Sex Differences in Human Mating
(Pasting my response to a question I got on a WhatsApp group: Why do many IIScian men chase women and once the woman is into them they are like " meh! I am not into u anymore"? It's so disheartening and emotionally so heavy on us women.)
Although nothing justifies this behaviour, I think there's some explanation from evol-psycho as to why it's mostly men doing this, not women. And it's important to understand this -- just like it's important to understand criminal psychology.
(Maiden Mother Matriarch podcast: Diana Fleischman & Louise Perry on 'Uncanny Vulvas' (sex robots) and Sex Differences in our evolved psychology)
Just to remind u, our evolved psychology, at times, works in unconscious ways. U don’t get to decide, for example, who you feel romantically/intellectually / sexually attracted to. Attraction is instinctual. It just happens. Yes, how u will further engage/interact with that person is (hopefully) governed by the top-down conscious control of your central nervous system – making u responsible for your actions.
Over hundreds of thousands of years of our hunter-gatherer and tribal history, evolution subjected human males and females to distinct selection pressures, resulting in many sex differences in human psychology (in addition to physiology) – particularly in mating strategies. Listing a few:
1. The average woman is choosier about who she has sex with. The average man is rather choosier about who he commits to. (Noted by Diana Fleischman, Geoffrey Miller and David Buss himself.)
2. The average woman underestimates the extent to which a guy friend is (sexually) interested in her. A man rather overestimates a similar behaviour coming from a woman-friend. (David Buss, I guess. Louise Perry too has written a lot on it in her book on Sexual Revolution)
3. In the context of infidelity in heterosexual romantic relationships, women, on average, experience emotional jealousy, whereas men, on average, experience sexual jealousy. Bluntly putting, she is more concerned about him getting emotionally attached to another woman, and he is more concerned about her sleeping with another man. (Miller)
4. (I felt embarrassed as a man to find this one, but this is the biggest sex difference discovered and replicated across cultures in the history of evolutionary psychology): The average man has really low standards for casual sex encounters. Bluntly put, a man looking for short-term mating would be willing to mate with almost any woman in search of sexual novelty, forget about typical attractors like facial symmetry, big pelvis, biomarkers of reproductive health, etc. Diana talks about it on Louise Perry’s Maiden Mother Matriarch podcast. ( originally reported by Clark & Hatfield )
I speculate that emotional bonding after a certain threshold of spending time with a male friend comes easier to women, just like it’s easier and earlier for heterosexual men to develop sexual interest in a woman.
Oxytocin (the so-called love hormone) is likely playing some partial role here. Women tend to ‘pair-bond’ during sex or after-sex-cuddles more often than men, given the (debatable) fact that the pituitary gland in the female brain releases more oxytocin in the bloodstream in each sexual encounter than that in the male brain, but this sex difference in human neurophysiology has poor evidence, so I suggest u take it lightly respecting the possibility that ‘pair bonding’ works slightly differently in women and men.
Whatever are the underlying mechanisms, SEX is always riskier for a woman – unwanted pregnancy, higher risk of STIs, emotional attachment and higher neuroticism. No wonder she is choosier about it than a female monkey!
One very common inter-sex confusion/conflict is: that during courtship, women tend to, by default assume their guy-friend is looking for a loyal long-term relationship. Men tend to assume that their girl friend, I mean woman-friend, might be seeking a husband but she is okay with short-term flings. Also, it's easier for the average man to say ‘No’ when it’s a no. (Yes, the women-gaussian is shifted to the +x axis compared to that of men in the Trait Agreeableness distribution ( women on average are more 'agreeable' and 'neurotic' than men).
That’s why communication is so crucial in the context of inter-gender interactions. The safer way to navigate the mating world, I think, is to know oneself and set the boundaries early on in an interaction and to say ‘no’ when it’s a no.
PS. There are plenty of emotionally mature men out there who are seeking a loyal mother of their kids with her. They are willing to put their best efforts in being a good partner and a loving to-be dad.
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