What Women Want

“It is not androcentric to propose that women’s preferences in a partner are more complex and enigmatic than the mate preferences of either sex of any other species.”

Taken broadly, human females appear to exhibit the most complex mate preferences observed across species.

“The great initial parental investment of women makes them a valuable, but limited, resource. Gestating, bearing, nursing, nurturing, and protecting a child are exceptional reproductive resources that cannot be allocated indiscriminately.”

From an evolutionary perspective, women’s fertility and child-rearing capacities are inherently limited and costly resources.

“Those who hold valuable resources do not give them away cheaply or unselectively. Because women in our evolutionary past risked enormous investment as a consequence of having sex, evolution favored women who were highly selective about their mates.”

This statement is particularly apt: “Those who hold valuable resources do not give them away cheaply or unselectively.” Misallocation carries high opportunity costs.

“Ancestral women suffered severe costs if they were indiscriminate – they experienced lower reproductive success, and fewer of their children survived to reproductive age.”

Choices vary in their consequences, and mate choice is among those with the highest stakes. Poor mate selection carried especially severe costs.

“If, over evolutionary time, generosity in men provided these benefits repeatedly and the cues to a man’s generosity were observable and reliable, then selection would favor the evolution of a preference for generosity in a mate.”

As discussed in Chapter 1, this explains how a female preference for generosity comes into being.

“men vary not just in their generosity but also in a bewildering variety of ways that are significant to the choice of a mate. Men vary in their physical prowess, athletic skill, ambition, industriousness, kindness, empathy, emotional stability, intelligence, social skills, sense of humor, kin network, and position in the status hierarchy. Men also differ in the costs they impose on a mating relationship: some come with children, bad debts, a quick temper, a selfish disposition, and a tendency to be promiscuous. In addition, men differ in hundreds of ways that may be irrelevant to women. Some men have navels turned in, others have navels turned out. A strong preference for a particular navel shape would be unlikely to evolve unless male navel differences were somehow adaptively relevant to ancestral women. From among the thousand of ways in which men differ, selection over hundreds of thousands of years focused women’s preferences laser-like on the most adaptively valuable characteristics.”

Men differ along many dimensions, but from an evolutionary perspective, women’s attention is disproportionately focused on variation in traits with adaptive significance.

“The qualities people prefer, however, are not static characteristics. Because characteristics change, mate selection must gauge the future potential of a prospective partner. A young medical student who lacks resources now might have excellent future promise. Or a man might be very ambitious but have already have reached his peak. Another man might have children from a previous marriage, but because they are about to leave his nest, they will not drain his resources. Gauging a man’s mating value requires looking beyond his current position and evaluating his potential.

Evolution has favored women who prefer men who possess attributes that confer benefits and who dislike men who possess attributes that impose costs. Each separate attribute constitutes one component of a man’s value to a woman as a mate. Each of her preferences tracks one component.”

“In selecting a mate, women must identify and correctly evaluate the cues that signal whether a man indeed possesses a particular resource. This assessment problem becomes especially acute in areas where men are apt to deceive women, such as pretending to have higher status than they do or feigning greater commitment than they are willing to give.

Finally, women face the problem of integrating their knowledge about a prospective mate. Suppose that one man is generous but emotionally unstable. Another man is emotionally stable but stingy. Which man should the woman choose? Choosing a mate calls upon psychological mechanisms that make it possible to evaluate the relevant attributes and give each its appropriate weight in the whole. Some attributes are granted more weight than others in the final decision about whether to choose or reject a particular man. One of these heavily weighted component is the man’s resources.”

Overall, Buss emphasizes that mate choice involves forecasting future value, detecting reliable signals, and integrating multiple trait dimensions. Women have evolved psychological mechanisms for making such decisions under uncertainty.

Part 2 of this chapter will examine in detail the specific traits for which women have evolved mate preferences.