The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating

by David M. Buss

Kings and despots routinely stocked their harems with young, attractive, nubile women and had sex with them frequently. The Moroccan emperor Moulay Ismail the Bloodthirsty, for example, acknowledged having sired 888 children. His harem had 500 women. When each woman reached the age of thirty, she was banished from the emperor’s harem, sent to a lower-level leader’s harem, and replaced by a younger woman. Roman, Babylonian, Egyptian, Incan, Indian, and Chinese emperors all shared the tastes of Emperor Ismail and instructed their trustees to scour the land for as many young pretty women as they could find.

Standards of beauty are not arbitrary but rather embody reliable cues to reproductive value. Advertisers have no special interest in inculcating a particular set of beauty standards; they do want to use whatever sells products. Advertisers perch a clear-skinned, regular-featured young woman on the hood of the latest-model car, or gather several attractive young women to stare fondly at a man drinking a brand-name beer, because these images exploit men’s evolved psychological mechanisms and therefore sell cars and beer, not because advertisers want to promulgate a single standard of beauty.

human males have faced a unique set of adaptive problems and so have evolved a unique sexual psychology. They prefer youth because of the centrality of marriage in human mating. Their desires are designed to gauge a woman’s future reproductive potential, not just the chance of immediate impregnation. They place a premium on physical appearance because of the wealth of reliable cues it provides to the reproductive potential of a potential mate. Men worldwide want physically attractive, young, and sexually loyal wives who will remain faithful to them over the long run. These preferences cannot be attributed to Western culture, to capitalism, to white Anglo-Saxon bigotry, to the media, or to incessant brainwashing by advertisers. They are universal across cultures and are absent in none. They are deeply ingrained psychological adaptations that drive our mating decisions, just as our evolved taste preferences drive our decisions on food consumption.

After a lecture on the subject of sex differences in mate preferences, one woman suggested that I suppress the findings because of the distress they would cause women. Women already have it hard enough in this male-dominated world, she felt, without having scientists tell them that their mating problems may be based in men’s evolved psychology. Yet suppression of this truth is unlikely to help, just as concealing the fact that people have evolved preferences for succulent, ripe fruit is unlikely to change their preferences. Railing against men for the importance they place on beauty, youth, and fidelity is like railing against meat eaters because they prefer animal protein. Telling men not to become aroused by signs of youth and health is like telling them not to experience sugar on their tongues as sweet. Many people hold an idealistic view that standards of beauty are arbitrary, that beauty is only skin-deep, that cultures differ dramatically in the importance they place on appearance, and that Western standards stem from the media, parents, the culture, or other agents of socialization. But standards of attractiveness are not arbitrary—they reflect cues to youth and health, and hence to reproductive value. Beauty is not merely skin-deep. It reflects internal reproductive capabilities. Although modern fertility technology grants women greater latitude for reproducing across a wider age span, men’s preferences for women who show apparent signs of reproductive capacity con...

Casual sex is also related to people’s developmental stage in life. Adolescents in many cultures are more likely to use temporary mating as a means of assessing their value on the mating market, experimenting with different strategies, honing their attraction skills, and clarifying their own preferences. After they have done so, they are often ready for commitment or marriage. The fact that premarital adolescent sexual experimentation is tolerated and even encouraged in some cultures, such as the Mehinaku of Amazonia, provides a clue that short-term mating is related to one’s stage in life.

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.

The comedian Jimi McFarland noted: “One of the things women claim is most important in a man is a sense of humor. In my years as a comedian, I’ve learned that they’re usually referring to the humor of guys like Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, and Russell Crowe. Apparently, those guys are hilarious.”

TREMENDOUS BENEFITS FLOW to couples who remain committed. From this unique alliance come efficiencies that include complementary skills, a division of labor, and a sharing of resources, as well as mutual benefits such as a unified front against mutual enemies, a stable home environment for rearing children, and a more extended kin network. To reap these benefits, people must be able to retain the mates they have succeeded in attracting. People who fail to stay together incur severe costs. Bonds between extended kin are ripped apart. Essential resources are lost. Children may be exposed to potentially dangerous stepparents. Failure to keep a committed mate can mean wasting all the effort expended in the selection, attraction, courting, and commitment process. Men who fail to prevent the defection of their mate risk losing access to valuable childbearing capabilities and maternal investment. Women who fail to retain their mate risk losing the mate’s resources, protection, and paternal investment. Both sexes incur opportunity costs, the lost opportunities for exploring other mating prospects. Given the high rate of divorce in Western cultures, and the existence of divorce in all cultures, it is obvious that staying together is neither automatic nor inevitable.

Desirable mates are always in short supply. Glamorous, interesting, attractive, socially skilled people are heavily courted and rapidly removed from the mating pool. Those who succeed in attracting the 9’s and 10’s tend to hold on to them, escalating the effort they allocate to mate guarding.7 Transitions between relationships are brief for the beautiful. In modern monogamous societies, for those left on the sidelines of the mating dance, mate shortages get more severe with each passing year.

Moody partners absorb time and psychological energy. Appeasing responses, such as efforts to get the partner out of the bad mood and putting one’s own plans aside temporarily, take up energy at the expense of other goals. Women impose these costs on men as a tactic for eliciting commitment. A moody woman may be saying: “You had better increase your commitment to me, or else I will burdon you with my emotional volatility.” It is one tactic in women’s repertoire for eliciting male commitment. Men dislike it because it requires that they expend effort that could be allocated to solving other adaptive challenges. Moodiness also functions as an assessment device to test the strength of the bond.17 Women use moodiness to impose small costs on their mates and then use men’s reactions to the costs as a gauge of their degree of commitment. If a man is unwilling to tolerate these costs, it is a cue that his commitment is low. Men’s willingness to tolerate the costs and to be responsive to the increasing demands for investment signals a greater level of commitment. Either way, the woman gains valuable information about the strength of the bond. Neither the functions of moodiness nor the functions of emotional reserve require conscious thought to be strategically enacted. Women need not be aware that they are attempting to test the strength of the man’s commitment. Men need not be aware that they are trying to minimize their commitment to preserve some for efforts outside the couple. ...

A common grievance of married men, far more than of married women, is that their spouse takes up too much of their time and energy. Thirty-six percent of married men, in contrast with only 7 percent of married women, express irritation that their spouse demands too much of their time. Twenty-nine percent of married men, but only 8 percent of married women, complain that their mates demand too much attention.

More women than men complain that their spouse fails to channel the money they do earn to them, especially noting their failure to buy them gifts. By the fifth year of marriage, roughly one-third of married women voice this complaint; in contrast, only 10 percent of husbands express similar complaints.24 Conflict between the sexes corresponds remarkably well with the initial gender-linked preferences in a mate. Women select mates in part for their economic resources and, once married, complain more than men that those resources are not forthcoming or abundant enough.

One of the most prominent changes within marriage over time occurs in the realm of sex. Among newlywed couples, with each passing year men increasingly complain that their wives withhold sex. Although only 14 percent of men complain that their newlywed brides have refused to have sex during the first year of marriage, 43 percent express this feeling four years later.

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The arrival of a baby has a significant impact on the frequency of sex. In one study, twenty-one couples kept daily records of the frequency of intercourse over a period of three years, starting with the first day of marriage.10 The rates of intercourse a year after the marriage were half what they had been during the first month. The arrival of a baby depressed the frequency of sex even more: after the birth, the rate of intercourse averaged about one-third of what it had been during the first month of marriage.

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The effect of the length of a marriage on sexual intercourse appears to be influenced by a woman’s physical appearance. According to a study of more than 1,500 married individuals, men and women respond differently to the normal changes in physical appearance that accompany aging.11 As women age, husbands show less sexual interest in them and experience less happiness with their sexual relationship. Men who perceive their wives as quite attractive, however, 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.

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The distribution of men’s average income in the United States, broken down by age, shows that income tends to be quite low among men in their teens and early twenties. In the decade between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four, men’s income attains only two-thirds of its eventual peak. Not until the decades from ages thirty-five to fifty-four does men’s income in the United States achieve its peak. From age fifty-five on, men’s income declines, undoubtedly because some men retire, become incapacitated, or lose the ability to command their previous salaries.49 These income averages conceal great variability, because some men’s resources continue to increase throughout their old age, whereas other men remain poor throughout their lives. Because older men tend to have more status and resources than younger men, men and women of the same age differ on average in their value as mates. In the same decade between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five when women peak in fertility and reproductive value, men’s income and status are typically the lowest that they will be in their adult lives. When most women between the ages of thirty-five and forty-four are rapidly approaching the end of their reproductive years, most men in the same decade are just approaching the peak of their earning capacity. To the extent that the central ingredients of desirability are a woman’s reproductive value and a man’s resource capacity, men and women of comparable age are not typically comparable in ...

Today we are confronted with novel sexual circumstances not encountered by any of our ancestors, including reliable contraception, fertility drugs, artificial insemination, cyber sex, online dating apps, breast implants, tummy tucks, sperm banks, and the capacity to genetically engineer “designer babies.” Our ability to control the consequences of our mating behavior is unprecedented in human evolutionary history and matched by no other species on earth. But we confront these modern novelties with an ancient set of mating strategies that worked in ancestral times and in places that are irretrievably lost. Our mating mechanisms are the living fossils that reveal who we are and where we came from. We are the first species in the known history of three and a half billion years of life on earth with the capacity to control our own destiny. The prospect of designing our destiny remains excellent to the degree that we comprehend our evolutionary past. Only by examining the complex repertoire of human sexual strategies can we know where we came from. Only by understanding why these human strategies have evolved can we control where we are going.