William Costello

Women are like, I'm not sacrificing my body for that.

We have new data come out that shows that relationships, being a parent,

Similar levels of happiness to not being a parent, greater levels of meaning for the parents, especially for women, but lower relationship satisfaction for the parents.

So it does take a toll on the relationship, but certainly on the woman's mate value thereafter, having the kids, the toll it takes on her beauty.

So you can kind of see why women, if there's all these benefits they can translate their beauty, which is their status, into, they'd be reluctant to sacrifice all that.

Yeah, because it's a misconception about evolutionary psychology that we have these fitness optimizing mechanisms.

We're adaptation executioners.

So it's just that behavior is that...

over evolutionary time would have resulted in more offspring are passed on.

So women still have the desire to have sex for the most part.

People don't come into the world with, oh, I really want to increase my reproductive success.

I want to have offspring.

But they do want to be seen as a high mate value to others, have sexual urges.

And over time, those things would have resulted in reproductive success.

So now it's a bit of a mismatch.

Yeah.

You didn't have reliable contraception.

Yeah.

It's a hugely evolutionary novel technology that's really just thrown the whole thing up in the air.

Well, given that there's fewer and fewer cross-sex friendships, I think it should be celebrated that this is an avenue towards relationship formation.