The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy Is as Necessary as Love and Sex (27 page)

When evaluating what qualities women want in a one-night stand
outside of their regular relationship, women topped out in requiring the
following attributes (using a 1–9 scale): sexy (8.7), highly desirable to the
opposite sex (8.2), desires sex with you a lot (8.2), sensuous (8.2),
physically attractive (8.6), good looking (8.3), sought after by members of the
opposite sex (8.3), thinks you are sexy (8.3), and greatly desires you (8.3).
Contrary to what women want in a regular partner, women seeking brief flings
appear to go for the “studly” charmers who have what it takes to bed a variety
of women. These are precisely the qualities that would give their sons a mating
advantage in the next generation.

These same qualities shine through when women express the
minimum percentile they require for various types of relationships. The
contrast between the minimums women express for regular mates and for one-night
stands is especially striking because women relax their standards for many
qualities when seeking brief encounters. For degree of education, for example,
women required husbands to be in the 61st percentile, but for one-night stands
they required only the 47th percentile. In sharp contrast, women became more
exacting in a one-night stand on precisely the qualities one would expect
according to the theory of sexy sons. Whereas they wanted their husband to be
in the 58th percentile on sexiness, they wanted their brief flings to be in the
76th percentile. On physical attractiveness, they required husbands to be only
in the 54th percentile, but demanded the 77th percentile for one-night stands.
In brief encounters, it seems, women demand sexy partners who are highly
desirable to other women, perhaps because their sons stand a greater chance of
being sexy themselves. Women, of course, do not think these thoughts; there is
no conscious calculus of genetic effects. They just find some men sexy and
that’s all they need to produce sons who will be sexually successful.

Imagine that you are on a camping trip. You wake up in the
morning with an empty stomach and a need to urinate. As you go about your
business, the sun beats down on your head and thirst parches your throat, and
you quickly come to appreciate the nearby stream with its cold, clean water.
But it’s time to head off for the day. You pack your gear and look around. Your
growling stomach signals the need to eat. Your crying baby is hungry. You want
to venture out, but there are possible dangers—wild animals, snakes, and
perhaps hostile humans. Now imagine that this camping trip lasts not a few days
or weeks, but your entire lifetime. This is what our ancestors faced, roaming
the savannas of Africa.

In our ancestors’ daily struggle to survive, they obtained food
through their own labors—gathering or hunting—or else garnered it from the
labors of others. Cold winters battered precarious shelters. Deep freezes
rendered fruit and game scarce. Hungry children cried at night, signaling the
extra mouths that needed feeding. Could a woman always have relied on only one
man? What if he left her to be with another woman? What if he became sick or
injured, hampering his ability to hunt? And what would she do when her husband
left for three or five days on an extended hunt, leaving her vulnerable to
possible exploitation at the hands of other men? One solution to all these
problems is to take out mate insurance—cultivate an affair partner as a backup
mate.

People normally purchase insurance as a hedge against
unpredictable disasters: car insurance in case of an accident, house insurance
in case of a fire or flood, and disability insurance in case of unexpected
personal injury. Mate insurance works in an analogous manner. Cultivating a
backup mate provides security in the event that a regular mate gets injured or
killed, infected with some disease, loses status within the group, fails to
provide food, becomes abusive, mistreats the children, or defects from the
relationship. The monthly premiums women pay for mate insurance are not
financial; they are sexual.

The backup mate can serve many functions when the regular mate
is not around. He can defend against predators, fend off aggressive men who
might otherwise exploit the absence of a regular mate, or provide food during a
shortage. As the biologist Robert Smith notes, “Females could likewise venture
sex on a good prospect against the possibility of some future return in
material resources . . . a hedge against the possibility that a principle mate
will be unable or unwilling to supply sufficient resources.”

According to the mate insurance hypothesis, women should select
affair partners in part based on their ability and willingness to provide
resources and protection. To explore what women want, Heidi Greiling and I
asked a large sample to rate the desirability or undesirability of 139
characteristics in a potential affair partner. The rating scale ranged from 1
(highly
undesirable in an affair partner
) to 5
(neutral
) to 9
(highly
desirable in an affair partner
)
.
Any characteristics rated 7 or higher are considered very desirable.

The protection factor permeated women’s preferences. Women
expressed a desire for affair partners who were athletic (7.7), protective of
her (9.0), strong (7.8), muscular (7.8), and physically fit (8.2). All these
qualities are signs of a man’s ability and willingness to protect a woman and
her existing children. In our in-depth interviews with women about what they
wanted in an affair partner, most vehemently denied that they were looking for
someone with the physique of an Arnold Schwarzenegger or a Sylvester Stallone.
They found those bodies overblown and worried that muscle-bound men were
overconcerned with their physical appearance. But they did want a man who could
handle himself physically with other men—a man in good shape, fit, strong,
athletic, well toned, and willing to step in when the situation called for it.

Although most systems of morality condemn women who have
affairs, these relationships apparently served an extremely important function
for our ancestral mothers, providing mate insurance in the event that they
needed protection from abuse or if something unfortunate befell their regular
mates.

The famous anthropologist Margaret Mead once was asked why she
had such a long history of failed marriages. She replied: “I have been married
three times, and not one of them was a failure.” A woman I interviewed told me
that relationships with men are like tires; some get better mileage than
others, but eventually they all wear out. These two anecdotes, of course, do
not add up to scientific evidence. But the fact is that a host of circumstances
could cause a woman to want to “trade up” in the mating market, and affairs can
be used to evaluate potential husbands.

According to Helen Fisher, several ancestral conditions set the
stage for the evolution of women’s psychology of trading up. First, a woman’s
partner may decline in mate value due to injury or disease. Second, a woman’s
own value may have increased over time as she became more proficient at
gathering, extended her political alliances, or proved to be especially fecund.
Third, in ancestral times, contact with a new tribe may have increased exposure
to more desirable potential partners.

There are several other circumstances that might have caused a
woman to trade up. Her regular mate might have become emotionally or physically
abusive, inflicting costs that were not apparent when she selected him. One
modern woman described her affair in these terms, implicitly implicating her
abusive husband as a reason: “Yes, I’m not as afraid to say what I want to say.
I don’t think I kowtow to my husband as much as I used to, I don’t let him hurt
my feelings as easily as I used to ’cause I silently think that someone else
loves me. And if this man, my husband, is getting mad and raging at me,
ridiculing me, then I don’t bow and paw as much as I used to.”

Some husbands become “slackers” over time, failing to provide
resources that they formerly provided. A man could start affairs with other
women, diverting a portion of his resources to his affair partners and their
children. He could prove infertile, rendering the relationship reproductively
barren. For all these reasons, selection may have fashioned a female sexual
psychology of mate switching.

To test the trading-up hypothesis, Heidi Greiling and I examined
the desires women express for affair partners, and contrasted them with desires
women express for one-night-stand partners and long-term mates. If an important
function of affairs is to evaluate the affair partner as a potential long-term
mate, then a woman’s desires for an affair partner should be similar to what
she wants in a spouse, but different from those expressed for a one-night-stand
partner. Women in our study supported this idea. In both an affair partner and a
husband, women wanted men who were above the 70th percentile on the following
qualities: dependable, affectionate, successful, emotionally stable, easygoing,
intelligent, mature, faithful, honest, open-minded, and unselfish. In sharp
contrast, women’s minimum thresholds for nearly all of these qualities in a
one-night-stand partner dipped below the 50th percentile.

Our studies of women’s perceptions of the benefits of affairs
and the circumstances that impel them also supported the trading up function.
One woman told us that her affair made it easier to break up with her husband.
Another revealed that her affair made her realize that she could find someone
more compatible with her than her husband. A third said that she had married
young, and the affair made her realize that she did not have to settle for a
man who failed to meet her standards.

Mate switching is the result of two related conditions: being
stuck with a regular mate who fails to bring in economic resources, thus
violating her desire for provisioning; and meeting someone who can better
provide those resources. Each woman in our study evaluated three crucial
circumstances as predisposing her to have an affair: When her current partner
can’t hold down a job, when she meets someone who has better financial
prospects than her current partner and who seems interested in her, and when
she meets someone who is more successful than her current partner.

This does not necessarily imply that a woman always marries her
affair partner. Sometimes she does, sometimes she doesn’t. But even when she
doesn’t, the affair typically gives her enough confidence in her own
desirability to catalyze a break. The affair, by boosting a woman’s
self-esteem, makes her more certain that she can trade up to someone better. Here
is what one woman reported:

“Yes, it built up my confidence and ego seeing that other men
were attracted to me, things that I really didn’t know before. It’s given me a
whole new way of looking at myself. It changed my whole way of dress, just my
whole appearance. I felt attractive again. I hadn’t felt that way in years,
really. It made me very, very confident.”

The most common domain of self-esteem enhancement pertains to
the woman’s body and sexuality—qualities critical to her value on the mating
market for trading up. One woman reported these effects of her affair: “I think
I’m more sure of myself and I don’t think I have to prove any kind of sexiness
like I used to.” After interviewing 50 women who were having affairs, Lynn
Atwater concluded that “most of the change in self-confidence was rooted in a
sense of being more physically appealing because they knew other men were
interested in them.” Since physical attractiveness is critical to a woman’s
mate value, an affair can elevate a woman’s self-appraisal of her physical
desirability, giving her the confidence to leave her current partner in the
quest for trading up to someone better.

Not all boosts in self-confidence as a result of affairs were
linked with sexuality and appearance. One woman reported: “I have more
self-confidence, a feeling of independence and self-reliance that I didn’t have
before . . . an understanding that I have resources and abilities too to meet
those needs if I have to, and that I could call on them again if I need to.”

Our more systematic studies of women’s perceptions of the
benefits of affairs supported the case-report evidence. Greiling and I found
that women who had affairs judged the effects on self-esteem to be among the
most beneficial consequences of affairs. On a 5-point scale, women judged the
following consequences of affairs to be among the most beneficial: “Affair
partner made me feel better about myself than any man had done” (3.87); “I felt
good about myself because my affair partner respected me” (3.68); “Because my
affair partner was interested in the details of my life, I felt good about
myself when I was with him” (3.55); and “Because my affair partner was
emotionally sensitive to me, my self-esteem increased” (3.43). The
mate-switching benefit of affairs is supported even more directly in the
following item, which also ranked among the most beneficial consequences of
women’s affairs: “I was able to make better decisions about long-term partners
because I felt good about myself ” (3.23).

Women see “being made to feel beautiful” as an extremely
important benefit of affairs, especially after a husband’s long-term boredom
has set in. Finding a fresh partner who appreciates one’s assets can give new
meaning to life. And let’s face it—the hundredth time a husband tells you that
you are beautiful, usually out of habit, does not have the same toniclike
effect as the first few times from a fresh lover. The boost in self-esteem is
undoubtedly enhanced when the affair partner profoundly values the woman in
ways that are not just sexual. Women judged the items “My sexual partner made
me feel important” and “My sexual partner made me feel intelligent,” for
example, to be among the most beneficial aspects of affairs.