The Role of Sexual and Romantic Attraction in Human Mate Preferences

ABSTRACT

Sex differences in mate preferences are ubiquitous, having been evidenced across generations and cultures. Their prevalence and persistence have compellingly placed them in the evolutionarily adaptive context of sexual selection. However, the psycho-biological mechanisms contributing to their generation and maintenance remain poorly understood. As such a mechanism, sexual attraction is assumed to guide interest, desire, and the affinity toward specific partner features. However, whether sexual attraction can indeed explain sex differences in partner preferences has not been explicitly tested. To better understand how sex and sexual attraction shape mate preferences in humans we assessed how partner preferences differed across the spectrum of sexual attraction in a sample of 479 individuals that identified as asexual, gray-sexual, demisexual or allosexual. We further tested whether romantic attraction predicted preference profiles better than sexual attraction. Our results show that sexual attraction accounts for highly replicable sex differences in mate preferences for high social status and financial prospects, conscientiousness, and intelligence; however, it does not account for the enhanced preference for physical attractiveness expressed by men, which persists even in individuals with low sexual attraction. Instead, sex differences in physical attractiveness preference are better explained by the degree of romantic attraction. Furthermore, effects of sexual attraction on sex differences in partner preferences were grounded in current rather than previous experiences of sexual attraction. Taken together, the results support the idea that contemporary sex differences in partner preferences are maintained by several psycho-biological mechanisms that evolved in conjunction, including not only sexual but also romantic attraction.

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank the AVEN community panel, Iam9man, and Dr Anisa Visram for providing helpful feedback on the design process of this study, as well as the AVEN community research board for supporting this study.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data Availability

The data associated with this research are available in the project-specific Open Science Framework repository https://osf.io/ap7td.

Open Science

The study has been pre-registered (https://osf.io/ap7td) and provides openly accessible materials on the Open Science Framework (OSF), in the project-specific repository: https://osf.io/bwem6/ Deviations from pre-registration are listed in the results.

Supplementary Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2023.2176811

Notes

¹ Asexual individuals do not experience sexual attraction to others. Demi-sexual individuals typically only experience sexual attraction once a strong, emotional connection has been established. Gray-sexual individuals, on the other hand, typically experience reduced sexual attraction to others, or only on rare occasions.

² A further 180 individuals who did not identify with their sex assigned at birth took part in the study. However, large heterogeneity in gender identity within this sample resulted in small group sizes which required control criteria that lie outside of the scope of the present study.

³ Sexual and romantic attraction were strongly correlated in allosexual (r = 0.735), but to a lesser degree in asexual (r = 0.303) individuals.

Additional information

Funding

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.