3.4 Short-term and long-term strategies
A pluralistic menu of conditional mating tactics.
Humans do not have one mating strategy; we have a repertoire. Sexual strategies theory, developed by David Buss and David Schmitt, holds that both sexes pursue a mix of short-term and long-term mating, deployed conditionally depending on circumstances.
Two strategies, different problems
Long-term mating (committed partnership) and short-term mating (brief liaisons) solve different adaptive problems and impose different costs and benefits. They therefore activate different preferences. In short-term contexts, both sexes lower some standards but men especially relax selectivity, while in long-term contexts both sexes raise standards on commitment-relevant traits.
Strategic interference and deception
Because men and women pursue overlapping but non-identical strategies, conflict arises. Strategic interference occurs when one person's strategy blocks another's — for example, when one partner seeks a short-term encounter and the other a long-term bond. This generates the predictable use of deception in courtship, and emotions (like anger and distress) that flag when one's strategy is being thwarted.
Conditional deployment
Which strategy a person emphasizes depends on factors like sex ratio, their own mate value, the local environment, and life-history calibration. Strategies are facultative — switched on and off by circumstance — not fixed personality types.
A grounding example
In a famous (and ethically dated) field study by Russell Clark and Elaine Hatfield, attractive strangers approached members of the opposite sex on a college campus and asked one of three questions: go on a date, come to my apartment, or go to bed with me. About half of both sexes agreed to a date. But while zero percent of women agreed to sex with a stranger, roughly seventy-five percent of men did — a larger fraction than agreed even to the date. The dramatic sex difference in willingness to accept an immediate short-term offer illustrates the divergent payoffs short-term mating historically held for men and women.