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

**Andrew Huberman** (0:00)
Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance.
I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. And now my conversation with Dr. David Buss. Well, David, delighted to be here. Excited to ask you a number of questions about these super interesting topics about how people select mates. Just to start off, perhaps you could just orient us a little bit about mate choice, you know, some of the primary criteria that studies show men and women use in order to select mates, transient mates as well as lifetime mates.

**David Buss** (0:47)
Right. Well, that's a critical distinction because what people look for in a long-term committed mateship like a marriage partner or a long-term romantic relationship is different from what people look for in a hookup or casual sex. So that's actually critical. I wonder if we could maybe just back up a second and just talk a little bit about the theoretical framework for understanding mate choice. Sure. It basically stems from Darwin's theory of sexual selection. Darwin noticed that there were phenomena that couldn't be explained by this so-called survival selection. So he came up with the theory of sexual selection, which deals not with the evolution of characteristics due to their survival advantage, but rather due to their mating advantage. And he identified two causal processes by which mating advantage could occur. One is intrasexual competition. And the logic was whatever qualities led to success in these same sex battles, those qualities get passed on in greater numbers. And so you see evolution, which is change over time, and increase in frequency of the characteristics associated with winning these, what Darwin called contest competition. And we know that the logic of that is more general now and involves things like, in our species competing for position and status hierarchies. But the second most relevant to your question about mate choice is preferential mate choice. That was the second causal pathway. And the logic there is that if members of one sex agree with one another about the qualities that are desired, then those of the opposite sex who possess the desired qualities or embody those desired qualities, they have a mating advantage. Those lacking desired qualities get banished, shunned, ignored, or in the modern environment become incels. The logic there is very simple but also very powerful. And that is that whatever qualities are desired, consensually desired, if there's some heritable basis to those, then those increase in frequency over time. And in the human case, these two causal processes of sexual selection are related to each other in that the preferences of, the mate preferences of one sex basically set the ground rules for competition in the opposite sex. So if, for example, hypothetically, women preferred to mate with men who were able and willing to devote resources to them, then that would create competition among men to claw their way and beat out other men in resource acquisition and then displaying that their willingness to commit that to a particular woman. So that's sort of a little bit of a theoretical backdrop. So you asked, well, what are the qualities that men and women desire? And maybe we'll start with long-term mating and then shift to short-term mating. The most large-scale study that's been done on this is a study that I did a while back of 37 different cultures, and it's now been replicated by other researchers. But basically what we found is three clusters of things. We found qualities that both men and women wanted in a long-term mate. We found some qualities that were sex differentiated, where women preferred them more than men or men preferred them more than women. And then we found some attributes that were highly variable across cultures in whether people found these as desirable or indispensable or irrelevant. So if you talk about universal desires, so things that men and women share, things like intelligence, kindness, mutual attraction and love, good health, dependability, emotional stability, although there's a bit of a sex difference there with women preferring it a bit more than men. So you go to anywhere in the world and these are qualities that people universally desire in long-term mates. Sex differences, so sex differences basically fell into two clusters. So women more than men prioritized good earning capacity, slightly older age and the qualities associated with resource acquisition. So these are things like a man's social status. Does he have drive? Is he ambitious?
Does he have a good long-term resource trajectory is one way that I like to phrase it because women often, they don't look at necessarily the resources that a guy possesses at this moment. But what is his trajectory? Women attend to the attention structure. So the attention structure is a key determinant of status. So there's people who are high in status or those to whom the most people pay the most attention. Hard work, ambition, does he have clear goals? Or is he in an existential crisis, not knowing what he's going to do with his life? Also, women use what's called in the literature, mate choice copying. So we've done studies where you just take a guy, photograph him alone versus take the same guy, put an attractive woman next to him or put two women next to him. And women judge exactly the same guy to be much more attractive if he's paired with women. From an evolutionary perspective, it's reasonable that women would prioritize these qualities because of the tremendous asymmetry in our reproductive biology, namely that fertilization occurs internally within women. Women bear the burdens of the nine month pregnancy, which is metabolically expensive as well as creating opportunity costs in terms of mobility and solving other tasks that people need to solve in the course of their lives. And so one way to phrase that is that the costs of making a bad mate choice are much heavier for women when it comes to sexual behavior, certainly, because it and the benefits correspondingly of making a wise mate choice are higher for women in the sexual context. But as I said, we have mutual mate choice in our species. And so what do men value more than women?