Short Cuts: Episode I 
Human Mate Selection Is a Many-Splendored Thing
David Buss has a grand unified theory about the evolution of desire. His research has identified 115 love acts, 147 things you can do to upset or annoy the opposite sex, and 237 reasons to copulate. But can that help me find romance?
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By the end of the lecture, though, the real mystery was human monogamy. Some form of marriage exists in every known culture, yet how strange it all starts to seem when you step back and contemplate the utter fallibility of intimate relationships. How could any process of selection or acculturation or chance have contrived such a precarious norm, something so uneven and flawed and fragile and contingent? How did we get this way? To what end? And how can an institution so ubiquitous seem so unnatural, requiring the force of custom and law and $50,000 weddings to prop it up? In the abstract, what Buss would call “long-term mating” is simply bewildering.
And yet you do feel the lack of it, sometimes more, sometimes less, sometimes surging up at odd moments, like when you are traveling home from Philadelphia with an expert on human mating and all of a sudden remember, viscerally, how it is to walk through the airport with someone.
I was beginning to get a little paranoid. Was this it? The DNA stops here? I paced around the house, resenting not men or fate but the sheer waiting, the not knowing. I was left with questions I hated: If no family was forthcoming, where did that leave me? Who would I be? I’d always consoled myself for never having been a girlie girl, a babe in a bikini, a long-lustrous-haired flirt, with the thought that I might be the other thing, a mother—a tall, goofy one with applesauce on her sleeve, a regular embarrassment to her children, who in my imagination are always groaning, hands over their faces. Would I forge ahead with test tubes, third-world orphans? I was drawing a blank. Oh, for Chrissakes, I said to Dr. N. Here I thought I was so advanced and yet basically all I can conceive of is whore, Madonna, none of the above. How’s that for ingrained psychology?
There was a spell before and after the East Coast trip when it seemed as if Buss would send me something daily, another paper he’d written or a book chapter or an excerpt from the new edition of the evolutionary psychology textbook he’d authored. He is a publication machine, an omnivorous researcher, and a tireless cataloger of behaviors (he has identified 19 tactics of mate retention, 115 love acts, and 147 things you can do to upset or annoy the opposite sex). Although I had started to suspect that he didn’t have the type of information I was looking for—I needed a fortune-teller for that—I still perked up at obliquely suggestive terminology like “mating intelligence.” Buss had written a foreword to an entire volume on that subject, and I read it straightaway, though I could guess what I was in for—more adaptive strategies. Sure enough. In a table, under “Mate Preference Adaptations,” were listed modifications a person might make to rise to the challenges of being single: “Calibrate mate preferences to one’s current mate value,” the list started off. According to Buss, this concept of “mate value” plays a major role in choosing a partner: In youth we assess our own value, largely through trial and error, and then seek someone of comparable worth—if you are a 7, in this view, you date a 9 or a 10 at your peril, infidelity and breakups being more common under those circumstances. I wanted to ask Buss what my mate value was, but I was too self-conscious. Besides, it wouldn’t have done me much good; when it comes to men, I don’t know how to tell a 5 from a 6 from a 7.
Back in Austin, Buss and I agreed that we would try once again to rendezvous for a drink. We met at an upscale Mexican restaurant, in a foyer dense with tropical fauna and noisy with drinkers’ raised voices. I found him behind some palm fronds and came clean about my newest confusion. If our mate preferences had evolved, I asked him, what might they have evolved from? Some orgiastic Stone Age frenzy, men lusting after senior citizens, women pursuing unreliable drifters?
Not so, he said: “If you took a snapshot of half a million years ago, no, it’s not the case that people were mating with, you know, plants.”
The waitress appeared, and we ordered some calamari. A little while later, though I hadn’t thrown anything too outlandish at him, Buss suddenly asked me, with a hint of exasperation, whether I believed there were any evolved sex differences in the brain at all. Sure, I said. Most men are attracted to women, most women are attracted to men.
“What about the other sex differences? Like sex differences in mate preferences for youth and appearance?”
“That I buy, but I’m not as sure about women and resources.”
“So you find some hypotheses about evolved sex differences more plausible than others.”
“Right.”
“Okay.”
He was growing impatient, I could tell. But I still had doubts about his model—about the hundreds of mechanisms and the storied Stone Age world that gave rise to them. More than that, I was turning over, in my own insufficiently evolved mind, a reservation that I couldn’t articulate. I hemmed and hawed and misspoke; the waitress brought a plate of large, overly battered calamari rings; we tried them and agreed they were lousy; and in fact, what it all had started to seem like was a bad date.
It was when Buss sent me a paper he’d written arguing that love is itself a useful mechanism that I drew the line. He characterized love as “an evolved solution to the problem of commitment.” Your beloved might be tempted to stray if someone with a better sense of humor or more resources comes along, yet “if your partner is blinded by an uncontrollable love that cannot be helped and cannot be chosen, a love for only you and no other, then commitment will not waver when you are in sickness rather than in health, when you are poorer rather than richer.” In other words, while our mating mechanisms are doing their work, while we’re implementing our (possibly unconscious) strategies and calibrating our preferences, sucking our fingers and flashing our wallets and singing our serenades, in comes love to make it all stick.
Would that it were so. If only human mating really could be reduced to evolutionarily attuned mechanisms at work, preference mechanisms picking out persons, and love mechanisms sealing the deal. But since all too often we fall for the wrong people and squander our fertile years, might love be counterproductive—and counter-reproductive? I’d dated perfectly intelligent, reliable, commitment-capable men with excellent hygiene and earnings potential; and then I’d gone and fallen in love with the other sort, and not just once. Even if I was suffering from some form of mating retardation, it’s not as if I was the only one.
God knows I’m no expert, but it seems to me romantic love could just as easily be the star-crossed product of our general capacity for emotional attachment and our tendency to idealize. It’s easy to go parsing the mind into mechanisms whose operations can be quantified like the choices of peahens. But what is a preference? To express one, in the abstract, is to picture an ideal, to draw on our evolved capacity to imagine things not present, whether big boobs or unicorns. To choose among ideals is distinct from choosing among actual people, because ideals—I’ve learned this much—are not our mates. And they don’t necessarily point us in the right direction. Call me cynical. But the way we go about trying to attain love, delaying reproduction and frittering away resources—it can’t be good for the species.
I didn’t spill my half-baked theory of love to Buss, since I knew he wouldn’t be too impressed. But I did let it slip, in an e-mail, that I was an unsuccessful mater, and kind and action-oriented as he is, he immediately proposed we have lunch to address the problem. Because I knew his work, I was somewhat concerned about what he might suggest. Breast implants? Botox? A painfully honest assessment of my mate value? But there was none of that.
His advice, first and foremost, was that I just needed to meet more people.
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