“PROFESSIONAL male, mid-40s, residing in Kensington, seeks slim attractive Venus, mid-to-late ’20s, for weekend company” – “Gorgeous, fun-loving woman, 25, seeks caring, nonsmoking, university-educated male companion, 30 to 35, with good sense of humour.”
Lonely Hearts columns provide us with a unique glimpse into the bargaining processes that underpin our choice of mate, a glimpse of what characteristics people seek in a partner and those they believe a prospective mate might be looking for in them. They amount to the opening bids in what in some cases will turn into a long chain of negotiation ending with some form of long-term relationship or marriage.
Most of us take the unwritten rules of this contractual bidding for granted. We accept that younger women find it easier to attract eligible men. We accept, too, that elderly male millionaires are more likely to marry 20-year-old models than are their poorer contemporaries. But what are the origins of these preferences and to what extent do they influence our search for partners?
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First the preferences. Psychologists Doug Kenrick and Richard Keefe of Arizona State University at Tempe have examined more than 1000 Lonely Hearts advertisements from the US, Holland and India. Their findings confirm what most of us might already suspect. As male lonely hearts age they seek women who are increasingly younger than they are; indeed, they tend to opt consistently for young women who are at the peak of fertility (in their late-20s). Female lonely hearts, by contrast, tend to prefer men who are about five years older than themselves, with the age gap tending to diminish as they get older.
But age is only one criterion. What do the columns reveal about looks and money? To find out, David Waynforth, a researcher now at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, and I, analysed nearly 900 ads in four American newspapers (see Graphs). Male advertisers were more likely than females to seek a youthful mate – 42 per cent versus 25 per cent – or a physically attractive one – 44 per cent versus 22 per cent. No surprises there, perhaps. But male advertisers were also more coy about their own looks. We found that while 50 per cent of female lonely hearts used terms such as “curvaceous”, “pretty”, or “gorgeous”, only 34 per cent of the males used comparable terms (“handsome”, “hunk” or “athletic”).FIG-mg19644101.jpg
It was a different story with money and status. Here it was the female lonely hearts who made most demands. When specifying their requirements in a mate, they were four times more likely than males to use terms like “college-educated”, “homeowner”, and “professional”. Male lonely hearts, on the other hand, were keener than women to advertise such attributes. The cues can be quite subtle. In London, men will declare their postal area if it is up-market (Kensington or Hampstead), but never if it is downmarket (Hackney or the Isle of Dogs).
Of course, no two cultures are the same, and the magnitude of these differences between the sexes is bound to vary from place to place. What surprised us, however, is how robust the general trends are. For example, when Sarah McGuinness and I studied 600 ads placed in two London magazines, we found trends similar to those seen in the American ads. Sixty-eight per cent of women advertisers offered cues of physical attractiveness, compared to only 51 per cent of men.
There is a consistency, too, with findings from other types of research (see “The mating game”). One well-known scholar of the human “mating game” is David Buss, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. In 1989, he analysed questionnaires about marital preferences completed by 10 047 people in 37 different countries ranging from Australia to Zambia and from China to the US. Irrespective of culture, women tended to be more “choosy” than men, evaluating prospective partners on a much broader range of social and personality criteria. Women also consistently ranked the status and earning potential of a prospective mate higher than men did, while men rated youth and physical appearance more highly.
The lonely hearts trends also fit with what might be expected from evolutionary considerations. In the Darwinian world, each individual is (unconsciously) trying to maximise his or her contribution to the species’ gene pool by producing as many great-great-grandchildren as possible. But the biological processes of reproduction have very different implications for male and female behaviour.
Among mammals the long drawn-out processes of internal gestation and, later, lactation mean that males cannot contribute much in any direct sense to the business of reproduction once conception has taken place. Therefore males who want to maximise their reproductive success have only one option: to fertilise as many eggs as possible. That means seeking a young, fertile partner with many child-bearing years ahead of her, or marrying as many women as possible at the same time.
Females, on the other hand, are better placed to influence the infant’s development directly. That means they are more likely to emphasise the business of rearing and look for mates with helpful resources – older men with established incomes and status. But this is a peculiarity of the fact that we are mammals. If human reproductive biology were more like that of birds or fishes, the story would be very different.
The reason men place such a high premium on physical attractiveness in women? Once again, says biology, it is all to do with the quest for physical cues linked to age, health and, ultimately, fertility – cues that in the conventional world of our evolutionary past were difficult to fake.
Take the case of the hour-glass figure. Common experience suggests that men (by and large) prefer women with low waist-to-hip ratios, and research bears this out. Psychologist Devendra Singh, of the University of Texas, Austin, asked 195 men aged 18 to 85 to rate drawings of women of different shapes and sizes from least to most attractive. The men preferred women of average weight to thin or fat women, but rated those with low waist-to-hip ratios the most attractive of all. Ratios of around 0.70 scored especially highly (healthy women in their twenties typically have waist-to-hip ratios of 0.67 to 0.80). Significantly, perhaps, this turned out to be exactly the shape of centrefold pin-ups from Playboy magazine over the past 30 years.
Wasp waists
The preference is unlikely to be an accident of fashion. Women with low waist-to-hip ratios are on average more fertile than women with higher ratios. They enter puberty earlier and, according to studies of married women, conceive more easily. Although the precise reasons are not yet known, this almost certainly relates to the “Frisch Effect”, first identified by American reproductive biologist Rose Frisch more than a decade ago: women only ovulate when their ratio of fat to total body mass reaches a certain level. The enlarged hips and thighs that give women their hour-glass shape are largely due to natural fat deposits in these areas. It seems that the wasp-waists and bustles of the Victorian period may have been attempts at advertising cues of fertility.
Similarly, our ideas about what characteristics go to make a pretty face may also be rooted in the different reproductive strategies of the two sexes. Some of the latest, and most direct, evidence has come from David Perrett, a neuropsychologist at the University of St Andrews, Fife, and his colleagues. Using composite pictures built up from “preferred” faces, the researchers were able to piece together the features that people find most attractive.
In men, women seem to find especially attractive features that indicate sexual maturity such as a strong jaw line and prominent chin as well as traits such as large eyes and a small nose. In women, it is large pupils and widely spaced eyes, high cheekbones, small chin and upper lip, and generous mouth that most men find attractive. Many of these female traits are characteristic of children and could act as signals of higher fertility. Men are also attracted by soft glossy hair and by smooth shiny skin – the very features the cosmetics industry have latched on to. Both are the product of high oestrogen levels and are therefore difficult-to-mimic cues of youth (and hence fertility).
What’s more, people from different cultures and races tend to agree on what constitutes beauty. Michael Cunningham, a psychologist at the University of Louisville, Kentucky, asked people from different racial backgrounds to rate faces of different ethnic origin for attractiveness. There was striking cross-cultural agreement over what features constitute a pretty face. Essentially, they are childlike qualities in women and signs of maturity in men. Beauty may not be in the eye of the beholder after all.
Cold pragmatism
Yet most of us cannot aspire to the clear-eyed coquettishness of a Winola Ryder or the rugged handsomeness of a Richard Gere. Worse still, we are only at the “right” age for a brief period during a lifetime. So how should ordinary mortals find our mates? Here evolutionary theory points the same way as cold pragmatism: adjust your strategy to make the best of what may otherwise be a bad job. In other words, lower your expectations and settle for less.
This is exactly what happens in the Lonely Hearts columns. In our study of American ads, Waynforth and I found that people adjust their bids in the light of their circumstances. Older women (who are less fertile) were less demanding in the traits they asked for in prospective mates than younger women. Similarly, when matched for age, women who considered themselves physically attractive were more demanding than those who made no mention of appearance. If you think you have a strong bidding hand, you play the market for all it’s worth.
The men in our Lonely Hearts study also modified their bids – not according to their looks but in the light of whether or not they offered cues of wealth. When matched for age, men who advertised cues of wealth and status were significantly more demanding of prospective partners than those who did not. Such men, for example, were less likely to tolerate children from a previous relationship. And unlike their female counterparts, male lonely hearts became more demanding of prospective mates as they aged, reflecting the growing strength of their hand in the poker game. The crunch point, however, came in middle age. Once past the mid-5Os, male advertisers lowered their demands, perhaps realising that mortality was making them an increasingly risky bet.
This kind of sensitivity to circumstances may even operate in relatively casual encounters between the sexes. James Pennebaker, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, asked (sober) men and women in bars to rate the other customers for attractiveness on a scale of 1 to 10. As closing time drew nearer, and hence the likelihood of heading home alone increased, so people began to rate members of the opposite sex as increasingly more attractive. On average, members of the opposite sex were judged to be about 20 per cent more attractive at midnight than they were at 9 pm. It seems that they were progressively lowering their standards with respect to sexual partners as the prospect of failure loomed large. Like Jane Austen’s eligible spinsters, they were chickening out of the competition for the most desirable mates when they felt that time was no longer on their side.
Children are a particular disadvantage to those seeking a new relationship later in life. A study in Germany by Eckart Voland, a historical demographer at the University of Giessen, Germany, found that young peasant widows of the 18th and 19th centuries had a 17 per cent higher chance of remarrying if the child of their first marriage had died. We found a loosely analogous trend in our lonely hearts sample from the US. Women who stated that they had young children from a previous relationship set their sights significantly lower than those who did not: when matched for age, women without dependents asked for almost twice as many traits in a prospective partner as women who had dependent children.
What happens when reproduction is no longer an issue? Theories suggest that gay people advertising in lonely hearts ought to moderate their demands in response to their circumstances? To find out, Waynforth and I examined ads in an American gay newspaper and compared them with those in straight newspapers. We found that heterosexual women were three times more likely to seek resources and status than lesbians, while gay men offered resources only about half as often as heterosexual men. Similarly, heterosexual women offered cues of physical attractiveness four times as often as lesbians did, while gay men sought these cues about half as often as heterosexual men. Lift the constraint of reproduction, it seems, and priorities change.
Most people are quite sensitive to the bargaining power they hold in the mating market place. In the early 1980s,: psychologist Steve Duck, then at the University of Lancaster, ran a telling experiment in which male subjects were asked to complete a questionnaire for some fictitious research project. Present in the room at the same time was a young woman ostensibly engaged in the same task; in fact, she was a stooge who adopted different styles of dress and behaviour with different subjects. Duck found that the men’s willingness to strike up an acquaintance with the stooge depended on the perceived similarities in their respective social styles.
This suggests a strong role for realism in the mating market place: no point investing resources trying to date someone too far above you in the social scale. And that realism in turn may partly explain why like tends to settle for like, their aspirations notwithstanding. Except in societies where arranged marriages are common, people are statistically more likely to marry people who are similar to themselves not just in social and culturaI background, but also in physical appearance. Among the more bizarre correlations between married couples, for example, is the relative length of the joints of the fingers.
Strengthening this tendency is the long process of social learning during adolescence, which cues us in to the kinds of individuals with whom we are most likely to achieve social success.
Adolescent experiences may influence mate choice in other ways, too. This sensitivity to experience may explain one striking feature of our American lonely hearts sample namely the frequency with which women advertisers sought traits linked to pair bonding and the family environment – traits signalled by words like “loving”, “warm”, “GSOH” (good sense of humour), “family-minded”, “gentle”, “dependable”. Some 45 per cent of the women in our American sample desired at least one of these traits in a prospective mate, compared to only 22 per cent of men. Yet men did not advertise these traits any more often than women did.
One interpretation is that this reflects a cultural lag in the aspirations of the two sexes. It is quite clear that in traditional societies all over the world, wealth is the single most important factor influencing a woman’s ability to rear offspring successfully. As a result, women place a very high premium on wealth (or at least future potential) in their husbands. But the industrial revolution of the last century has had an important impact on women’s ability to rear offspring in the industrialised West, in two crucial respects.
First, dramatically improved medical technology has reduced childhood mortality to very low levels compared to what it was, and indeed still is, in pre-industrial societies. Secondly, the expanding economies of the industrialised countries have meant that wealth differentials are much less important in determining what you can afford to invest in child rearing. In addition, women are now more able to earn their own way and are no longer so dependent on their menfolk to provide them with the resources they need during the arduous and costly business of childcare.
Outdated machismo
With wealth per se no longer so important for women, the other (principally social) aspects of the rearing environment will have a much bigger impact on the success with which a woman rears her children. ence the 45 per cent of female lonely hearts who ask for “caring, sharing” partners. But if women’s priorities in the West have changed, the message from the lonely hearts data is that men have not yet realised this. Women might be seeking caring, sharing partners but men are still pushing the age old traits of manliness and wealth for all they are worth.
Advertising is, of course, a shady business, and the business of mate searching is no different. Indeed, one of the commonest complaints made by people responding to Lonely Hearts advertisements is that the advertiser turned out to be nothing like the description in the ad. I suspect that most people actually have quite a realistic appreciation of their own worth in the mating marketplace and ask for traits in a partner that are a much better match to their real character than their descriptions of themselves (which tend to be overblown in order to keep their options as wide as possible).
So, if you’re thinking of dipping into the Lonely Hearts columns this Valentine’s Day, you might be advised to ignore what advertisers say about themselves and concentrate on what they ask for in a partner. It is probably a much better estimate of what they are really like. Otherwise, it’s a game of poker.
The mating game
IN traditional societies, men seek women who are young and fertile, while women seek men with prospects of status and wealth. But when economic circumstances change, so too do the relative demands of the sexes.
Consider the marriage patterns of 18th and 19th century German peasants. Eckart Voland, a historical demographer at the University of Giessen in Germany, examined the parish registers of the Krummhorn region in northwest Germany. When matched for age, the wealthier landed peasant farmers married significantly younger brides than landless day labourers did. In addition, it was clear that the women from the lower socioeconomic classes were trying to hold out as long as possible for the opportunity to marry up the social scale.
The wives of men higher in the social scale produced up to a third more surviving offspring, mainly as a result of higher rates of infant survival rather than higher birth rates. So the benefits of hypergamy (marrying up the social scale) were enormous. Not every woman could expect to succeed, however. Eventually women of low status would be forced to cut their losses and make the best of a bad job within their own social circle.
Economic change also encourages flexibility. Take the case of the Kipsigis, agro-pastoralists from western Kenya. Monique Borgerhoff Mulder of the University of California at Davis interviewed Kipsigis women to monitor trends in bride price payments between 1920 and the present. In the past, Kipsigis men would pay much higher prices for younger women, especially if they were on the plump – but not fat – side. Youth and plumpness both being signs of high fertility, the higher prices would reflect an expectation that the marriage would produce more offspring.
In contrast, Kipsigis women preferred men whose families could offer them larger land-holdings. Kipsigis wives are given their own plots from their husband’s land-holding, with the number of surviving children that a woman can raise over her lifetime increasing with the size of the plot.
During the 1980s, however, Kipsigis bride prices plummeted. The local value of labour, and hence of large families, had declined to the extent that young, fertile brides were no longer so highly sought after.
