The BBD .. I've Been Saying This For Years & I'm No Scientist
Affairs are women’s natural backup plan, says scientists
I call it the BBD ..
Bigger
Better
Deal
Often the ladies will have one of these lined up before giving you the elbow.
Humans — and women in particular — have been programmed by evolution to pursue affairs in case they decide to leave their partners, scientists have suggested.
New research challenges the widespread assumption that humans are meant to be monogamous and that breakups are a sign of failure.
Instead, the “mate-switching hypothesis” suggests that humans have evolved to constantly test their own relationships and check for better long-term options.
The scientists believe it applies particularly to childless women whose choice of partner can have a huge impact on their subsequent ability to raise children.
“Lifelong monogamy does not characterise the primary mating pattern of humans,” said David Buss, Cari Goetz and colleagues, in a research paper. “Breaking up with one partner and remating with another — mate switching — may more accurately characterise the common, perhaps the primary, mating strategy of humans.”
New research challenges the widespread assumption that humans are meant to be monogamous and that breakups are a sign of failure.
Instead, the “mate-switching hypothesis” suggests that humans have evolved to constantly test their own relationships and check for better long-term options.
The scientists believe it applies particularly to childless women whose choice of partner can have a huge impact on their subsequent ability to raise children.
“Lifelong monogamy does not characterise the primary mating pattern of humans,” said David Buss, Cari Goetz and colleagues, in a research paper. “Breaking up with one partner and remating with another — mate switching — may more accurately characterise the common, perhaps the primary, mating strategy of humans.”
For early humans, when disease and accidents meant few lived beyond the age of 30, a willingness to experiment may have been key to survival.
It meant people would pick partners with the best chances of long-term survival, but have someone else in reserve in case that partner died.
“Although break-ups are often moralised as ‘failures’, we propose that selection has sculpted a complex psychology designed to jettison current mates and acquire new ones in circumstances when mate switching would have been evolutionarily advantageous,” the researchers argue.
Their paper cites the actress Jennifer Love Hewitt, whose character in the television series The Client List said: “Husbands are like pancakes: there’s no shame in throwing the first one out.” Their view of relationships is also reminiscent of the tangled affairs in the 2004 film Closer, starring Natalie Portman, Clive Owen, Jude Law and Julia Roberts.
Natalie Portman and Clive Owen in the 2004 film Closer, which focused on extremely tangled romantic relationships
Such ideas are, however, controversial among those researching the evolution of human behaviour.
Until now the main explanation for the evolution of female infidelity was the “good genes” theory, which argues that women are attracted to less dominant men as long-term partners because they are more likely to stick around.
Many women will, however, covertly seek more masculine “affair partners” — especially in their fertile period. In evolutionary terms they get the“fittest” genes for their baby from the affair partner and then have the child cared for by a reliable long-term partner.
Such behaviour may sound devious, but women’s real behaviour is even more subtle, according to Buss, professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Texas, and Goetz, assistant professor of psychology at California State University, San Bernardino, whose ideas stem from their combined research and a detailed review of the latest science.
They suggest that women keep track of their partner’s “mate value”, comparing it with that of other single men. They also assess “relationship load” — the costs imposed by partners who behave badly or fail to provide.
“Affairs serve as a form of mate insurance, keeping a backup mate should a switch become warranted in the future,” the researchers say.
The researchers suggest that even women in very positive relationships benefited from affairs. “A regular mate may cheat, defect, die, or decline in mate value. Ancestral women lacking a backup mate would have suffered a lapse in protection, and resources.”
This raises questions about what drives male infidelity. “The most probable primary fitness benefits men accrued from short-term mating . . . are straightforward: ancestral males could directly increase their reproductive success by obtaining sexual access to fertile women in addition to a primary partner,” the team say.
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