Getting Down to the Details in a Long-Term Mate : Traits That All People Prioritize...and Other Traits That Only Some People Prioritize

Abstract

People around the world prioritize love, kindness, and faithfulness in a long-term mate (Buss, 2003). People also prioritize similarity, as evidenced by data showing that couples are similar to one another in physical, cognitive, and psychological characteristics (Luo & Klohnen, 2005). Finally, humans also prioritize characteristics that are familiar to them, as evidenced by data showing that people select mates whose physical characteristics resemble those of their caregivers (Bereczkei et al., 2004; Heffernan & Fraley, 2015). But how much of mating is systematic and how much is random? Some researchers have suggested that preferences for love and kindness and preferences for similarity narrow the pool of potential mates by only a little, and that mate preferences are actually mostly idiosyncratic (Lykken & Tellegen, 1993). However, we propose that individuals’ mate preferences are systematically tied to their genetic dispositions and how they are raised.