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Good news for men with very attractive partners: in scientific terms, you’re probably having more sex (in-pair copulations) than other guys.
However, according to a new study, the reason that you’re doing this is to mark your territory, and hold on to a partner who’s more likely to be pursued by other men and thus put you at risk of being cheated on.
It might seem obvious that more attractive partners inspire more frequent sex, but according to Farnaz Kaighobadi, a PhD student in Evolutionary Psychology, at Florida Atlantic University, the reasons are found in our evolutionary past, and run much deeper than simply thinking your mate is pretty hot.
Farnaz Kaighobadi claims:
In this context, sex is a “mate retention behaviour” designed to hold on to a partner who might otherwise stray and to increase the odds that any children born are those of the woman’s mate. Other such behaviours range from kind gestures like buying small gifts or offering compliments to nasty traits like sifting through a partner’s mail or threatening anyone who shows interest in them.
The underlying reasons are deeply unconscious.
It’s not like men are sitting there and thinking, ‘My partner is attractive so it’s likely she’s going to be unfaithful, so let me have more sex with her; it could be simply, ‘My partner is hot, I’m going to have more sex with her.’
Men reported that they have sex with their partners an average of 3.3 times in a typical week, Kaighobadi says, and they assigned them an average attractiveness rating of 7.9 on a scale of 0 to 9. Then, with each one-point increase in attractiveness, the frequency of sex increased by 40 percent, she says.
The study involved 277 heterosexual men, and was co-authored by Todd Shackelford. It will be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Personality and Individual Differences.
Kaighobadi also noted:
It’s not yet clear how this dynamic plays out in same-sex couples.
Posted by Jonathan in Sociobiology