William Costello

It still tends to be the preference, but they're beginning to mate down, so to speak.

But this comes with a whole host of other problems.

So in those mateships where women are beginning to mate down,

We see increased infidelity for both sexes, increased use of insomnia, anxiety, and depression medication among both sexes.

You see a massive prevalence of intimate partner violence.

There was a huge study done on 27 EU countries with over 21,000 EU women, and it showed that the woman earning more or being higher educated than her partner was a massive risk factor for all types of intimate partner violence.

Jesus.

which is kind of a really dark finding, but it makes sense from an evolutionary point of view, because in evolutionary psychology, we have something called mate retention strategies, and you have two strategies to mate retain, to retain your mate.

You have the benefit provisioning strategy, which means you can provision your partner with so many benefits that she doesn't want to leave.

She's happy to stay.

She gets a lot of benefits from you.

Whereas if you don't have a lot of benefits to provide, you choose the cost infliction mate retention strategy.

And that's the type of inflicting costs on your partner to lower her self-esteem so she doesn't feel like she can leave you.

And in the most extreme circumstances, that even includes intimate partner violence.

So you might recognize that in the kind of abusive language of abusive men who might say, who would ever have you except me?

You're lucky to have me.

No one will ever have you.

And you try and lower your partner's self-esteem or their sense of their own mate value so they don't leave you for someone else.

And that makes sense.

If you think about a man who's suddenly threatened that his wife is earning more than him or has begun to earn more than him or is higher educated, she's spending her time around other high status men, more high status than you.