Choosing a mate

How many times have you heard it said that “opposites attract”? From movies to books to musicals, it’s an idea that has been drummed into our heads: Katherine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, for instance, or Liza Doolitle and Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady.

But a new study has found that when men and women start seriously seeking a mate, they look for someone who is similar to them.

Stephen Emlen, a behavioral ecologist at Cornell University, conducted the study with Peter Buston, who is now at the University of California, Santa Barbara. They gave questionnaires to almost 1000 men and women aged 18 to 24. Each was asked to rank the desirability of 10 attributes in a long-term partner. Next, each was asked to rank themselves on the same 10 attributes.

The results showed a consistent match between the qualities ranked as highly desirable in a partner and those the individuals saw themselves as possessing. (Among the attributes ranked were wealth and status, family commitment, physical appearance, sexual fidelity, education, intellectual interests and desire to have children.)

 

Previous studies have also found that men and women tend to choose marriage partners with many attributes similar to themselves, and that people who choose such partners tend to be happier and have more stable marriages.

The researchers theorize that people looking for a mate assess themselves first, then look for someone “in their own league.” Choosing a partner with far superior qualities, either deliberately or because of self-delusion about one’s own qualities, could risk a future breakup, because the partner is more likely to be tempted away by a higher-quality mate.

Yet this research flies in the face of arguments and research by evolutionary biologists and psychologists over the last few years. They say that men and women choose mates differently, based on conflicting levels of parental investment, without much regard for common interests.

According to evolutionary theory, women are primarily interested in a man’s ambition, social status, wealth, desire for children and commitment to family, because their primary concern is in the long-term viability of the children they invest so much in producing. Men, on the other hand, who invest very little in the production of children, are supposedly primarily interested in women who are young, healthy and physically attractive, all indications that they’ll be good at having children. Men are also supposedly more interested in sexual fidelity than women, because they have no other way to be certain any children were actually fathered by them, whereas women are more concerned about emotional infidelity, because their main worry is that their men might abandon them and their children.

A study of personal ads showed that women who advertised themselves as physically attractive demanded greater financial and occupational status of the men they were seeking than did women who did not suggest they were physically attractive–and men who suggested they had wealth and status were more likely to insist on physical attractiveness in the women they were seeking.

Another study of personal ads by Pat Barclay of McMaster University in 2001 showed that women are attracted to altruistic men–men whose ads included extra spare time interests, such as working with special needs children or volunteering to referee sports games–whereas men rated altruistic women as less attractive. Presumably, this is because an altruistic man might be more willing to invest more energy and resources into a relationship and the raising of children.

But a study released earlier this year by Dr. Christine Harris of the University of California in San Diego indicated that the supposed differences in jealousy between men and women vary greatly from culture to culture–which would mean the differences aren’t hard-wired into us by evolution. In many cases, only a minority of men said sexual infidelity in a mate would be worse than emotional infidelity.

In other words, we don’t yet really understand everything that goes into the choosing of a mate. go about choosing a mate. Do biology and evolution really drive the process, or do factors less immediately focused on the prospects of successful reproduction come into play?

Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Liverpool, compares it to a poker game. “You have to balance your preferences against those of your partner and the other players in the game.”

And, presumably, hope that the person you finally choose wasn’t bluffing.

Permanent link to this article: https://edwardwillett.com/2003/07/choosing-a-mate/

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