Cupid’s arrow: research aims to illuminate laws of attraction

UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME and WORLD SCIENCE

We’ve heard the clichés: “It was love at first sight,” “it’s in­ner beau­ty that truly mat­ters,” and “op­posites at­tract.”

But what’s really at work in se­lect­ing a ro­man­tic or sex­u­al part­ner?

So­ci­ol­o­gist Eliz­a­beth Mc­Clin­tock of the Uni­vers­ity of Notre Dame in In­di­ana stud­ies how phys­i­cal at­trac­tive­ness, age and in­come af­fect mate se­lec­tion and rela­t­ion­ships. Her re­search aims to of­fer new in­sights in­to why and when Cu­pid’s ar­row strikes.

In one of her stud­ies, pub­lished in the jour­nal Bio­de­mog­ra­phy and So­cial Bi­ol­o­gy, Mc­Clin­tock ex­am­ines the ef­fects of phys­i­cal at­trac­tive­ness on young adults’ sex­u­al and ro­man­tic out­comes.

“Cou­ple forma­t­ion is of­ten con­cep­tu­al­ized as a com­pet­i­tive, two-sid­ed match­ing pro­cess in which in­di­vid­u­als im­plic­itly trade their as­sets for those of a mate, try­ing to find the most de­sir­a­ble part­ner and most re­ward­ing rela­t­ion­ship that they can get giv­en their own as­sets,” Mc­Clin­tock said.

“This mar­ket met­a­phor has pri­marily been ap­plied to mar­riage mar­kets and fo­cused on the ex­change of in­come or sta­tus for oth­er de­sired re­sources such as phys­i­cal at­trac­tive­ness, but it is easily ex­tend­ed to ex­plain part­ner se­lec­tion in the young adult pre­mar­i­tal dat­ing mar­ket.”

Mc­Clin­tock’s study indicates that just as good looks may be ex­changed for sta­tus and money, at­trac­tive­ness may al­so be traded for con­trol over the de­gree of com­mit­ment and pro­gres­sion of sex­u­al ac­ti­vity.

Among her find­ings:

Very phys­ic­ally attrac­tive wom­en are more likely to form ex­clu­sive rela­t­ion­ships than to form purely sex­u­al rela­t­ion­ships; they are al­so less likely to have sex­u­al in­ter­course with­in the first week of meet­ing a part­ner. Pre­sum­a­bly, this dif­fer­ence arises be­cause more phys­ic­ally attrac­tive wom­en use their great­er pow­er in the part­ner mar­ket to con­trol out­comes with­in their rela­t­ion­ships.

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