing entangling commitments
8. Female-specific short-term mating challenges. In short-term mating, women have evolved to reap several potential fitness benefits, including immediate access to resources, obtaining high-quality genes, and mate switching to divest themselves of a cost-inflicting partner or to trade up to a superior partner (Buss et al., 2017).
9. Context-specificity of sexual strategies. Humans have evolved mating adaptations to implement different sexual strategies depending on features of condition and context such as operational sex ratio, mate value, social norms surrounding sexuality, culture-specific mating system, and ecological variables such as parasite prevalence, sex-specific mortality, food scarcity or abundance, and individual resource demands driven by the number of dependent children (e.g., Gangestad & Buss, 1993; Prall & Scelza, 2020; Schmitt, this volume).
10. Sexual strategies are evolved psychological solutions and their behavioral manifestations. Sexual strategies are evolved solutions to common and sex-differentiated mating problems. They include psychological design features sensitive to multiple features of context that activate or suppress them, information-processing procedures and decision rules, and manifest emotional, cognitive, and behavioral outputs that include attraction, sexual arousal, tactics of attraction, derogation of competitors, mate guarding, and many others.
11. Humans have little conscious awareness of their mating psychology. No conscious awareness about origins, nature, or evolved functions of sexual strategies is implied by SST. Nonetheless, humans may possess partial insight into some aspects of sexual strategies either through observation of others or through introspection about the self, partially driven by the degree to which this awareness facilitates navigating the complex maze of mating challenges posed by the processes of sexual selection.

Also see by David Buss:

• Evolutionary Psychology
• When Men Behave Badly
• The Evolution of Desire

Women Short-Term Strategies Explained: mate switching VS dual-mating strategy (good genes)

On first glange, women don’t gain nearly as much as men engaging in short-term, no-strings attached sex.

However, there is still plenty in it for women.
Currently, the theory of women’s short-term sexual behavior include:

• Immediate resources
• Good genes (AKA dual mating strategy): obtaining investment and resources from one regular committed partner and obtaining superior genes from an affair partner.
  Historically this hypothesis rested on the “ovulatory shift” -ie.: women prefer more masculine men during their ovulation window-.
  But “The empirical evidence for these mate preference shifts is mixed. One large meta-analysis (…) found some support for the predicted preference shifts, although the effect sizes were small (Gildersleeve et al., 2014)” and “Based on the studies conducted thus far, empirical support for the hypothesized good genes function of women’s short-term mating is weak or mixed (Jones et al. , 2019)“
• Evaluating short-term mates for long-term possibilities
• Mate switching, such as starting to have short-term sex with a better man, and then move to him for a committed relationship

Buss tends to favor mate switching and he says:

Mate switching may be the most frequent or primary function of female infdelity

There is much talk by some present-day red pill (2024) gurus about mate switching VS dual mating strategy.
Not that red pill folks like Rollo Tomassi have any high authority on these issues, but in my opinion, it’s a nonsense debate since the above hypotheses are NOT mutually exclusive.
ALL above hypotheses can apply to different women, different situations, or may all apply to the same situation, with only different weights each.

My note: mate switching is the #1 option IF the higher value man is available

I believe that mate switching is women’s #1 goal when a higher mate man is available because that’s what makes the most sense for women: best genes, best provisioning, best relationships.
However, since higher value men may only be available for the short term, the “good genes” is the #2 option for women.

Finally, I’d personally add a 5th hypothesis:

• Exaptation/spillover of pleasure: women engage in short-term sex because it’s pleasurable. Sexual pleasure evolved to increase copulation and the number of offspring. And that applies indiscriminately to both long-term, and short-term.
  So, sometimes women have sex because it’s fun, without any deep motive (duh moment)

Culture & environment: they matter

Humans are social animals.

So it would be surprising if culture did not matter a lot.

However, the authors made a great point that I often suspected as well:

In general, culture matters increasingly more with society’s complexity and opulence, while survival becomes less of a worry -and quantity of reproduction as well-.

Say the authors:

The infuence of biological, ecological, socioeconomic, and cultural factors varies between and within types of societies. In isolated tribal, subsistencebased societies, biological and ecological factors play major roles. In traditional societies, besides these factors, socioeconomic and cultural factors play important roles. In modern societies, socioeconomic and cultural factors become dominant, with decreasing infuences for biological and ecological factors

The authors provide this evidence in support:

The findings of Buss and colleagues (Buss et al. , 1990) about mate preference conform to this interpretation
(…)
India, China, Iran, and Nigeria were on one end, with high value on resource provisioning, domestic skills, chastity, home, and children, and the Netherlands, Great Britain, Finland, and Sweden on the other end with low value of these traditional qualities

I have personally noticed the same.
Poorer societies value money more than richer (and more socialist) ones.

Humans are also very good at adapting to different environments.
And that adaptation can be triggered by childhood experience, or also simply by moving and changing environment:

When ecological and social conditions of life change, people adjust their norms of attractiveness due to exposure to new cultural environments.
The example of Zulu people of South Africa, who moved to the UK, have demonstrated such capability for adaptation (Tovée et al. , 2006).

This is also why some men recommend to be careful with moving your mate from one country to another because… I can’t write this publicly, sorry :).
See our programs or book a consultation.

The environment matters: earning example

For example, women in poorer ecologies place a premium on men’s earnings:

Notably, our mating psychologies are highly responsive to changing environmental challenges and demands, and evidence suggests that greater competition for resources and greater resource demands in one’s local ecology upregulates women’s preference for earning capacity and downregulates women’s preference for emotional stability and compatibility of interests and values when evaluating potential mates (McGraw, 2002)

Childhood environment matters: life history examples

People who faced greater childhood adversity are more likely to develop faster life history strategies, which are associated with earlier sexual maturity and greater sexual motivation relative to people with slower life history strategies.
Dinh et al.(2017) found that women with faster life history strategies demonstrated a robust, positive association between conception risk and sexual motivation (…) Women with slower life history strategies, however, demonstrated a negative association between conception risk and sexual motivation.
Thus, women who experienced unstable and harsh early environments were more likely to maximize reproductive opportunities, and this resulted in a closer coupling of ovarian hormones with sexual motivation compared to women who experienced more stable and plentiful early environments

Of course, these different approaches are only antithetical in the, shall I say it, lesser minds of extremists and biased individuals.
In truth, they’re all just part of the mix -and part of the explanatory mix-.
It means that both ecology, culture, and genes (both shared among most people or exceptional to the individual) contribute to adjusting and changing the general trends of mating preferences.

Culture and individual needs matter: jealousy patterns example

The evolutionary headline on jealousy is that “men fear sexual infidelity, and women emotional infidelity”.

In truth, it’s more complex, and it depends largely on culture and the male parental investment:

drawing on cross-national data from a two-part survey administered to 11 populations (3 urban, 8 small-scale societies), Scelza et al.(2019) suggest that the standard evolutionary psychology perspective of highly charged emotional responses to female infidelity by males might be somewhat simplistic
(…) these researchers found that when sex and culture were considered in tandem, men and women in most of the focal populations were more upset by sexual infdelity. By contrast, in a small number of other populations, both sexes were more distressed by emotional infdelity.
The key insight (…) is that sociocultural factors (e.g. , paternal investment and norms for extramarital sex) are potent “contributors to cross-cultural variation in jealous response” (p.23). Specifcally, the greater paternal investment and the lower frequency of extramarital sex, the more severe the jealous response. It is noteworthy that this recent work does indeed conform to the evolutionary prediction that the intensity of jealousy should depend on the male’s level of investment

People change & adapt: condition-dependent mating strategies

People’s taste in the opposite gender changes depending to personal, social, ecological, and cultural context.

This also means that mate value changes depending on:

• Sex ratio. Men shift to brief sexual encounters when many women are sexually available because the sex ratio is in their favor and they are therefore better able to satisfy their desire for variety (Pedersen, 1991)
• (potentially) Ecological parasite prevalence. higher parasite prevalence means greater value on physical attractiveness (Gangestad & Buss, 1993).
  Note: the importance of this variable is in question, awaiting further research
• Individual autonomy: attractiveness matters more in independent cultures, such as American society, and matters less and implies different expectations in interdependent societies, such as Korea in Southeast Asia and Ghana in Africa
• Gender equality and cultural stereotypes: sex differences in mating preferences for attractiveness are smaller in societies with greater gender equality (the Netherlands), compared to cultures with more conventional gender norms (ie.: Germany) (Buss et al. , 1990; De Raad & Doddema-Winsemius, 1992)
• Opulence/resources: substinence-based societies prefer mates with higher fat percentages (e.g. , Anderson et al. , 1992; Brown and & Konnor, 1987)

But don’t go to extremes: why evolutionary models beat socio-cultural models

Sociocultural models have considerable appeal and have characterized social psychology for several decades.
However, these models may be inadequate at dealing with the fact that (a) preferences are remarkably similar around the world (Buss, 1989; Tomas et al. , 2020), (b) preferences often look the same in diferent species (Wroblewski et al. , 2009), and (c) preferences are consistent across age groups and time (Kenrick & Keefe, 1997)

Mate Value

Mate value is a measure of attractiveness.

People differ in their mate value, and high-mate value also means the ability to give and make others better off, as per social exchange:

People vary in their mate value, or the degree to which they would promote the reproductive success of those who mate with them (Buss & Schmitt, 1993; Symons, 1979, 1995)
(…)
it makes sense that humans have evolved not to mate indiscriminately but have evolved psychological mechanisms to evaluate and prefer mates who possess greater, as opposed to lesser, reproductive value

Evolutionary psychologists largely believe that what we find attractive is in good part shaped by evolution:

with attraction being understood as an evolved psychobehavioral mechanism for identifying and pursuing healthy, fertile, high-quality mates (Lee et al. , 2008), and attractive cues understood as valid cues to underlying physiological or psychological quality (Coetzee et al. , 2009; Stephen & Tan, 2015)
(…)
Individuals who are able to identify cues to mate quality (…) enhancing their reproductive success and providing a selection pressure which favors genes that enhance successful identification of a partner’s quality

High-quality mates provide two benefits:

• Direct benefits to the chooser, such as protection from violence; gifts such as money, food, or access to high-quality territory; or investment in offspring (Luoto, 2019a; Trivers, 1972)
• Indirect benefits to the offspring, such as good genes (Fisher, 1930; Jones & Ratterman, 2009)

My note: women’s preference for the two may vary
I suspect different women also value those two differently.
For example, some selfish “gold digger” may prioritize direct benefit to them, rather than to their children.

Cues of genetic quality

The cues to mate genetic qualities can be divided into 4 categories, but then the authors

• Health during development
  • Symmetry, albeit there is limited evidence that it refects aspects of health during development or in adulthood (cf.Borráz-León et al. , 2021)
  • Sexual dimorphism (AKA: “sex typicality” or “masculinity/femininity”). Sexual dimorphism is thought to be largely fxed by the end of puberty, so it is may act as a valid cue to hormone levels during development (Luoto et al. , 2019; Swift-Gallant et al. , 2020).
    Exceptions apply though, the authors later say that “for long-term relationships and in harsh environments men prefer more masculine female partners (e.g. , Little et al. , 2007, but see Pereira et al. , 2020)”
• Current condition
  • Adiposity faces near the average level of apparent facial adiposity were perceived as healthiest and most attractive, but slightly contradicting: asked to manipulate them to appear as healthy as possible, participants chose faces corresponding to lower BMI and lower adiposity (Stephen et al. , 2017)
  • Skin Color and Texture smooth (Fink & Matts, 2008), yellow-orange (i.e., a combination of yellow and red; see Foo, Rhodes, et al., 2017), reddish (Re et al., 2011) and darker (Fink et al., 2001) skin
    • Yellowness and redness for Carotenoid concentration (see Foo, Rhodes, et al. , 2017; Stephen, Law-Smith, et al. , 2009). The authors also mention it comes from fruit and vegetables in the diet (Alaluf et al., 2002; Stahl et al., 1998)
    • Reddish skin pigments for blood vascularization and oxygenation (visually detected in reddish skin pigments; Re et al. , 2011)
    • Darker skin pigments for melanin concentration (Chung et al. , 2010) are all positively associated with immune system functioning (see Chew & Soon Park, 2004; Lakaye et al. , 2009; Re et al. , 2011; Smith & Tiboutot, 2007)
      My note: many exceptions always apply, see women’s endless fascination with vampires
• Genetic quality
  • Major Histocompatibility Complex, thought to be detectable via (largely unknown) cues in individuals’ odor and facial appearance (Lie et al. , 2009)
  • Height, but mostly for men, because “women’s height does not appear to strongly afect men’s perceptions of women’s attractiveness“. Height heritability is also larger in men, than women.
    Even here though, there is an “optimum balance“: The relationship between male height and reproductive success may be curvilinear, decreasing after an optimal height has been reached (Sugiyama, 2015). Even though taller men are favored by women, taller men have lower reproductive success than average men in some populations (Stulp & Barrett, 2016)
  • Muscularity, especially upper-body strength explains most of the variance in women’s perceptions of men’s body attractiveness (Sell et al. , 2017)
  • Body odors: people find odors linked to superior immune functioning more attractive (Rikowski & Grammer, 1999).
    Body odor is also linked to men’s masculinity and trait-level dominance (Sorokowska et al. , 2012; Sorokowska et al. , 2016), in turn related to elevated androstadienone (a testosterone derivative) levels, and women seem to be attracted to androstadienone-based odors (Saxton et al. , 2008)
• Psychological traits. there is some evidence that individuals who express a preference for certain personality traits in a romantic partner find the faces of opposite-sex people who report that personality trait more attractive (Little et al., 2006). There is also evidence that intelligence (Zebrowitz et al., 2002) may be visible in the face
  • Competence
  • Compassion, including kindness, agreeableness, generosity, and altruism.
    When physical attractiveness was paired with altruism (i.e. , high physical attractiveness/low altruism in one condition and high altruism/low physical attractiveness in another condition), women desired a long-term mate with high altruism/low physical attractiveness condition. (Farrelly et al., 2016).
  • Compatibitily, both men and women place greater importance on compatibility of interests with a long-term mate (Treger & Masciale, 2018)
  • Intelligence: For women, a mate’s intelligence appears to be a nonnegotiable psychological characteristic in any relationship, regardless of involvement (Jonason & Antoon, 2019; Jonason et al. , 2019)
  • Humor, posited to be an indicator of intelligence. Consistent with this hypothesis, both men and women prefer their partners to have a sense of humor (Li et al. , 2002), with women specifically preferring humor-producing men, and men preferring humor appreciating women (Hone et al. , 2015)
• Non-bodily traits, such as indicators of status, creativity, clothes, etc.

For sexual dimorphism, we have for women:

• Facial femininity may act as a valid cue to fecundity, higher estrogen (see Law Smith et al. , 2006) and superior immune function (Foo et al. , 2020)
  • Small jaw
  • Small nose
  • Reduced interocular distance
• Lower waist-to-hip ratio (WHR)
• Lumbar region curvature of around 45.5° would be best for pregnancy and men men’s attraction to women peaks as women’s lumbar curvature approaches this angle (see Lewis et al. , 2015)
• Breast,
  • Medium and large breasts seen as more attractive, healthy, young, and fertile than small or very large breasts (Furnham et al. , 1998; Havlíček et al. , 2017; Pazhoohi et al. , 2020; Singh & Young, 1995; Swami et al. , 2009; Valentova et al. , 2017);
  • Breasts with a 45:55 upper-pole (i.e. , distance from the nipple to the top of the breast) to lower-pole (i.e. , distance from the nipple to the bottom of the breast) ratio (Mallucci & Branford, 2012, 2014)
  • Symmetrical breasts are more fecund (Møller et al., 1995) and at lower risk of breast cancer (Scutt et al. , 1997), again suggesting that breast symmetry may act as a valid cue to health

However, women’s preference for masculinity is much less straightforward.

To begin with, it’s on a spectrum, and more isn’t always better:

However, studies asking participants to choose between masculinized and feminized versions of men’s faces typically find either no preference for masculinity (Scott et al., 2010; Stephen et al., 2012; Swaddle & Reierson, 2002) or a preference for feminized faces (Mogilski & Welling, 2017; Perrett et al., 1998; Stephen et al., 2018), possibly because high testosterone levels and masculine facial shapes are associated with personality traits that are detrimental in long-term partnerships (e.g., aggression and infidelity; Lee et al., 2017; Mazur & Booth, 1998; Perrett et al., 1998).
This hypothesis suggests that women’s mate selection mechanisms may be performing a trade-off between masculine men who may have “good genes” but personality traits that are undesirable in a long-term partner and father, and feminine men who may be less prone to aggressive behavior and are more suitable as husbands and fathers

The authors further explain that both the preference for masculinity in socioecologically harsh conditions and and during peak fertility may need to be revised because of weak or contradictory findings.

Whichever the reason, it seems clear that “more isn’t always better” and it’s more a question of personal preferences, culture, and circumstances.
And it’s more about “hitting the right balance”.

This is something we have already mentioned in our article “the law of optimum balance“:

• The law of optimum balance
• Optimum balance in dating

Also see:

• Mating value practical analysis

Hormones

In general, higher testosterone makes for less relationship commitment and satisfaction (e.g., Edelstein et al., 2014; Gray et al., 2002; Julian & McHenry, 1989).

The authors even say that “T is incompatible with the maintenance of nurturant relationships” (Edelstein et al., 2014, p.401).
This is because testosterone is more associated with (shor-term, uncommitted) mating, rather than relationships:

T functions in ways that promote mating behaviors in a manner that may also compromise investment and maintenance in long-term relationships

Testosterone and its effects

This chapter was somewhat confusing with several seemingly contradictory findings:

• The link between testosterone and men’s consummatory behavior is tenuous (Schmidt et al. , 2009)
• Testosterone levels and sexual behavior are not correlated for men, or future research is needed to examine moderating variables (ie.: life history)
• More consistently, testosterone seems to be associated with mate-seeking behavior
• Men’s testosterone levels are higher when single, and lowest when they have children, BUT
• Partnered but non-monogamous men have higher testosterone than single men (van Anders, Hamilton, & Watson, 2007). The authors note that these men do not experience a reduction in mate-seeking motivations
• Similarly, monogamous men who maintain interests in alternative partners have higher levels of testosterone than monogamous men without interest in alternative partners (Edelstein et al. , 2011; McIntyre et al. , 2006; van Anders & Goldey, 2010).
  The author suggest that men who are seeking mates have higher testosterone albeit, I add, correlation is not causation
• Number of partners has been positively linked to testosterone levels (Peters et al. , 2008; Pollet et al. , 2011), particularly for dominant men (Slatcher et al. , 2011)
• it appears that men with higher testosterone have higher mating and reproductive success
• Men’s testosterone increases in the presence of an attractive woman who is a possible mate, and when competing with other men (especially if there are possible mates in the audience)
  • Cortisol also increases

Estrogen and progesterone

Female mating behavior is closely connected to ovarian hormones such as estrogen and progesterone.

Estrogen peaks before ovulation and progesterone peaks during the luteal phase.

• Research supports the hypothesis that men perceive women to be more attractive when they are ovulating
• Women reported greater sexual activity, sexual desire, and sexual fantasies around ovulation and their sexual initiation activity was highest in the three days leading up to ovulation (measured as LH surge, Bullivant et al. , 2004)
• Single women reported stronger feelings of loneliness in the early follicular phase. The authors say that may motivate women to seek out potential partners around ovulation
• Ovulating women reported being more assertive, having higher mate value, and were more likely to implicitly associate themselves with sex-related words (e.g. , seductive and sexy).
  These results support the fertility-assertiveness hypothesis: women seek higher control on their environment when conception risk is high (in both opportunities and threats)
• Ovulating women are more risk-averse: decrease in their total number of risk-taking behaviors such as going to a bar or walking in a dimly lit area, more likely to sit far away from a suspicious man in the study waiting room (Guéguen, 2012) and were more likely to judge men as more sexually coercive (GarverApgar et al., 2007)
• Hormonal contraceptives disrupt these results: Exotic dancers on hormonal contraceptives received a consistent rate of tips across their menstrual cycles while naturally cycling women got more around ovulation (Miller et al., 2007).
• Women on hormonal contraceptives did not demonstrate increases in autosexual and female-initiated couple behavior around ovulation (Adams et al., 1978)
• Life history mediates hormonal changes, with “faster life history strategy women” seeking sex during ovulation, while slower life history strategy women avoid it
• Women have higher testosterone when aroused. Ie.: watching romantic scenes from The Notebook (Lopez et al. , 2009), viewing photographs of men’s faces (Zilioli et al. , 2014), imagining a sexual interaction with an attractive partner (Goldey & van Anders, 2011), and during the early stages of a relationship (Marazziti & Canale, 2004),
  BUT…
• Testosterone fluctuations across the menstrual cycle do not predict sexual motivation (Roney & Simmons, 2013)
• Women in happy relationships have lower testosterone (Edelstein et al. , 2014) which, I’m guessing here, may also mean lower risk of infidelity
• Women (and men) have higher cortisol when meeting possible relationship candidates
• Testosterone and estradiol increase orgasms: testosterone seems positively associated with women’s psychological orgasm whereas estradiol appears linked to more pronounced physical sensations during an orgasm (e.g. , flooding and flushing) (van Anders & Dunn, 2009)

Market-like dynamics of dating

To begin with, dating also functions just like any other market:

Whenever people have the ability to choose partners and partner quality varies, we should expect competition for more desirable partners.
This competition for the “best” partners occurs in a biological market (e.g. , Barclay, 2013, 2016; Noë & Hammerstein, 1994, 1995). In any market, supply and demand afect the value of a good (e.g. , a romantic partner), and anything afecting supply and demand can also infuence the mating market

And some of the market variables that influence the dating market include:

Sex Ratio

• People become more competitive and aggressive with more men: people primed with unfavorable (vs.favorable) sex ratios, become more intrasexually competitive (Arnocky et al. , 2014; Griskevicius et al. , 2012; Xing et al. , 2016) and more aggressive toward attractive same-sex, probably because they are potential threatening rivals (Moss & Maner, 2016).
• Women become more competitive with more women: women are more wary of same-sex others (Vukovic et al. , 2019) and desire to maximize their relative gain over other women (Xing et al. , 2016)
• Women seek a career: women enter the workforce in higher numbers and seek more lucrative careers, perhaps not to be overly-reliant on men (Durante et al. , 2012; Guttentag & Secord, 1983)

Mating Systems

• Polygyny increases competition because fewer “winners” monopolize women to get all the (genetic) success, so many losers scramble for fewer available women.
  This is true both historically (for review, see Henrich et al. , 2012) and across nations (Schmitt & Rohde, 2013)
• High male parental investment increases women’s competition, even in polygynous species

Income Inequality

Intrasexual competition includes competing for resources (ie.: career and business success).

• Higher income inequality increases competition because it exacerbates the difference between the haves, who gain more dating power, and the have-nots, who may end up without a mate.
  This may also apply to women, who post more sexy selfies (Blake & Brooks, 2019a; Blake, Bastian, et al., 2018)
• Some women may drop out of the dating scene with higher income inequality. I quote the authors: “Other women, however, may opt out of this competition, pursuing briefcase over baby (see Durante et al., 2012).
• Financially empowered women care less about men’s resources

Read more here:

• Mating market dynamics
• Mating market hacks

People adopt the values of their best interest

Patriarchy VS Feminism

Something we often noticed and contended here at TPM :).

This example shows that it’s not necessarily aboud individuals, but about “inclusive fitness”:

Concerning parents’ competition on behalf of their children’s mating success, evidence suggests that parents’ ideological support may be an instance of motivated reasoning, with parents supporting ideas and practices that beneft their ofspring. For example, families with single, adult daughters are more likely to support women’s reproductive rights, whereas families with more adult men are likely to oppose those rights (Betzig & Lombardo, 1992)

And a specific example:

(…)
Blake, Fourati, and Brooks (2018) somewhat similarly fnd that mothers with sons (vs.daughters) are more supportive of practices that suppress female sexuality (i.e. , Muslim veiling), which might serve to control female sexuality and beneft male ofspring

It’s pretty wild if you think about it.

A corollary of this finding is that a certain degree of intersexual conflict and/or competition is expected and, at a social level, potentially unavoidable.
And as the example shows, it’s not like some people think of a clear-cut case of men vs women, but more of “male-aligned interests VS female-aligned interests”.

It’s pretty wild if you think about it.

On this topic, see our latest video:

Consensual non-monogamy is repressed by those who can’t have multiple partners

first off, the authors say consensual non-monogamers tend to be socially unrestricted.

But, also, potentially, by those who can afford multiple partners:

That is, CNM may be preferred by those who are well-suited or motivated to compete with others for access to romantic/sexual partners, while those who are not might attempt to publicly enforce monogamy to restrict intrasexual competition.

And then, interestingly, that “repressing non-monogamy” may make sense from a social perspective:

Restricting intrasexual competition is a reasonable moral aim.
Higher rates of intrasexual competition may lead to public and personal health risks, such as higher rates of mortality and homicide (Daly & Wilson, 2001; Kruger, 2010), anabolic steroid use among men (Harris et al., 2019), interpersonal antagonism and/or social ostracism (Vaillancourt & Sharma, 2011), problematic eating habits among women (Li et al., 2010), and risky medical procedures (Dubbs et al., 2017). In this sense, those who condemn CNM may be attempting to curtail the harms caused by rivalry within multipartner mating systems.

In general, non-monogamy seems most interesting to people who are more interested in short-term mating:

people in CNM compared to monogamous relationships reported higher social and ethical risk-taking, along with several other traits that are characteristic of a “fast life history” (e.g. , earlier pubertal development, less aversion to germs, and greater interest in short-term [and less interest in long-term] relationships) (reviewed in Figueredo et al. , 2006; see also Del Giudice et al. , 2016

Same-gender attraction and reproductive fitness

Historically gay men and lesbian women reproduced at lower rates.

But that difference decreases with modern societies, and may even go to zero for women:

At least in some modern Western societies, such as the United States, almost 40% of individuals who identify as LGBT report to have biological ofspring (e.g. , Gates, 2013). Other nationally representative studies, such as from New Zealand, show that in modern societies non-heterosexual women reproduce with the same frequency as heterosexual women, although non-heterosexual male reproductive success is signifcantly lower (e.g. , Wells et al. , 2011)

Homogamy VS hypergamy

In simple words:

• Monogamy = same status couples for compatibility. Prospective mating partners are selected from the same or similar social circles with comparable economic and power standing, social status, and educational background
• Hypergamy = higher status for self and offspring enhancement. in the upward-mobility model, AKA hypergamy, lower social, economic, and educational classes prefer dating higher economic status, while higher economic status can “get something in return”

The authors say that the prevalence of homogamy VS hypergamy depends on gender equality and the distributions of educational and social attainments of men and women (Blossfeld & Timm, 2003).
So with increasing education and equality, hypergamy decreases and homogamy increases.

This is exactly what we said in one of our first articles on female hypergamy.

Intra-gender competition

Humans are not a species where mating depends only on intra-genders and male competition.

Instead, women’s choice matter in humans.
However, intra-sexual competitions may still weigh also in human mating:

Anthropological evidence suggests that winning direct physical competition can be efficacious for winning in mating competition. Among the Yanamamo, men who have killed have more wives and children than those who have not (Chagnon, 1988). Indeed, men’s physiology seems to reflect such competition (e.g., men’s size; Arnocky & Carré, 2016; McElligott et al., 2001).

Chagnon has been heavily criticized and, in my opinion, for good reasons.
However, that doesn’t mean that all his work or anecdotal evidence are invalid.

The other claim that “men’s physiology reflects competition” is also dubious in my opinion because stronger men are also better hunters or better at surviving, or simply more attractive.
But its’also not to be excluded.

Finally, most men know that they tend to be more deferential towards bigger and/or aggressive men, and that may also lend credibility to the efficacy of intra-sexual competition.

Ultimately though, in our modern dating environment and for practical purposes, I’m convinced that men who focus on women are more successful than men who focus on the competition.

Each Gender Competes Based On The Other Gender’s Preferences

For women’s competition:

Men tend to place greater value on partners’ reproductive potential and related characteristics than women.
Thus, women tend to compete intrasexually over linked dimensions such as youth, physical attractiveness, and sexual fdelity

And for men’s competitions:

As women tend to place greater value than men on a mate’s resource provisioning ability, men often compete more than women over resources and status (Buss, 1989; Conroy-Beam & Buss, 2021; Walter et al. , 2020)

But since women are the choosers, we can generally expect stronger competition among men:

when mating motivations are made salient, men (but not women) engaged in increased intrasexual (but not intersexual) aggression (Ainsworth & Maner, 2012). Men also report greater distress when a rival exceeds them on these characteristics (Buss et al. , 2000)

And, men being more aggressive and higher testosterone and competing in a fiercer contest, we can also expect more aggression:

evidence suggests that, compared to girls and women, boys and men enact more physical, violent, and faceto-face tactics of intrasexual mating competition (e.g. , Archer, 2004; Benenson, 2014; Björkqvist, Lagerspetz, & Kaukiainen, 1992; Campbell, 2002; Vaillancourt, 2013)

Men compete for status, women for beauty

As cliche’ as that may sound to some, there is at least some truth to it:

Consistent with evolutionary theorizing, it was found that in samples of students as well as adults, men experienced more jealousy than women when their rival was more socially or physically dominant or had a higher status than themselves, whereas women experienced more jealousy then men when their rival was more physically attractive

There is no evidence that testosterone is linked to mate jealousy, albeit prenatal exposure to male hormones seems to be.

Interestingly, shorter men taller men reported jealousy in general, and especially with socially and physically dominant and attractive rivals.
Instead, average height women reported less jealousy than short and tall women, and especially in response to physically attractive rivals.

Gender divide in covert aggression

Women tend to compete more covertly.

For example:

Social exclusion is one form of intrasexual mating competition (Buss & Shackelford, 1997), and girls and women exclude same-sex others more than men do (Benenson et al. , 2009, 2013), with social exclusion potentially achieving separation of romantic partners from prospective rivals, and thus efective protection against rivals

Women also use more facial expressions, something I’ve also noticed with women being more expressive in both the positive and the negative:

women’s aggression toward one another often takes the form of subtle facial expressions (Simmons, 2002; Underwood, 2003), with some suggesting that such nonverbal expressions may have special meanings for girls and women (Brown & Gilligan, 1993; LaFrance, 2002; Underwood, 2004)

And women seem to be pickup more subtle negative expressions (e.g. , Geary, 2010; Goos & Silverman, 2002).

The authors suggest this is because direct aggression is more costly for women (I have some doubts here, see below), and because men don’t prefer women who outcompete other women.
I agree with the latter, and I’ve personally always been turned off by “nasty women” who excluded or attacked other women.

However, engaging in more direct aggression doesn’t mean that men don’t also engage in (more) covert aggression:

Both sexes engage in indirect aggression (e.g. , gossip) and social exclusion (Benenson, 2014; Campbell, 1999, 2002; Crick & Grotpeter, 1995; Hess & Hagen, 2006a, 2006b, 2019; Underwood et al. , 2001)
(…)
… some work suggests that indirect tactics might be especially useful when women or men compete with their ingroup members (Hess & Hagen, 2019)

And in our modern society, covert aggression is more widespread than ever, and probably increasing at the expense of more direct aggression.
Also see:

• Covert power moves, all examples of indirect aggression
• Passive aggression, a communication style all based on covert aggression
• Office politics, where competition is all indirect and covert

Reputational attacks may work best against women

Because, the authors suggest, some of the traits men value are less easily observable:

Reputation manipulation might be especially effective for harming female mating rivals because some features that men desire in women—particularly reputations for sexual fidelity—are difficult to assess, easy to impugn, and once denigrated, difficult to defend (Hess & Hagen, 2006a, 2006b). This is in stark contrast to men, as much of what women desire in men can be directly observed and/or objectively measured (e.g., if one man could best another in a fight or income)

This seemed like a plausible guess to me.

Women compete more when (single) mothers

Women seem to be competing more:

• For friends
• On behalf of the offspring
• (potentially) as single mothers because mating is harder and competition stronger for them

More attractive = more attacks

Krems et al.(2020) reviewed evidence supporting this hypothesis: physically attractive women are considered mating threats and are disproportionately aggressed against (Arnocky et al. , 2012; Fink et al. , 2014; Leenaars et al. , 2008).

This is something I’ve sadly noticed myself when bringing an attractive date to a mixed group.
It’s funny how I don’t mind too much men playing their games on me, but I find it much sadder when women exclude or attack another woman (especially if my date).

Itersexual competition (& cooperation)

First off, the authors say that men and women have more scope for cooperation than competition:

Despite the often too prevalent perception of a war between the sexes in the social sciences (see special issue of Sex Roles, e.g., Vandermassen, 2011), to a large degree interdependent reproduction promotes cooperation rather than confict (Buss, 2017; Mikulincer & Shaver, 2007)

They even add later on that the large overlap in common interests makes it difficult to pinpoint areas of conflict (something I don’t necessarily agree with):

One of the complicating aspects of considering sexual confict in long-term relationships is the high degree of overlap in interest between the sexes. Men and women have a higher degree of similarity in long-term partner preferences, such as for healthy, kind, and agreeable partners (e.g.Buss & Barnes, 1986; Tomas et al. , 2019).

However, stopping there would be a mistake.
First of all, even in the common interests, the authors rightfully point out that there are measurable differences even in the overlap of common interests (Walter et al. , 2020).
There are more diverging interests as well , including the different “sex optima” for each gender.

For example, as the authors of the last chapter shrewdly point out:

Traits favored by one sex (e.g. , multiple mating by males) are sometimes costly to members of the other sex who have traditionally had primary responsibility for prolonged periods of ofspring dependency) (Chapman et al. , 2003, p.41)

So, in truth, men and women have much to gain from cooperation, but also potentially from cheating and/or controlling their partner or imposing their best preferences.
Think of it as a largely cooperative relationships, punctuated by smaller instances of conflict, compromise, and potential cheating or manipulation.

Conroy-Beam et al.(2015) introduced three factors that infuence relationship satisfaction, and we add more from the book:

• Cost and benefits, with continuous evaluation if the relative benefits of staying with a partner outweigh the relative benefits of leaving
• Manipulability of partner investment, or how well one can elicit a partner’s investment in the relationship
  (Walter et al. , 2020)
• Signaling of relationship problems, especially harmful when public
• Mate value infuences how satisfed one is with a partner and relationship. Higher mate value partner = higher satisfaction (Conroy-Beam et al. , 2016).
  However, even here it’s often a question of balance: too big a discrepancy may make the lower value partner insecure or overly jealous

Conflict and dangers to the relationship may also change or increase over time as the factors above also change over time:

the confict between sexes might increase with relationship length because cues of youthfulness decrease and social status may change (e.g. , due to job loss).
These changes might trigger relationship termination. One possible example of this is serial monogamy among highly attractive, high-status men

AS a last note, this is true for most average men and women.
The conflict between higher-value men and women may be larger because the interests of higher value men diverge much more strongly from women.
Ie.: higher mate value men have less to gain from entering any relationship.
See here for example:

Also read:

• Evolved adaptations of intrasexual competitions

Evolved mechanism for cooperation: suppression of alternatives

Both men and women in relationships seem to have mechanisms to decrease the risk of a breakup by ignoring potential alternatives:

Overall, men without a partner rated the confederate as more attractive—suggesting that attraction is suppressed by the presence of a long-term partner.

And what also gives as insight that this may be an evolved mechanism is that while single men were more attracted to ovulating women, partner men were less attracted.
The same bias was seen when it came to remembering potential alternatives.

Infidelity

Infidelity is not the norm, but not too uncommon either:

ranging from 22–25% of men and 11–15% of women having had extramarital afairs during their lifetime (e.g. , Atkins et al. , 2001; Labrecque & Whisman, 2017; Wiederman, 1997)

The desire for infidelity is even more common:

Hicks and Leitenberg (2001) found, in a diverse sample of university students and employees ages 18 to 70 years, that 87% of their respondents (98% of men and 80% of women) reported having had extradyadic sexual fantasies in the past two months. In a substantial number of cases, such fantasies

Infidelity is also one of the most common reason relationship breakup crossculturally (Betzig, 1989; Amato & Previti, 2003), albeit some people stay together even after infidelity.

Most people generally dislike infidelity, but many may still engage in it in the right circumstances.

Infidelity makes evolutionary sense

In the end, people cheat because it’s good to keep a long-term partnership, while trying to sneak something on the side:

Humans have evolved a collection of mating strategies whereby benefts can be gained both from investing in a long-term partnership and from defecting from that partnership to gain benefts from an extra-pair partner

This is explained mathematically and with game theory:

Certainly, there are advantages to long-term cooperative partnerships in which each individual sacrifces a personal optimum for a relatively higher net collaborative yield (i.e. , positive-sum relationships; Axelrod, 1997), such as when children are aforded security and environmental stability by multiparent care (Abraham & Feldman, 2018; Geary, 2000).
But the greater net individual beneft of defecting in a trust game (i.e. , when one partner cheats but the other does not) suggests that human’s evolved mating psychology is confgured to motivate calculated deception (i.e. , infdelity) (see McNally & Jackson, 2013; Mokkonen & Lindstedt, 2016)

Infidelity may have little to do with love, affection, or caring for the cheated spouse

Something the authors say and I agree with:

People may have an evolved preference for monogamy and deep socioemotional attachments with particular individuals.
On the other hand, individuals are also motivated to engage in strategies that ancestrally propagated genes

The same generally goes for ethical or “good behavior”.
People may truly prefer being “good” or ethical, but may still cheat or backstab when the payoff is high.

Sex differences around infidelity

Both genders engage in infidelity.

But while men may find sex with a new partner enticing no matter what, women may be more discerning and, I quote, “be especially inclined to be unfaithful if an existing partner is of poor quality, if the partner is not a good means of emotional support, or if a male who offers more emotional fulfillment or higher gene quality becomes available (Buss, 2000)”.

• Women’s main strategy is always long-term

While women most certainly cheat, their primary strategy tends to be long term:

women have been selected to compete with one another to develop and maintain a pair-bond with a high-quality male and to take steps to reduce the risk of being abandoned (e.g. , Gallup et al. , 2012).

• Men underestimate emotional infidelity

Interestingly, the authors say that men are more likely to fall for emotional infidelity because they’re more likely to under-estimate it:

Men more than women fail to notice the underlying threat of infdelity that does not involve sex. This sex-diferentiated bias represents a sexual confict that presents a clear threat to relationship maintenance

But emotional infidelity can often lead to sexual infidelity and breakups.

• Women suffer more

Women in general reporting more intense grief (“heartbreak”) reactions than men.
Despite women more often taking the initiative in the breakup, women reported higher intensity of anger, anxiety, and fear and all forms of physical reactions than men, while no sex diference was found for numbness, lost focus, and inability.

The authors say this is because of men’s higher propensity to focus on short-term liaisons rather than long term, coupled with a stronger inclination to rebound and seek new partners.

• Men and women hide infidelity to match their partners’ preferences

men spend more money on and display emotional investment in existing partners, while women initiate more sex with existing partners and maintain their physical appearance in order to avoid suspicions regarding infdelity

Cultural differences of infidelity

There are large differences in the prevalence of sexual infidelity:

For example, extramarital sex is more prevalent in African than in Asian and Western countries.
One study showed that estimates of extramarital sex in the past year range from 38% for men and 19% for women in Guinea Bissau (e.g. , Caraël et al. , 1995), compared with 11% for men and 4.5% of women in China (Zhang et al. , 2012).
The incidence of extramarital sex seems especially low in Muslim countries, probably due to the severe sanctions on this behavior (Adamczyk & Hayes, 2012)

Of course, the authors preferred to mention “cultural” rather than potentially “something else”.

Anti-cuckoldry evolved defenses

Men evolved several psychological adaptations that are not present in women, including:

• Paternal resemblance preference in offspring

For example, with recognizing and preferring children with facial similarity (redacted for brevity):

(…) 90% of the males but only 35% of the females selecting the child whose face had been morphed with their own
(…)
Platek et al.(2004) found sex diferences in the brain by viewing self-morphed baby pictures (…) Wu et al.(2013) also showed a stable male advantage in child face processing

• Olfactory similarity

Alvergne et al.(2009) found that paternal investment was positively related to both face (visual) and odor (olfactory) similarities between fathers and children.

• Emotional proximity to similar children

Alvergne et al.(2010) also found fathers reported the highest emotional proximity to children who displayed greater resemblance, but this relationship was not observed in mothers

• Higher satisfaction with child-father resemblance

For high parent–child resemblance both parents exhibited high levels of well-being, but for low parent–child resemblance the well-being of mothers was higher than fathers. Thus, the literature overwhelmingly implicates a male-specifc efect of resemblance on child investment

Women took (evolutionary) note and tell fathers that the children are like them, even when external raters disagreed.

Predictors of infidelity

Predictors of infidelity include:

• Sexual excitation, strong for men (Mark et al., 2011)
• Relationship dissatisfaction/unhappiness, stronger for women (Mark et al., 2011)
• Extroversion, openness to new experiences (Altgelt et al., 2018; Orzeck & Lung, 2005; Yeniceri & Kökdemir, 2006)
• Sensation seeking (Lalasz & Weigel, 2011)
• Poor impulse control (Brady et al. 2020)
• Antisocial/low agreeableness
• Dark triad
• High sexual permissiveness
• Unrestricted sociosexuality is a powerful predictor of infidelity (Barta & Kiene, 2005; Rodrigues et al. , 2017)
• Low religiosity: less religious people were more likely to be unfaithful (Whisman et al. , 2007)
• Avoidant attachment style (DeWall et al., 2011)
• Declining in sexual-relational adjustment (Scott et al., 2017)
• Revenge for partner’s infidelity: Warach et al.(2018) found that sexual betrayal was the single best predictor of sexual infidelity of the personality dimensions they examined
• Belief in the availability and availability of higher-quality mates: Emmers-Sommer et al.(2010) found that, among 220 students in the United States, men and women were more likely to be unfaithful when they had higher-quality alternative partners.

Read more in:

• How to pick a loyal girlfriend

Higher mate value men may incur “defensive” infidelity

Buss and Shackelford (1997) found that women who believed they were of lower mate value than their husbands also believed that their husbands were more prone to infdelity, which prompted these women to report a higher likelihood that they, themselves, would be unfaithful to their husbands

However, I would have liked to see the incidence of these cases.
Plus, it would be interesting to see how many of those higher value men were indeed cheating. I suspect, a higher percentage than the average.

Jealousy

There are two types of jealousy:

• Possessive, a preventive reaction that involves mate guarding in order to avoid infidelity, also related to cultural and environmental factors such as:
  • Parental control of mate choice: more common in cultures of arranged marraiges and/or culture that downplay freedom of choice and love. Instead, as the author say, “freedom of mate choice seems to make possessive jealousy less necessary”.
  • Life history (in particular attachment style and father absence)
  • Domestic violence: possessive jealousy & mate guarding are linked to domestic violence among men
• Reactive, a response to an actual or potential threat

Jealousy motivates mate-guarding

Both jealousies evolved to be attentive and active against infidelity.
And for good reasons, say the authors:

Mate guarding among males has evolved because it is essential to guarantee paternity certainty: males who did not allow their partners to mate with other males were evidently reproductively more successful than males who did not pay attention to their mate’s extradyadic sexual behavior.

In any species with high male parental investment, thus including humans, women also have an incentive to be jealous and to mate guard.

Men Who Invest More Are Also More Jealous

both sexes report high levels of jealousy (Buss, 2013; Scelza et al. , 2020).
Moreover, this is particularly evident in societies with high levels of paternal investment; when high investment is expected from men, men are more concerned with women’s sexual infdelity and women are more concerned with the potential diversion of resources to a male’s new mate—thus high jealousy (Scelza et al. , 2020)

This is also why, in general, “player types” are less jealous.
And it’s also why we often say here that most red pill gurus, obsessed with faithfulness and partners’ count, are truly relationship men at heart who long for a “good woman” to stick with them.

Jealousy also depends on mate value

The authors also say that “jealousy implies that one feels threatened by the loss of a partner’s sexual or romantic exclusiveness”.

Couple that with the fact that love makes jealousy less necessary, and you see why too much jealousy is poor self-signaling that lowers your value (and attraction).
This is why from a strategic and effectiveness point of view we recommend caution when dealing with men approaching a partner:

• What to do when someone makes a move on your girlfriend

Intimate partner violence

• IPV is associated with insecure attachment styles: violent men are more insecure, anxious, and preoccupied in their attachment style and reported more dependency on and preoccupation with their wives (Holtzworth-Munroe et al., (1997)
  • Avoidant men are also relatively jealous: less self-evident is that also avoidants are often relatively jealous (Buunk, 1997). A possible explanation is that avoidants are dependent on their partner but feel that they are not meeting their partner’s needs with their distance and are concerned with losing their partner.
• Possessive jealous men are more violent
• Intrasexually competitive women are more violent: only intrasexual competitiveness was associated with intimate partner violence (Buunk & Massar, 2019)
  • Women’s IPV peaks at around 20, when they are also the most intrasexually competitive
  • Fertile women may be more violent, depending also on cycle, and other women’s cycle (my note: albeit I think it may be true, I’m not too convinced seeing how many similar studies have shown little or nul effect in more recent, better studies)

Dark triads and religious men are more likely to mate guard

people who score high on the dark triad traits of Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy are more likely to engage in mate guarding, including both beneft-provisioning and cost-inficting behaviors (Chegeni et al. , 2018; Jonason et al. , 2010)

However, dark triads are also more likely to escape mate guarding:

women who are most likely to find value in attempting to gain benefts from both a long-term partner and a short-term partner simultaneously, such as high Machiavellian women, are similarly more likely to resist a long-term partner’s mate-guarding efforts (Abell & Brewer, 2016)

And, I’m sure many won’t like this:

Evidence has similarly related costinficting mate-guarding behaviors to high levels of religiosity. That is, at least among men, increased religiosity is associated with an increased tendency to use cost-inficting mate-guarding tactics (Chaudhary et al. , 2018)

I think this may be mediated by conservatism.
And indeed, as we contended on this website:

As religion may function as a strategy to restrict women’s mating opportunities, this may explain why the same relationship between religiosity and cost-inficting mate guarding was not identifed among women

Similar as we contend in the beginning of this video:

Mate guarding sometimes is motivated by a “risky” partner

men are more likely to guard their female partners when those women demonstrate low relationship commitment (French et al. , 2017) and when those female partners engage in behaviors that men interpret as sexual receptivity (Prokop & Pazda, 2016).
Overall, when it seems as though a partner may be interested in alternatives to the ongoing relationship, people are more likely to engage in mate-guarding behaviors to prevent that defection.

In other sources I’ve seen that men are more aggressive, mate-guarding, and violent when indeed the partner is having affair(s).

My note: cheating spouses attracting partner’s violence – personal experience
This is something I’ve experienced personally.
I know of an asbolute violent ahole to his girlfriend. Everyone righteously condemned him, and most thought he was imagining things.
But I know that he wasn’t imagining things.

Higher value partner = more mate guarding

The loss of a lower-value partner is a smaller loss, so people spend less resources mate-guarding them.

Instead, the loss of a higher-value mate partner is a major loss.

Thus, we see that higher mate value partners call for more mate guarding:

we see that men, for example, are more likely to engage in mate guarding, particularly benefit-provisioning mate guarding, when their current partner is high value (Miner, Starratt, & Shackelford, 2009; Starratt & Shackelford, 2012).

However, higher mate value partners are also more likely to escape guarding:

people are more motivated to resist a partner’s mate-guarding efforts when the value of the potential extra-pair benefits are high. For example, women are more likely to resist a partner’s mate guarding when they perceive themselves to be more attractive than their partner (Fugere et al., 2015)

And, just as we’d expect, people engage in more mate guarding when there are few available good partners around.

My Note: women escaping controlling men – personal experience
I also know for a fact that a man installing tracking apps on her attractive and sensual partner’s phone had good reasons to try and track her (but she was smart enough to avoid detection).

Attachment Styles

This part was the clearest explanation of attachment styles I’ve ever read.

Thanks to this book it finally clicked how attachment styles relate to people and people’s psychology.

So let’s start.
First of all, attachment styles are phenotypes that we develop to increase reproductive fitness:

From an evolutionary standpoint, the attachment behavioral system refects an organized set of physiological and psychological mechanisms that encode and process early life experiences with attachment fgures to produce phenotypes (i.e. , attachment styles) that are more likely to increase ftness in particular environments (Simpson & Belsky, 2008; Szepsenwol & Simpson, 2019).
In this respect, attachment styles refect the adaptive calibration of life history strategies (Szepsenwol & Simpson, 2019)

Albeit most pop psychology books like the “secure attachment style” as the “best” of the pack, an evolutionary lens looks instead at what’s most effective to survive and reproduce.
Secure is best for stable environments and other secure partners, but avoidant is best for harsh environments and short-term mating:

Although secure attachment is typically viewed as the most optimal and adaptive style within the developmental literature, an evolutionary perspective suggests that attachment security has an adaptive advantage in safe and predictable environments but not in harsh and unpredictable environments (Simpson & Belsky, 2008; Szepsenwol & Simpson, 2019)
(…)
insecure attachment may have adaptive advantage over secure attachment in more harsh and unpredictable environments (Szepsenwol & Simpson, 2019).

From an evolutionary perspective then, the secure attachment is related to parental investment and a “slow life strategy”:

Hazan and Zeifman (1999) suggested that the primary evolutionary function of secure attachment in adult relationships is to increase the likelihood of stable and enduring pair-bonds. Enduring pair-bonds are inferred to enhance the reproductive fitness of both parents and their ofspring. Thus, attachment security is thought to align with a slow life history strategy and long-term mating strategies that emphasize quality rather than quantity of investment in ofspring when environment dangers and threats are low and predictability of future events is high (Geary, 2015; Hazan & Zeifman, 1999).

Indeed, attachment security is consistently linked to more committed and long-term romantic relationships (Mikulincer & Shaver, 2016; Szepsenwol & Simpson, 2019).
That, in turn, has many psychological and even physiological advantages for the secure partners.

And avoidant attachment instead is related to short-term, uncommitted dating:

Attachment avoidance is assumed to refect a relationship commitment minimization strategy (Del Giudice, 2019; Karantzas et al. , 2019), in which parental investment is traded off against reproductive investment (…) (Szepsenwol & Simpson, 2019).
(…) aligns with a fast life strategy and short-term mating strategies (…)

Indeed, research found avoidants to have lower relationship commitments, less parental investment, and less partner support and provisioning -especially during parenthood- (Szepsenwol et al. , 2015).

Finally, attachment anxiety may seek a relationship commitment maximization with chasing and turning towards their partners.
However, I’m unconvinced here because as the authors themselves say, too much attachment anxiety makes for dissatisfying and potentially short-lived relationships.

Emotional Intensity Theory

Emotional intensity theory was a wholly new concept for me.

And a little mind-blown.

The theory states that motivational intensity is determined by the importance of reaching an outcome (i.e. , the goal) and the challenge.
The importance of the goal sets the maximum effort one is willing to exert to overcome the challenge, while the perceived challenge magnitude determines the actual effort.

However, to conserve energy people only invest in what is likely to provide returns.

Meaning that emotional intensity (and, possibly, action), will be highest with:

• High effort with unknown challenges
• Low effort with weak challenges because these challenges don’t pose a threat
• High effort with strong challenges because these challenges do require lots of effort
• Low effort for too big challenges because the goal is unreachable anyway so people resign themselves

In chart (not the clearest probably):

This theory explains why in dating, often, the sweet spot is a balance between the extremes.
Take reciprocation of attraction or investment for example. Too much, and there is no challenge. Too little, and there is no point in putting effort into someone.
But give moderately, and you hit the sweet spot.

In a study:

Reysen and Katzarska-Miller (2013) (…) tested whether the manipulated degree of reciprocation of a potential partner acted as a deterrent to romantic feelings by producing cubic efects of deterrence on the intensity of attraction (Reysen & Katzarska-Miller, 2013).
To test their hypothesis, the researchers asked participants to imagine a potential romantic partner who reciprocated either a strong, moderate, weak, or unspecifed personal feeling of attraction (this latter condition instantiating the control condition of “reciprocation unmentioned”).
Results revealed that potential partners’ reciprocation of attraction acted as a deterrent to participants’ actual intensity of attraction to the potential partner. Specifcally, the intensity of attraction varied as a cubic function of increasing degrees of reciprocation: it was intense when reciprocation was unspecifed; paradoxically reduced when participants’ feelings of attraction were highly reciprocated; intense, again, when attraction was only moderately reciprocated; and eventually substantially reduced when attraction was, instead, only scarcely reciprocated.

The authors conclude that certain obstacles and barriers to romantic feelings can be motivating and beneficial for in-pair feelings.

Of course, what the authors don’t mention but I suspect is the case here is that personality also matters.
People with high self-esteem and/or who relish a challenge may be more motivated to pursue the “almost impossible” partner/challenge.
But lower self-esteem and or men and women with other priorities will instead let go sooner.

Dual sexuality & ovulatory shift: a myth?

The ovulatory shift hypothesis postulates that women are more attracted and receptive to high mate-value extra-relationship men during their peak fertility days.

The extended hypothesis also includes the “dual sexuality hypothesis”, such as:

women have two functionally distinct sexualities: (a) extended sexuality—expressed during the nonfertile phase and which functions in attachment to the primary partner, and (b) estrus—expressed during the fertile window and which functions to increase the likelihood of conceiving with genetically high-quality men (Gangestad & Tornhill, 2008; Tornhill & Gangestad, 2008)

In the manosphere this is referred to as “alpha f*cks, beta bucks“.
Such as, women want to be impregnated by a high-mate-value man who’s more of a player type, and then seek a “nice guy” to take care of her and the children.

Also see our main article on this:

Masculine men not more attractive during peak fertility

The findings of more appreciation for masculinity during peak fertility are contradictory.
Overall:

Overall, these fndings show little support for the idea that cyclic changes in mate preferences are adaptations to enhance the likelihood of short-term mating with men possessing markers of genetic quality during the high-fertility period.

Ovulatory shift disproven by current evidence

So, what does the evidence say?

The evidence suggests that the ovulatory shift is dubious, small or null.
And the dual sexuality is equally dubious because in many studies attraction increases for the partner as well:

Studies on mate preferences provide limited evidence for robust changes across the cycle. In contrast, there appears to be subtle but systematic increase in sexual desire and behavior during the high-fertility phase. Nevertheless, these changes are similar for in-pair and extra-pair sexual desire, thus contradicting the ovulatory shift hypothesis

There were studies showing that women with men “lacking putative markers of genetic quality” were more attracted to extra-pair men.
However, I’d have to wonder how this could not be the case, since other men are simply more attractive.

The ovulatory shift was an important part of the dual mating strategy, so the authors suggest the dual mating strategy is also questionable.

BUT…

My note: I’d be cautious jumping to conclusions -and writing off the dual-mating strategy

The book is very recent.

But there has been some even more recent research by Macken Murphy on 254 individuals -not huge then, and including men as well-.
And the research showed that unfaithful people -men included- found their extra-dyadic partner more physically attractive, but not better overall, and also not better for parenting.

These results are consistent with dual mating, but not with mate switching.
However, the same applied to men.

Murphy also released an even better podcast.
I listened twice to it, and he was even more convincing there.

So, what gives?

In my opinion, both mate switching and dual strategy are valid, which would confirm and conform with humans’ -and women’s- plurality and adaptability of sexual strategies and approaches.
I’ve also experienced both in life.
And I’ve ever experienced women who slept on the side with the guy who wouldn’t even provide better genes -on external physical appearances at least- to the official boyfriend.

I believe attractiveness also plays a role.
Higher mate value women may be more able to secure a high mate value man who commits and invests, thus reducing the need for ‘ovulatory shift strategies’.

Breakups

Breakups and how people react to them seem to be highly variable and depends a lot on who initiated it, and what they think their prospects are.

Some evidence findings include:

WOMEN:

• Report consideration for both themselves and their partner when initiating a breakup, while men only consider themselves (Helgeson, 1994)
• Often involved or invested partners (Hill et al., 1976)
• First to fall out of love (Rubin et al., 1981)
• More likely to move to alternative mates (Blau, 1964)
  • UNLESS it was divorce with children, in which case they’re more likely to focus on their and their children well being, and future partner’s quality (Hetherington & Kelly, 2003; Symoens et al. , 2014; Tavares & Aassve, 2013; Wu & Schimmele, 2005)
• Rebound quicker when they had initiated the breakup (Buss et al., 2017; Helgeson, 1994; Rubin et al., 1981),
  BUT
• Non-initiating women reported more sadness, confusion, and fear in comparison to males who reported feeling more happy or indifferent following the dissolution (Perilloux & Buss, 2008)
• Initiate more breakups and unilateral breakups (Baumeister et al., 1993; DeLecce & Weisfeld, 2016; Sprecher, 1994; Tong & Walther, 2010)
• Blame men more than themselves and have more negative attitudes of their partners (Athenstaedt et al., 2020; Sprecher, 1994)

MEN:

• Breakup less often, and more often react to women’s breakups
• Claim to not know the cause of the breakup
• Experience more negative emotional reactions from breakups (Rubin et al. , 1981), probably also because they fall in love more, and more often
  • More depressed, lonely, unhappy and less free after the breakup and engaged in more harmful behaviors following breakups (Athenstaedt et al. , 2020; Rubin et al. , 1981) BUT
• Initiators retain a sense of confidence in the ability to acquire a better mate (Perilloux & Buss, 2008)
• Less willing to break ties, also because they have more positive views of their partners
  • Denigrate their ex less often

Divorce isn’t bad per se, it’s the bitter fighting that harms children

there is compelling evidence that it is not divorce per se but a constellation of mutually reinforcing factors pre- and post-separation (e.g. , poverty, family violence and abuse, parental mental health and substance use, reduced parenting capacity, and separation-related confict) that drive many of the negative consequences of relationship breakdown for children (Pryor & Rodgers, 2001)

What’s most dangerous instead is the “obsessive hatred” that seeks to harm the partner no matter the costs to oneself, and the children:

Like love however, hatred tends to have an obsessive element that makes letting go difficult. Obsessive love sees only the good in someone (Fisher, 2000); hatred sees only the “bad. ” For Demby (2009, p.477) (…)
“pathological hatred” can be seen as “an efort to destroy while at the same time desperately needing”—the co-existence of desire and destructive urges.

Later the authors talk of this type of hatred as a “reunion behavior” through aggression and harm.
Something that seems to make sense to me.

PRACTICAL TIPS

Use fragrances if very un-masculine

Allen et al.(2016) suggested that men who already have desirable levels of masculinity may not derive much beneft from fragranced products, but men low in masculinity/dominance may be able to apply scented products to elevate perceptions of their masculinity/dominance and, in turn, their attractiveness.

Quit meowing

Meowing, or the practice of doing exercises for a stronger jawline, may not be needed by all:

several studies have found that women are attracted to masculine facial features (see DeBruine, 2014; see also Little, Connely, et al. , 2011). Other research, however, has shown that women are attracted to men with feminine facial features, which may infuence perceptions of warmth, kindness, and paternal investment (see Marcinkowska et al. , 2019)

And later:

Women seem to vary more in their preference for masculinity-femininity. Such variation is partly due to genetic effects, and is also influenced by conditional factors, including personal and environmental characteristics (Zietsch et al., 2015).

Rebounds to help with heartbreaks

rebounds may have positive effects. Brumbaugh and Fraley (2015) found that people who entered into rebound relationships had more confidence and felt more at peace with their previous relationships relative to people who did not.

Pick similar partners for long-term satisfying relationships

large body of literature suggests that partner similarity is critical to relationship satisfaction, maintenance, and longevity.

Especially when you or your partner rate that dimension important, and on dimensions such as:

• Religiosity
• Personal interests
• Likes and values
• Sex drive
• Personality
• Relationship standards

Avoid game players

General relationship satisfaction (…) is negatively correlated with game-playing, uncommitted love, and manipulative sexuality (Hendrick et al., 1988).

Also read:

• Games women play
• Games men play
• Nasty games women play

Quit the gym, join a band

Testament to this sexual appeal, a young man carrying a guitar (i.e., indicative of creativity) can solicit more phone numbers from young women compared to a young man carrying a sports bag or nothing (Guéguen et al., 2014)

Edit:
The study has been retracted since its publication.

Share food on dates

Consistent with the notion that food sharing is a courtship tactic, it appears to be associated with higher mating success (Alley et al. , 2013). Recent analyses of outcomes from 792 dinner dates from the restaurant-based TV reality show “First Dates” found that couples who shared food were highly likely to agree to a second date: 93% of couples who shared food agreed to go on a second date, compared to 43% of couples who did not share food (Hendrie & Shirley, 2019)

My personal tip here is to first tell her to make you try a bite a of her food -or help yourself with a fork if you’re worried she may have a low disgust threshold-.
And then give some of yours to her.

Personally, I take an even simpler step forward: I say that I like trying different things, and propose/tell to order several different dishes that we will share.

Powerful women better be strategic for maximum dating success

Physical dominance, size, muscularity, and wealth are traditional cues or instantiations of status.
These features are unlikely to help women attract men and may even render women less attractive as prospective mates.
For example, being too tall can harm women’s mating prospects; men typically prefer shorter women, and women typically prefer taller men (Pawlowski, 2003). As such, a taller woman (e.g. , 6’4″) must compete with shorter women (6’4″ and below) for the few men taller than herself (6’4″ and up).
Similarly, being too intelligent, educated, or high-earning—other markers of what we typically think of as status—might also be considered potentially harmful to women’s success in mating competition (Bertrand & Kamenica, 2015; Folke & Rickne, 2016)

However, as we often also expect here at TPM, reality is complex adn the author also found out that it’s more nuanced and exceptions apply.

It’s not like men completely write off high-status women.

For example, men are less attracted to moderately physically attractive women with a high status job, but more attracted if she’s highly physically attractive women (Fisher & Stinson, 2020)

This is something we discussed a long time ago already (and were heavily criticized for):

• Dating for successful women

Pick sperm donors looking like the father if conceiving with sperm donors

Because of men’s evolved adaptation to favor children who are similar to them, it’s best to:

• Give the adoptive father’s name to the child (e.g. , John Doe, “Jr.”): naming the child after the putative father was a strong predictor of long-term supportive and close relationship when born out of wedlock (Furstenberg and Talvitie, 1980)
• Pick sperm donors who look like the father (some sperm banks allow to match donors with pictures)

Interestingly, when couples picked sperm donors, father wanted a skin color like theirs, while mothers wanted the “more advantageous skin color” (which the authors don’t mention, but chances are it was white)

Do consensual non-monogamy if you want to enjoy casual sex and relationships

When those with greater interest in having sex with multiple partners engage in CNM, they report higher relationship satisfaction (Rodrigues et al. , 2017; Rodrigues, Lopes, Pereira, et al. , 2019).
This suggests that people who form CNM relationships may avoid the fallout of infidelity by choosing a relationship structure that better matches their (and their partner’s) mating motives and personalities

MORE WISDOM

Major theories can take hold even without much supporting evidence

The author describes that even science sometimes follows fads.
Describing the now much less supported menstrual cycle fluctuations and “dual strategy”:

Finally, the story of research on cyclic changes convincingly shows how well-formulated theories may become a mainstream view, even though their empirical support is weak and their assumptions unrealistic (e.g. , the role of extra-pair copulations).
Relatedly, it shows how science often operates in waves of fashion, following a pattern of sporadic interest followed by introduction of an influential theory, an outbreak of empirical activity, and then gradual decline and sporadic interest. This is not restricted to menstrual cycle studies. Other areas such as research on fluctuating asymmetry, waist-to-hip ratio, and second-to-fourth digit ratio (to name just a few) have followed a similar pattern

It’s not so surprising, after all.
Science is done by scientists, and scientists are humans.

Love is a fundamental human emotion

Something we already mentioned on this website:

Despite widespread views in the social sciences over the past century that love is a European phenomenon of recent origin (e.g. , Bloch, 2009), love is prioritized as a preference in long-term mating in countries ranging from Brazil to Zambia (Buss et al. , 1990).

And a bit later:

Romantic love appears to be a part of the shared human experience—with nearly all studied cultures evidencing intimate and romantic pair-bonding

The authors rightfully add that pair-bonding makes even more sense in ancestral and under-developed societies because of the benefits it provides to the couple and the offspring.

That being said though, in general it seems like individualistic cultures have more idealized and romantic beliefs of love, while collectivist cultures a more pragmatic one.

And men may fall in love more and more often than women

Conversely, males appeared to initiate romantic overtones more often, fall in love easier, and (…) often reported having been in love more often (Kephart, 1967; Sprecher, 1994) suggesting that they are afforded more opportunities to pursue the luxury of love since they commonly incur fewer costs with commitment (Rubin et al., 1981).
(…) Consequently, males fall in love faster and experience more emotional reactions from breakups (Rubin et al., 1981)

Poaching and infidelity make for poorer relationships

individuals who had been poached by existing partners tended to have poorer-quality relationships, including less satisfaction, commitment, and investment.
Poached individuals also reported being more attentive to alternative partners, perceiving their alternatives to be of higher quality, and engaged in more infidelity relative to nonpoached individuals

And:

while evaluating a partner during infdelity may result in a more informed mate switch, relationships that start as infdelity may be less gratifying and more tumultuous (e.g. , characterized by poorer satisfaction and commitment and more infdelity).

Men probably solved the question of “paternity uncertainty”

Says Buss:

Because fertilization occurs internally within women, men cannot be certain that they are the genetic father of a woman’s child. Men who failed to solve this problem would have risked investing valuable resources in the offspring of intrasexual rivals. To compound these costs, the mates of those men would have also devoted their investments into offspring of their rivals. Unless ancestral men were able to solve this problem, it is unlikely that men would have evolved a long-term high-investment mating strategy

Muslim’s veil may be a tool of male power

A cross-cultural study on veiling reported that in all of the 25 countries included in the analysis, men supported veiling more than women. Veiling may thus serve men’s ftness interests more than those of women (Pazhoohi & Kingstone, 2020), for example by reducing women’s attractiveness to men who are not their husband.

Evolution is very imperfect

A theoretical background:

many psychological (and physiological) mechanisms are now processing inputs that they did not evolve to handle, thereby leading to maladaptive cognitive, afective, and behavioral outputs (Li et al. , 2018; Li, Yong, van Vugt, 2020; Maner & Kenrick, 2010)

An example:

The male beetles took such a liking that they would continue attempting to copulate with a bottle despite being attacked and having their genitalia dismantled by predatory ants

Also see our video:

Some degree of homosexuality is common

Some studies show that a substantial proportion or even a majority of men and women do have also some level of same-sex attraction despite considering themselves heterosexual (Santtila et al. , 2008; Savin-Williams & Vrangalova, 2013).

And it’s not true that one is either straight or gay:

Moreover, non-heterosexuality does not mean only exclusive homosexuality but rather a spectrum of non-heterosexual attractions and preferences (Valentova & Varella, 2016b)

The authors also say that homosexuality is highly heritable and linked to psychological, neurological, hormonal, developmental, and anthropometric specificities (Bailey et al., 2016).

Bisexuality is linked to dark-triad and sex drive

Bisexual women (Luoto & Rantala, 2022) have been demonstrated to display elevated sex drive and desire when compared to both heterosexual and homosexual women (Lippa, 2006, 2007; Schmitt, 2007; Stief et al. , 2014), and they also engage in more sexual behavior (Fethers et al. , 2000; Hayes et al. , 2011)

My experience with bisexual women confirms the same.

And as for dark triads:

Semenyna et al.(2019) showed that this heightened sociosexuality observed in bisexual women is associated with personality traits known as the Dark Triad (Machiavellianism, sub-clinical narcissism, and sub-clinical psychopathy) and sexual competitiveness

The author of “Confessions Of a Sociopath” also says that, in her experience, bisexuality may be the most defining trait of sociopathy.

Masculinity & sociosexuality: a complex relationship

• More masculine women have more sexual partners: a number of studies reported that more masculine women have more sexual partners than more feminine women (cf. Bártová et al. , 2020; Mikach & Bailey, 1999; Varella et al. , 2014). BUT
• Gay men don’t have lower sociosexuality, albeit they’re on average less masculine than heterosexual men (Bailey & Zucker, 1995)
• Bisexual women are more feminine than lesbians, but have a more unrestricted sociosexuality (Flanders & Hatfeld, 2013); (Schmitt, 2005, 2007)
• Gender non-conforming heterosexual and homosexual individuals are more sexually unrestricted (Bártová et al. , 2020)
• Non-heterosexuals engaged in more consensual nonmonogamy (Valentova et al. , 2020)

Modern societies naturally move towards more inclusion, tolerance, & humanity

Inglehart and colleagues (Inglehart 1997, Inglehart & Baker, 2000; Inglehart & Welzel, 2005) in their modernization theory distinguished traditional and modern societies based on social, economic, and cultural characteristics. Cultural norms of traditional societies place high value on survival and security, while cultural norms of modern societies place high value on self-expression and tolerance of minorities

I disagree that’s a given.
Modern societies can move towards far more repressive systems. The difference though is that poorer societies cannot even afford inclusivity, self-expression and tolerance because they must prioritize survival.

Richer societies instead can afford to think beyond survival to include more progressive values and welcoming stances.
Richer societies can do that, and probably tend to do that. But it doesn’t necessarily mean they will.

But it’s still a good point.
Similarly, subsistence societies value child-bearing and having many and healthy children. Richer societies also value fathers’ involvement, and they value humanity and kindness for their own sake:

In traditional societies, continued childbearing affords higher reproductive rates, but parental investment in existing children is more important in modern wealthy societies (e.g., Mace, 2000). Due to increasing overpopulation in some societies (and on the global scale), the modern culturally evolved norms frequently discourage extended reproduction of offspring and tolerate unhealthy offspring more than traditional societies. Subsequently, the norms value less the number of individuals but rather promote humanity and survival of everyone, regardless of their health perspective.

Status matter, but not for women

In general, men compete with other men to acquire higher status, which in turn allows for better dating.
This holds true even in modern societies, but not for women:

In Western societies high-income men have more biological children than low-income men, whereas among women the opposite is true (Hopcroft, 2005; Nettle & Pollet, 2008)

Antisocials may try to poach more, but are only successful if they’re high-quality partners

This is the same we said in our articles “the myth of psychopath’s mating success“:

antisocial people (…) are not the most frequent targets of these attempts. Instead, highly extroverted, open, attractive, and loving people are the most sought-after targets of poaching (Schmitt & Buss, 2001)
(…).
Further, although they attempt poaching frequently, antisocial people are also not the most successful poachers. That recognition goes to people who are self-described as open to new experiences, sexually attractive, and sexually unrestrained

QUOTES

On “why infidelity exists (and makes sense)”:

From an investment perspective, simultaneously investing in a long-term partnership and one or more short-term partnerships is akin to diversifying one’s portfolio

Oral sex as effective mate guarding (a strategy of giving value and make your partners want to stay, instead of restricting freedom):

people who engage in sexual behavior that is more likely to lead to partner orgasm—such as oral sex (Richters et al. , 2006)—may be employing a particularly valuable mate-guarding tactic (Pham & Shackelford, 2013; Sela et al. , 2015)

Note: of course, that is only true as long as that “extra” sexual behavior is wanted by your partner and that oral sex is better than other types of sex -including “normal” penetrative sex-.

On relationships as “unspoken deals” (redacted for brevity):

One line of thinking with respect to (…) relationship dissolution is (…) that marriage-like unions involve females conferring some exclusivity of sexual and reproductive rights to a male in exchange for his commitment to invest in and protect her and their offspring (Daly & Wilson, 2000).
However, should either not fulfill their end of the bargain (e.g. , either party is unfaithful, “freeloads,” or becomes undependable), the relationship may dissolve.

🙋🏼‍♂️ Lucio’s Analysis

Sometimes ad-hoc explanations weren’t plausible

Ad-hoc explanations undermine the rigor of evolutionary psychology.

In general, good evolutionary psychologists don’t do it much and, fortunately, they were the exceptions in this book.

However, there were passages where certain explanations felt more speculative, and not very plausible.

For example, the authors suggest that women compete less physically than men because injuries are costlier to women:

By contrast, injury related to physical aggression may be costlier for women e.g., injury could make a woman unable to care for offspring, causing them to expire; Campbell, 1999, 2002) further facilitating this sex difference in overt and direct intrasexual mating competition

The author does well to use the words “maybe”, and “could” -that’s how you recognize a good scientist-.

But a little bit later the same hypothesis, with fewer hypotheticals:

physical competition would negatively afect a mother’s ability to provision for herself and her (grand) offspring, and as a result of this selection pressure, women have evolved to be more risk-averse than men (e.g. , Cross & Campbell, 2011; Massar, 2018)

The hypothesis itself still strikes me as an ad-hoc explanation.
It lacks sufficient depth and fails to address counter-arguments.

Why?
Because injuries aren’t exclusive to women in terms of reproductive costs.
Injured men also face equally reduced reproductive success.

If injury alone were the key determinant, we’d expect both genders to be similarly cautious, if not men even more so, given their external reproductive organs make them particularly vulnerable in physical conflict.

Plus, since top men also reproduce more than women, the cost of physical aggression for top men should be even higher, and their risk aversion equally higher.
That doesn’t seem to be the case to me, since higher-status men may be even more aggressive.

Now I am going to make an hypothesis: some men may (subconsciously) like this hypothesis because it reinforces the frame of women as weaker -and men handling “tough business”-.

Sometimes fails to mention confounding variables or alternate explanations

For example, making the case that men discriminate more against children that are not theirs, the author say that (compared to women):

Daly and Wilson found that children are 100 times more likely to be killed by their nonbiological parents, and nonbiological fathers are far more prone to engage in killing and other forms of child abuse than nonbiological mothers.

However, men are also more violent, so it’s not possible to make a direct comparison with women, unless one shows that men are less than 100 times more likely to kill anyone.

In another case, to prove that parents care more for their biological children:

families with both adopted and biological children, Gibson (2009) found that biological children were less likely to be arrested, less likely to be on public assistance, and less likely to require treatment for substance abuse or other mental health problems

Adopted children are more likely to have issues of their own.
Including: being abandoned by addicts or psychopathic parents (genetic), or having spent time early childhood in harsh condition (environmental).

Misunderstands the lover/provider (short term/long term) male strategy

The authors say:

The second major assumption of the dual sexuality hypothesis is that men who can provide indirect benefts (i.e. , men with high-quality genes) pursue mainly a short-term mating strategy (…) As a consequence, their willingness to provide direct benefts (e.g. , in the form of paternal care) is low. This assumes that qualities responsible for direct benefits are of different origin than qualities of indirect benefits.
In other words, men who can provide paternal care lack cues of genetic quality. Such an assumption is, however, likely to be unfounded.

That’s not the case though.

The player/provider theory is based on the idea that many men who can sleep with many women prefer sleeping with many women, rather than committing.
These men could provide paternal care, but do not want.

The other side of the coin is that men who present themselves as committed partners and doting fathers may also be of a high mate value. But, as a group, they are likely lower mate value than the players (because if they were the same, many father would be players instead).

I do agree with the author though that many people over-generalize and mistakenly imply that all father-types are lower mate value, and all player types are of higher value.
Indeed, it was one of our early posts here:

• It’s about mate value, not the role

Sometimes a bit PC (but I can understand it)

For example:

Some divorced individuals may remain single because they possess undesired traits that make it difcult to form and maintain a romantic relationship, such as having high levels of neuroticism, narcissism, and attachment-avoidance (Amato, 2000; Wang & Amato, 2000).

Narcissism is often attractive. Avoidant attachment can facilitate a “player” style that’s also effective in early dating.
I think more likely and common issues for struggling divorcees include: poor, older, overweight, or saddled with children to take care.

And another example later that also felt to come from a somewhat “off” naive/pc perspective:

Men are signifcantly more likely than women to repartner after separation (…) and are more likely to have children with that new partner (…).
From the narrow perspective of the success of a single-family unit, such behaviors seem difficult to reconcile with theories of evolutionary adaptation. From a broader perspective of survival of the species, however, it could be argued that the more important outcome lies in the chances of “superior” mate selection the second time around

What’s “success of a single-family unit” has to do with evolutionary adaptation?

Either I completely misunderstood this part, or the authors seemed to bring some strange personal value that single-family units are “good” -a moral take- or “good for evolution” -a claim lacking evidence-. Both seem off.

Still too many studies low in ecological validity

Several studies felt to me over-relied on what people say.

For example:

one study explored sex diferences and mate preferences in a booty-call relationship, finding that only women, not men, consider the kindness of a booty-call partner a necessity (March et al., 2018).

Well, the study, called ” Netflix and Chill? What Sex Differences Can Tell Us About Mate Preferences in (Hypothetical) Booty-Call Relationships”, is based on an online questionnaire.

I wouldn’t overly-trust this study.

Some feminist, left-leaning claims?

For example:

is incontestable that women, in the immediate cultural past (e.g. , last 500 years), have been discriminated against, and in many developing nations major discrimination still occurs.

It could be true indeed, but it would be better to define that discrimination.

And how “incontestable” is it?

How about some advantages women have also enjoyed?
Many soldiers who perished in war would love not being forced to go to war.
And many men who did NOT find a mate may envy the comparatively ease with which women can find one.

Sometimes I wished for more numbers

For example:

Buss and Shackelford (1997) found that women who believed they were of lower mate value than their husbands also believed that their husbands were more prone to infdelity, which prompted these women to report a higher likelihood that they, themselves, would be unfaithful to their husbands

However, I would have liked to see how many more said that.

Some hypotheses are based on weak effects and left me unconvinced

For example, the authors list “coitus-induced uterine contraction” to interfere with another man’s embryo implantation:

Should these mechanisms fail and the woman is impregnated by another man, the third category of paternal assurance strategies involves pregnancy termination, which can include pregnancy-induced domestic violence (Burch & Gallup, 2004) and coitus-induced uterine contractions that interfere with embryo implantation (see Gallup & Burch, 2006, for details)

However, as far as I know -and i double checked before writing this, sex is generally pretty safe for an embryo.
So this felt to me more like a case of “looking for an item to add to the list of paternity-ensuring mechanisms.

Evolution is not a perfect, deterministic machine

Just like libertarian extremists (mistakenly) believe in free-market perfection, some people think as if evolution is a deterministic, nearly perfect machine.

As an example:

If either of these hypotheses is correct—if masculine facial structures in men cue immune robustness or if they confer an advantage in intrasexual competition—selection should have shaped psychological mechanisms in women to be attracted to masculine facial shape

Not really.
Masculine facial features may confer an advantage in intrasexual competition, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that women will be attracted to masculine facial shapes.
It MAY be the case. It may LIKELY be the case. But it doesn’t necessarily follow.

Evolution is complex and messy, with an endless list of traits to select for or against.
So it’s not a given that women would develop an adaptation to prefer a trait that helps in intrasexual competition.

Traits that help in physical combat may spread only because of survival and better reproduction via higher social status, without necessarily becoming more attractive.

Also, the “law of balance” applies again.
And developing exaggerated masculine facial features may come at a cost in other areas.

Just as an example, bigger testicles may make reproduction more efficient.
But they likely make combat less efficient -and cost more to develop and maintain-.
And it doesn’t seem that women have strong preferences for balls’ sizes.

Again, see this video:

Some claims felt off (and probably were off)

This paragraph didn’t add up to me:

In general, heterosexual men find women with feminine sex-typical traits to be more attractive (e.g. , Fraccaro et al. , 2010), although there are exceptions, indicating that for long-term relationships and in harsh environments men prefer more masculine female partners (e.g. , Little et al. , 2007, but see Pereira et al. , 2020)

While I could understand the case for “harsh environments”, the “long-term” claim didn’t add up for me.

So I asked Chatgtp.

My input before quoting the paragraph above was: “from this paragraph from an evolutionary handbook, can you confirm or disprove with other studies that for long-term men prefer more masculine women?
while i can understand the case for “harsh environments”, it seems odd to me that men would prefer more masculine women as long-term partners“.

Chatgtp confirms that long-term men prefer feminine women as long-term partners:

And here is another example:

Other research, however, is less consistent and indicates diferential effects depending on contexts and moderating variables. Meta-analysis of results across many studies (Langlois et al. , 2000) showed no sex diferences in the importance of attractiveness, with both men and women preferring physically attractive partners (e.g. , Fletcher et al. , 2004; Kenrick et al. , 1993; Regan & Berscheid, 1997)

This was my question to Chatgtp before quoting the above paragraph: “I was surprised to read this because in most research and handbooks I’ve seen, men and women do differ in how they value and weigh attractiveness compared to other traits when it comes to mate selection. Based on academic consensus and the results of most studies and meta-analyses, is this true that men and women don’t differ in how much they value attractiveness? this is the paragraph that raised some question marks for me:”

And Chatgtp agreed:

REVIEW

The Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology and Romantic Relationships is a well of wisdom.

Even after going through many handbooks and studies in this field, I still learned a lot from this book.

The book is also well-structured and seems thorough.
Even the criticism listed above refers mostly to single instances, and not trends.
Sure, like most other handbooks, it could gain with some streamlining and synthesis. That’s because different authors sometimes revisit similar and/or foundational concepts with slightly different angles and studies (in this review for each chapter I combine parts from different chapters).

But overall, it was one of the most TPM-enriching books we’ve ever reviewed.
I took copious notes, and updated and improved many, many articles thanks to this handbook.
And I could even confirm or add some extra insights for our products.

For that, I am very grateful to the authors.

Check the best books to read or get this book on Amazon.