How Many Friends Does One Person Need? (26 page)

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 child-like qualities in women and signs of maturity in men. David Perrett and his colleagues have carried out similar studies of facial attractiveness in European, Japanese and Zulu populations, with very similar results. Beauty may not be just in the eye of the beholder after all.
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Most of us cannot aspire to the clear-eyed coquettishness of a Winona Ryder or the rugged handsomeness of a Richard Gere at the height of their careers. Worse still, we are only at the ‘right’ age for a brief period during a lifetime. So how should we ordinary mortals find our mates? Here, evolutionary theory suggests you should adjust your strategy to make the best of what may otherwise be a bad job. In other words, lower your expectations and settle for the bargain basement. It’s pure Jane Austen.

This is exactly what happens in the Lonely Hearts columns. In our study of American ads, David 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 were. 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 status or 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
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in the poker game. The crunch point, however, came in middle age. Once past the mid-fifties, 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 singles bars to rate the other customers for attractiveness on a scale of one to ten. As closing time drew nearer, and hence the likelihood of heading home alone increased, they began to rate members of the opposite sex as increasingly more attractive. On average, members of the opposite sex were judged to be about twenty per cent more attractive at midnight than they were at 9 p.m. In contrast, their ratings of members of their own sex showed no such tendency to change with time. Since it seems at best implausible that the least pretty girls had been chosen first and gone off to their evening’s tryst, it must be that the punters were progressively lowering their standards with respect to sexual partners as the prospect of failure loomed ever larger.

Children are a particular disadvantage to those seeking a new relationship later in life. Voland found that in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Krummhörn population young peasant widows who had had a single child from their first marriage had a seventeen per cent higher chance of remarrying if that child had died. We found an 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 dependants asked for almost twice as many traits
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in a prospective partner as women who had dependent children. Women with dependent children were forced to be a lot less choosy.

Most people are quite sensitive to the bargaining power they hold in the mating marketplace. 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 (ficti-tious) 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 a conversation with the stooge depended on the perceived similarities in their respective social styles. Yet again, it seems we pitch our bids to what we think we can get away with, and don’t try to overbid the hands we hold. The mating game is unforgiving: what you can achieve in this game is not just of your choosing – it depends on someone else choosing you.

Boguslaw Pawlowski and I found a comparable sense of realism in UK Lonely Hearts ads. We calculated a simple index of selection for each sex – the ratio of the expressed preference for partners of a given age by members of the opposite sex relative to the number of individuals of that age in the advertising population. A selection ratio greater than 1 means you are in great demand; below 1, and you are less than popular. We then plotted how demanding advertisers were in relation to this selection
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ratio. For both sexes, the higher the selection ratio, the more demanding those individuals were in their search for partners. Except for one age group: men in their later forties. It seemed that they wildly overestimated the strength of their bargaining hand, and were far more demanding than their attractiveness to women actually warranted. Still, by their fifties they had learned the hard truth and radically downgraded their demands. So even men can learn, it seems.

This suggests a strong role for realism in the mating marketplace: no point investing resources trying to date someone too far above you in the social scale. We learn in the sandpit of life how we stand in the mating market, and adjust our aspirations accordingly. We might yearn for a Winona Ryder or a Richard Gere in our dreams, but it takes only a couple of cold shoulders for a sense of reality to intervene. That realism may partly explain why like tends, in the end, to settle for like when they make their final choice, their aspirations notwithstanding. Except in societies where arranged marriages are common, people are statistically more likely to marry those who are similar to themselves, not just in social and cultural 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.

Experience plays a particularly important influence in mate choice. This sensitivity to experience may explain one striking feature of our US Lonely Hearts sample, namely the frequency with which women advertisers sought traits linked to pairbonding and the family environment – traits signalled by words like ‘loving’, ‘warm’, ‘GSOH’ (good sense of humour), ‘family-minded’, ‘gen-
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tle’, ‘dependable’. Some forty-five per cent of the women in our American sample desired at least one of these traits in a prospective mate, compared to only twenty-two per cent of men. Yet men did not advertise these traits any more often than women did, suggesting that men had not yet picked up on this change in women’s concerns.

This probably 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 wealth 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. Second, 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 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.

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. Hence the forty-five 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
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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 their description. 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, 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 predictor of what they are really like. Otherwise, it’s a game of poker.
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In July 1838, the young Darwin sat down and wrote out a list of pros and cons for marrying his cousin Emma Wedgwood (she of the famous pottery family). But it seems that he was really wasting his time. Whether or not she would accept him would depend more on things much more basely biological than what either of them thought of the advantages and disadvantages of marriage. It seems that, though the young Darwin was blissfully unaware of it, evolution has saddled us with a whole series of cheap chemical tricks that play a far more important role in our behaviour than most of us would like to think. Just when we thought our much-vaunted brains had allowed us to rise above base nature, base nature emerges from the shadows once again to slap our wrists and remind us of our past.

Take kissing, for example. Of course, monkeys and apes nuzzle and muzzle each other, especially when grooming. But all this serious mouthing stuff that we do – no other species does anything like it. Even though it is sometimes said not to be universal in all human cultures, it’s certainly very widespread and it isn’t just a consequence of how close you’ve been to the French. So what’s it all about?
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Freud and his fellow travellers insisted that kissing was just some kind of reversion to infancy and the deeply buried memory of the pleasures of sucking on your mother’s breast. Well, it’s easy enough to see that adult kissing might have originated thus, but sucking breasts and kissing aren’t quite the same thing. After all, if it really was a reversion to breast-sucking, why not just do
that
? Another suggestion is that it’s a form of courtship feeding, a habit widespread in the insects and some birds. But that tends to be a male thing, with males offering pack-ets of food (sometimes regurgitated, sometimes not) as gifts to prospective mates. Females evaluate the quality of a male by the size of the offering. It has a certain logic, rather similar to that of offering large diamond rings and mink coats to one’s beloved. But it doesn’t quite make sense when there is no food involved. And, in any case, we already do exactly this by other perfectly good means – think box of chocolates, flowers even. Besides, both sexes do kissing with equal enthusiasm, and courtship feeding is usually one-way. Something else is clearly afoot.

In fact, kissing is probably all about testing the genetic make-up of prospective mates. Our immune system is what defines us individually, and it is determined mainly by a little cluster of genes known as the major histocompatibility complex, or MHC for short. The MHC genes determine the range of foreign bodies (everything from pollen to viruses and bacteria) that your body can recognise and get rid of should they invade. It is a set of genes that is particularly prone to generating mutations, thereby allowing us to adapt to the threats posed by the ever-mutating
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microscopic world that continually parasitises us and threatens our personal survival. The MHC genes also control your odour, because it turns out that your natural smell is closely related to your immune response.

There has been a long series of studies which have shown that people tend to prefer to mate with people who have complementary MHC genes. The reason is fairly obvious. If you mate with someone with the identical immune response, your children will only have that limited immunity. But if you mate with someone with a complementary set of responses, your children will have a much wider range of immunity to the diseases that threaten them.

So how do you get to find out whether a prospective partner has the right set of immune responses to suit you? Smell is one way of doing it, and smell obviously means getting up close and personal. That’s why our perfume preferences are very personal: they seem to be directly related to the natural body odour that we have. In effect, we prefer to wear those perfumes that enhance our natural smell – that’s why it’s always tricky buying perfumes for someone you don’t know very well. But smells can be masked, not just by ladling on Givenchy’s latest, but also, in the state of nature in which we have spent most of our evolutionary history, by accumulations of dirt and bacteria. So one way to circumvent this problem is to get up even more close and personal and taste the stuff directly.