When you look at YouTube, you find countless pop-psychology or dating-guru explanations about what men desire and what women desire in a partner. But if you truly want to examine these preferences in depth—if you want solid, evidence-based knowledge about them—you could read The Evolution of Desire by David Buss.

Over countless millennia, humans evolved mating preferences that were adaptive in ancestral environments. These preferences nudged us toward certain behaviors and away from others. For example, women evolved tendencies to avoid mating with men who lacked resources or the ability to acquire and provide them. Men evolved preferences for cues of fertility rather than age or infertility. In ancestral environments, such preferences increased reproductive success.

I still vividly remember the first chapters of the book—there were genuinely ingenious quotes and conceptual gems throughout, and the final (short) chapter was almost philosophical in tone. The book confronts the reader with fundamental questions:

Why do men and women have the mate preferences they do?
What can individuals do to attract a partner?
What can they do to retain a desired partner?
What strategies are used to end relationships?
Why do attraction and attractiveness change over time?
How do people respond to their own changes—and to changes in their partners?
Why does sexual frequency often decline in long-term relationships?
Why do roughly 40% of men report, after four years of marriage, that their wives are withholding sex?
Why are break-ups so common?
Why does sexual conflict appear to be so persistent, rather than inter-sexual harmony?
And how do some couples manage to stay together for decades?

These are some of the essential questions one encounters while reading the book. It provided considerable food for thought. It sheds light on one’s past relationships or one’s current relationship and on relationships within one’s social environment. It explains why we have inherited certain adaptive preferences and how these preferences evolved.

But it also raises a deeper question: If these preferences evolved because they were adaptive in ancestral environments, are they still adaptive in modern environments? And what does adaptive behavior look like today? Conversely, what does maladaptive behavior look like in modern contexts?

Once you have read this book, enjoyed it, and acquired a solid understanding of human mating—quite unlike the kind of information one might receive from the average dating guru—the next question naturally arises: Where should the journey continue?

Which books should one read next to deepen knowledge in this area and in related fields?

In my case, Robin Hanson comes to mind—particularly his ideas related to social ally theory, a framework that has been elaborated in considerable depth by Jean-Louis Dessalles. Status, in this perspective, is closely linked to the concept of “your value as an ally.” (Geoffrey Miller might phrase it as “your value as a mate.”) The next step, for me, would be to deepen my understanding of social status as a central organizing principle in human behavior.