Dr. David Buss

And in the human case, these two causal processes of sexual selection are related to each other in that 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, you know, 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 theoretical backdrop there.

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.