Table of Contents
Promiscuity
Women’s preferences for short term mates suggests that they use casual sex to evaluate potential husbands. If they only wanted short-term mates for opportunistic sex, as many men do, then certain characteristics (such as promiscuity, commitment) would not bother women.
Like men, women would find promiscuity in a prospective lover to be neutral or even desirable. But women regard promiscuous tendencies in a potential lover as highly undesirable since they signal a man’s unavailability as a potentially committed partner. They are less likely to engage in a long-term relationship with that man.
Another reason is that a man’s promiscuity can interfere with extracting immediate resources by the woman. If a man has multiple partners, they are less likely to provide enough resources to any particular female partner.
Women’s desires in a short-term partner are very similar to what she wants in a husband. A woman wants someone who is kind, romantic, understanding, exciting, stable, healthy, humorous, and generous with his resources.
While a man’s preferences change abruptly depending on mating context, women place a high standard on short term partners and long-term partners since the former can end up becoming a husband.
Infidelity
Women cheat when they’re not happy while men cheat regardless of whether they are happy.
Women sometimes cheat to make it easier for them to break up with their current mate.
Casual sex partners can sometimes bestow elevated status on their temporary mates. Women can elevate their status by mating with a prestigious man, even if it just an affair. Women can gain access to a higher social sphere, where they can find a permanent mate.
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Possible Genetic Benefits of Short-Term Sex
Another benefit from short term sex for women is to gain access to superior genes. A woman might secure the investment of a lower-ranking man by marrying him while simultaneously securing the genes of a higher-ranking man by mating with him casually.
This better genes theory has been called the “sexy son hypothesis.” The idea is that women prefer to have casual sex with attractive men so that their suns will have the same characteristics and will therefore enjoy greater mating success.
Costs of Casual Sex
All sexual strategies have costs, including casual sex.
Men risk contracting sexually transmitted diseases and acquiring a reputation as a womanizer or “man-whore.” Or suffering injury from a jealous husband. Many murders occur because a jealous man suspects infidelity by their wife. Unfaithful married men also risk costly divorces and retaliatory affairs by their wives. Short-term sexual strategies are also expensive, time consuming, and require energy.
Women sometimes incur bigger costs than men. Women risk impairing their desirability if they develop a reputation for promiscuity (since men prize fidelity in a potential wife). Women known as promiscuous suffer reputational damage even in relatively promiscuous cultures (such as the Swedes or the Ache Indians).
A woman who adopts an exclusively short-term strategy also risks physical and sexual abuse. It is true that married women are subjected to battering and rape by their husbands, but the potential for date rape is significant (some estimate an incidence of 15-20 percent among college women).
In cultures where food and material resources are shared communally, women have less incentive to marry. These include the Ache in Paraguay and the socialist welfare system of Sweden.
As a consequence, only half of all Swedish couples who live together get married, and members of both sexes often pursue more casual relationships.
Why do both sexes pursue brief sexual encounters? Men figure that they can afford to pursue brief affairs because they will eventually be able to attract a long-term mate as they accrue more resources. Women who are not very desirable figure that carefree short-term relationships are a good alternative to settling down with someone who does not meet her standards.
The sexual strategies pursued by other people affect the likelihood of casual sex. When many men pursue short-term relationships, as in Russia in many large-population cities, women are effectively forced into casual mating because fewer men are willing to commit, although some women choose to opt out of the mating game entirely.
This picture of human nature may be disturbing to some. Women may not be pleased by the ease with which men are sometimes ready to jump into bed with strangers. Men may not be comforted by the knowledge that their partners continue to scan the mating terrain, encourage other men by flirting, offer hints of sexual accessibility, cultivate backup mates, and sometimes cheat with impunity. Human nature can be alarming.
From another perspective, we have many different mating strategies, and this gives us much more power and flexibility, as well as control over our destiny.
Signs of fidelity have long been used by women to attract mates. When a woman has a long history of casual sex, it may be difficult to appear faithful, loyal, and devoted. But this was a much more important factor in traditional cultures. In the modern Western world, with its higher mobility and anonymous urban living, there is much room for rebuilding one’s reputation and starting fresh in new environment.
Having a history of promiscuity in the modern world no longer precludes the subsequent use of signs of fidelity to attract a mate.
Sexual Signaling
There are other things, aside from beauty and resources that matter. Morality and intelligence, for example, are seen as highly attractive qualities for obvious reasons.
No one wants to be deceived, and everyone wants to a higher chance of surviving.
The Menace of Mate Poachers
In monogamous and polygynous societies, people who fail to mate early suffer the consequences. Mate poaching is a strategy that those who have been left out of the mating pool pursue.
Men face the prospect of cuckoldry: proving resources to a mate that is unfaithful. Chimps, our closest primate relatives, behave differently. Male chimps don’t invest in their young. They would incur a double penalty if they did, since they not only may have wasted their parental investment but could have channeled their parental investment to their rival’s offspring.
Cuckolded men are universal objects of derision.
There are no paradises populated with sexually liberated people who share mates freely and do not get jealous.
Breaking Up
Infidelity is one of the major causes behind couples breaking up.
Nothing remains static. Value changes over time. A hunter’s promise may be cut suddenly by a debilitating injury. An ignored introvert who long occupied the bottom rungs of desirability may achieve renown through a dazzling invention that others value.
A young healthy couple may discover that one partner is infertile. Ignoring change is maladaptive. We have evolved psychological mechanisms to alert us to these changes and motivate us to engage in problem-solving.
Changes in a Woman’s Mate Value
A woman’s desirability is strongly determined by cues to her reproductivity. This value diminishes as she gets older.
Married couples have less frequent sex over time and report lower sexual satisfaction.
The arrival of a baby reduces frequency of sex. Mating effort shifts to parental effort.
Husbands show less sexual interest in their partner as she ages. But men who view their wives as attractive maintain high frequencies of sex and higher levels of sexual satisfaction.
Other research confirms that after the early years of marriage, husbands lose more sexual interest in their wives than wives do in their husbands.
Women guard their husbands consistently over time. Men guard their wives much more intensely early on than later on.
Changes in Men’s Mate Value
A woman’s desirability declines predictably with age, but the same is not true for men. The qualities valued in men are intelligence, political alliances, parenting proclivities, cooperativeness, kin networks, coalitions, and most important, the ability to provide for a woman and her children. These peak much later in life for men. In a typical man’s life, his value may diminish to zero, skyrocket, or both.
A woman’s reproductive value predictably declines over time.