Dr. David Buss

Yeah, well, I mean, I can offer some sort of informed speculation about it.

You know, a secure attachment style, if both partners have a secure attachment style, that's conducive to a long-term mateship.

Avoidant attachment styles, avoidant people tend to have more difficulty with intimacy and also higher probability of infidelity.

And anxious attachment style, I don't know, can create problems of its own, you know, in the overly clingy, dependent, you know, absorbing what I call high relationship load.

What is the baggage that someone brings to the relationship?

A couple of things.

So one is that I think people are generally pretty good at self-assessing mate value.

And even self-esteem has been hypothesized to be one internal monitoring device that tracks mate value.

So when we get a promotion at work or we get a rise in status, we feel an elevated sense of self-esteem.

We get fired.

We get rejected.

We get ostracized.

Our self-esteem plummets.

So our self-evaluation, I think, does track mate value to some extent.

There are people who overestimate their mate value.

People high on narcissism in particular.

And some people underestimate their mate value.

Another important element is that there's

Consensual mate value, so that is, if you asked a group of 100 people, you know, there's a fair amount of consensus that this person's an eight, that person's a six.

But there are also individual differences in mate value.