How Humans Select & Keep Romantic Partners in Short & Long Term | Dr. David Buss

Andrew Huberman introduces David Buss, a psychology professor at the University of Texas, Austin, as one of the founding figures of evolutionary psychology. He describes Buss's laboratory as studying the strategies humans use to select mates in the short and long term, sex differences in mating strategy, infidelity by both women and men, deception in courtship (including false proclamations of love and promises of money or sex), how people assess their own and others' mate value, jealousy, mate poaching and mate guarding, the influence of ovulation and the menstrual cycle, and, in more recent work, stalking and sexual violence.

Huberman notes that people judge their chances with a potential partner not only through direct assessment but also indirectly, using other people's evaluations. He names Buss's books "The Evolution of Desire," "Why Women Have Sex" and the most recent, "When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault," and says he values Buss's work because it is grounded in quantitative laboratory studies using rigorous statistics, in a field full of rumor and speculation.

Asked about the criteria men and women use to choose mates, Buss first draws a distinction he calls critical: what people look for in a long-term committed partner, such as a spouse, differs from what they seek in a hookup, a one-night stand or a brief affair. Before answering, he asks to lay out the theory behind mate choice.

Buss grounds the discussion in Darwin's theory of sexual selection. Survival selection, he says, could not explain traits like the peacock's plumage or the massive antlers of stags that females lack. Sexual selection explains traits that evolve because of a mating advantage rather than a survival advantage, through two causal processes.

The first is intrasexual competition, stereotyped by two stags locking horns, with the winner gaining sexual access to the female. Whatever qualities produce success in these same-sex contests get passed on in greater numbers. Buss says the logic is now understood more generally and, in humans, includes competing for position in status hierarchies.

The second, preferential mate choice, is the one most relevant to the question. If members of one sex broadly agree on desired qualities, members of the other sex who have those qualities are chosen, while those who lack them are shunned or ignored. If the desired qualities have some heritable basis, they become more frequent over time. In humans, Buss argues, the two processes are linked:

the mate preferences of one sex basically set the ground rules for competition in the opposite sex

His hypothetical example: if women preferred men able and willing to devote resources to them, men would compete to outdo each other in acquiring resources and in showing they are willing to commit them to a particular woman. Humans also have mutual mate choice, which is not true of all species, so both sexes hold preferences and both compete: men for the most desirable women, women for the most desirable men.

Buss stresses that long-term mating is rare among mammals. Of more than 5,000 mammal species (he first says primates, then corrects himself), only about 3 to 5% have anything resembling a pair-bonded, long-term mating strategy. Even chimpanzees, our closest primate relatives, lack one: nearly all their sexual activity happens during the female's estrus, after which males and females mostly ignore each other, with some exceptions.

Humans, by contrast, show long-term pair-bonding attachment, heavy male investment in offspring and relatively concealed ovulation, which Buss calls unique features of the human mating system.

His evidence for what people want in a long-term mate comes mainly from what he describes as the largest study of its kind: his own study of 37 cultures, since replicated by other researchers. It found three clusters: qualities both sexes want, qualities that differ by sex, and qualities whose importance varies widely across cultures, from indispensable to irrelevant.

The qualities men and women share include intelligence, kindness, mutual attraction and love, good health, dependability and emotional stability. On emotional stability, Buss notes a slight sex difference, with women preferring it a bit more. He admits these may seem obvious, since "no one wants a stupid, mean, ugly, disease-ridden mate", but says nobody knew this before the 37-culture study. He presents them as universal, from the Zulu in South Africa to Rio de Janeiro, Portugal and Oslo.

Buss pushes back on the idea that love is a recent Western invention of European poets. He says the Kung San of Botswana describe falling in love much as Westerners do, and even distinguish an infatuation stage from an attachment phase. He argues the frenzied, obsessive stage can't last long, maybe six weeks, six months at most, or nothing else in life would get done. Huberman links this phase to dopamine circuits firing at high frequency.

The first sex-differentiated cluster: women, more than men, prioritized good earning capacity, slightly older age and qualities tied to resource acquisition, such as social status, drive and ambition. Buss frames this as a man's "long-term resource trajectory": women often look less at what a man has now than at where he is heading.

When Huberman asks which concrete cues women use across cultures to judge this, Buss acknowledges that the question has received less research attention. One established cross-cultural finding is that women attend to the "attention structure," which he calls a key determinant of status. He clarifies that this means how much others attend to a man, not how well he himself can focus:

So those people who are high in status are those to whom the most people pay the most attention.

Other cues he lists are hard work, ambition and clear goals. He contrasts a man devoting effort to his professional development with one who spends eight hours a day on video games, Cheetos and beer, or who is in an existential crisis about what to do with his life. In the modern setting, the attention structure can show up as follower counts: a million Twitter followers versus three.

Buss also describes "mate choice copying," which is related to the attention structure:

guys who have passed the filters of multiple women, those are like preapproved.

In his lab's studies, the same man was photographed alone and then next to one or two attractive women. Women rated the identical man as much more attractive when he appeared with women. Buss adds, without giving data, that some men exploit this by bringing hired "wing women" on dates and presenting them as a sister or former girlfriend.

His evolutionary explanation rests on reproductive asymmetry. Fertilization happens inside women, and women carry a metabolically expensive nine-month pregnancy that also limits mobility and the ability to handle other life tasks. So in sexual matters, he argues, a poor mate choice costs women more, and a wise one benefits them more.

Because mate choice is mutual, Buss turns to what men value more than women: physical attractiveness. He confirms the difference holds consistently across cultures, but says women are not indifferent to looks. They notice fitness, a good shoulder-to-hip ratio and cues to health. He adds that men are mistaken in thinking women prefer the heavily muscled physiques of muscle magazines more than women actually do.

Appearance, he argues, carries a lot of information about health and, for men assessing women, about fertility and reproductive value. He stresses that this is not conscious reasoning. Men do not think a woman looks attractive because she must be fertile; they simply find the cues attractive, and those cues track youth and health.

Buss says he was taught as an undergraduate that attractiveness is infinitely arbitrary and culturally variable, and that this is simply not true. Based on the last 20 years of research, he says:

the cues that men find attractive in women are not at all arbitrary.

He allows some cross-cultural variation, such as how much plumpness or thinness is preferred, but lists clear skin, clear eyes, symmetrical features, a low waist-to-hip ratio, full lips and lustrous hair as markers of youth and health built into standards of attractiveness. His point is that men are not merely superficial; there is an underlying logic to the preference.