Why Men Want Sex and Women Need Love by Barbara Pease Page A

commitment from a man.
    So does this mean that if you are a woman over fifty with no reproductive value, you are destined to be lonely? No, it means that like younger women, an older woman needs to keep herself looking attractive if she wants to stay in the mating game. Women’s magazines are full of articles about mature women and how they keep themselves looking young. Looking younger by taking care of yourself is what attracts men of all ages, not the fact that you can’t have children anymore. Think Joan Collins, Cher, Ivana Trump, and Madonna.
    What Men Want Women to Know No. 22
If something we said can be interpreted two ways and one of these ways makes you sad or angry, we meant the other one.
     
     
    None of these male preferences could be viewed by women as fair, sensible, politically correct, or reasonable, but they are reality and it doesn’t matter whether you like it. When you understand the origin of male preferences and know that they are part of the male brain hardwiring, it makes male behaviors more understandable and therefore easier to deal with.

Getting to the Point
     
Men’s long-term list
     
    Here’s what men look for in a long-term partner:
Personality
Attractiveness
Brains
Humor
Good body
    When you compare this to the next list—women’s list of preferences for a long-term partner—you’ll see that they are very similar to men’s, with personality being number one for both. The main difference is that women want a man who is also sensitive, whereas men prefer a woman to look good.
Women’s long-term list
     
    Here’s what women want in a long-term partner:
Personality
Humor
Sensitivity
Brains
Good body
    Ancestral women never had such an extensive list because all they needed was a man who had enough motivation to catch food and fight off aggressors. Ancestral man didn’t need to beable to crack a joke to impress a woman, be able to play chess, or understand her feelings. Ancestral women would have also had far less difficulty in finding a mate than women of the twenty-first century because cosmetics, designer bras, and surgery were never an option. Our ancestors’ playing field was much more level.
    Now here’s a twist that most women don’t know: Men have two mating lists; most women only have one. Whether a woman is looking at a man as a long-term or short-term mate, she uses the same criteria on her list for evaluation. Men, however, have a long-term list
and
a list for short-term, casual relationships.
Men’s short-term list
     
    Here is their short-term list:
Attractive
Good body
Breasts
Butt
Personality
    As you can see, this list is largely composed of visual cues that cause hormone activity in the brain’s hypothalamus and amygdala, so men’s short-term list is about lust. David Buss listed sixty-seven characteristics nominated by men and women as desirable in a casual mate. These included loyalty, sociability, honesty, wealth, kindness, intelligence, charm, education, generosity, responsibility, and cooperativeness. He found that men rated these characteristics as dramatically less important in a casual mate than women did. Men were also significantly less concerned about negative characteristics in casual mates, such as promiscuity, alcoholism, education, bisexuality, and mental abuse, than women were. Conversely, men rated these things as significantly unattractive in a long-term partner. For long-term mates, men were concerned about the need for commitment and physical attractiveness, whereas hairiness and low sexdrive were deemed undesirable. Men rated women’s need for commitment from them as highly undesirable in a casual partner, but rated it as very important in a long-term or marriage partner. Even a casual mate who was married rated higher than a single one because the married woman was less likely to want a commitment from him.
    A man’s short-term list is the one in action in clubs, pubs, bars, the beach, gyms, and everywhere he goes. It’s mainly a