What Men and Women Really Want in a Potential Mate

Source: Francis C. Franklin via Wikimedia Commons /CC-BY-SA-3.0

Three decades ago, and across many cultures, several researchers explored how women and men differ in their preferences for a mate. Outside of personal partialities such as “I want a nice person” or “I want someone who likes me,” the question raised: Are there sex differences in the qualities that are desired in a mate, either for a short-term or long-term partner? One scholar who investigated these differences was evolutionary psychologist David Buss who established through his research consistent and significant differences between women and men in what they value in a mate.

These sex differences largely remained unchallenged except in regard to how the variations came into being. Buss’s view was that the sexes diverge in how to maximize their genes being transmitted to future generations. For example, “reproductive investments for men are minimal and only require sexual intercourse, whereas investment times for women are drastically longer (gestation and breastfeeding). Therefore, men are able to pass on more of their genes than women by adopting a short-term mating strategy.” That is, more than women, men show interest in multiple, brief, casual sexual interactions with youthful, attractive consorts (indicators of fertility).

Women, on the other hand, care less about sexual infidelity and value emotional commitment to enhance better security in raising offspring during their extended time commitment to the young. Women benefit “by selecting their partners more carefully based on how likely they are to help during gestation and invest resources in children after they are born.” Thus, they prefer older, higher-status partners who may have more ambition, industriousness, and resources.

Without denying this possible original biological impetus, sociologists and culturalists focus on how societies reinforce these basic sex differences, beginning in a child’s first moments of life and extending through infancy, childhood, and adulthood. Girls learn how to be girls and boys learn how to be boys within their cultural context. However, the new, gentler man and the empowered woman are recent developments. Has this altered the seemingly intractable evolutionary-based differences between women and men?

Recent research

For a contemporary perspective, psychologists Bogdan Kostic and John Scofield from Missouri State University and the University of Missouri collected online questionnaires from over 3,000 participants residing in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom of various sexualities and ages (mean age = 26 years).

Largely consistent with previous research, they found the following significant differences between women and men in mate preferences:

1. Women more than men emphasized the financial prospects of a mate.
2. Women more than men valued ambition and industriousness in a mate.
3. Men more than women placed importance on the physical attractiveness and youthfulness of a mate.
4. Men more than women were interested in brief, uncommitted relationships (from one hour to two years).
5. The sexes did not differ in their interest in long-term relationships (five years or more).
6. Women more than men were distressed by emotional infidelity; men were more distressed by sexual infidelity.

Lesbians and gay men

The investigators extended their research in a unique manner by assessing how these sex differences are played out among those who would not appear to follow an evolutionary model: lesbians and gay men. Their research revealed that the heterosexual findings were replicated for gays and lesbians, largely because they also share with heterosexuals of their sex most of their genes and pre-adult environments. There were, however, several noteworthy exceptions. Gay men were more interested in long-term mating than heterosexual men and they were less concerned with the youthfulness of their partner. Lesbians and heterosexual women were similar across the board. Bisexuals of both sexes, however, were largely ignored. Are they similar to straights and gays, or are they halfway in between? We do not yet know.

Conclusions

1. There are more similarities than differences in what men and women want in a potential mate.
2. Generally, differences between the sexes are larger than differences between sexual orientations.
3. Perhaps it will take more than minor inroads into how the sexes are built biologically and raised socially to alter these sex differences.

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