A critical adaptive problem is that sometimes, desirable mates are already mated and therefore not available in the eligible mating pool. Some researchers have argued, on the basis of analyses of traditional cultures, that in human ancestral conditions, most women became married at or shorty after puberty. This mating context would have severely exasperated the adaptive problem of finding a mate for those who were not already mated, particularly for men. Any degree of polygyny, a possible reoccurring feature of our past, would have further intensified the problem.
An evolutionary psychological perspective on friendship suggests that sex and relationship status may predict people’s motivations for initiating, selecting, and dissolving opposite-sex friendships. Men and women are predicted to differ psychologically in domains in which they recurrently faced different adaptive problems over human evolutionary history (Buss, 1995). Women, for example, have faced a 9-month obligatory investment to produce a child. Men have not.
Friends do not share copies of our genes, nor do we generally reproduce with our friends. Around the world, however, people form friendships that last for days, years, and even a lifetime. One of the complexities of friendship is that some characteristics of friendship are perceived as both beneficial and costly. The friendship literature, for example, is inconsistent on the role of sexuality in opposite-sex friendship.
The authors of this scale hypothesized that people form opposite-sex friendships (OSFs), in part, to acquire long-term mates (both sexes), to gain short-term sexual access (men more than women), and to gain physical protection (women more than men). They hypothesized that men and women have evolved psychological mechanisms that are designed to guide the initiation, selection, and dissolution of opposite sex friendships.
Infidelity is a major cause of divorce and spousal battering. Little is known, however, about which individuals are susceptible to infidelity, or about the relationship contexts that promote infidelity. Personality factors most strongly linked to susceptibility to infidelity according to the study from which this instrument was created, were low Conscientiousness, high Narcissism, and high Psychoticism.
People devote considerable effort to retaining their mates. Mate retention tactics range from vigilance to violence, and are linked to variables such as marital satisfaction and relationship aggression. The Mate Retention Inventory (MRI; 104 items comprising 19 tactics) has proven to be reliable and valid. Given the importance of assessing mate retention in various contexts, there is a need for a briefer version of the MRI. Therefore, the authors developed this short form of the MRI (the MRI-SF), which assesses performance of 19 mate retention tactics using two items per tactic.
Maintaining a romantic relationship can be difficult work fraught with conflicts and challenges.Inadequate finances, meddling in-laws, and personality clashes, for example, can be sources of conflict in a romantic relationship. Perhaps the most important threat to a romantic relationship is infidelity (see Buss, 2000). Indicators of the likelihood of infidelity are key criteria that men and women use to select a long-term partner (Buss, 1989), and infidelity is a frequently cited cause of relationship dissolution and divorce across cultures (Betzig, 1989).
Evolutionary psychologists hypothesised over three decades ago that men and women would differ psychologically in the weighting given to cues that trigger jealousy (Symons, 1979). A man's jealousy has been hypothesised to focus on cues to sexual infidelity because a long term partner's infidelity jeapordises his certainty in paternity, thereby placing him at risk of investing in another man's offspring. A woman's jealousy has been hypothesised to relate to cues to the long-term diversion of a man's commitment.
Conflict is predicted to occur whenever the reproductive strategy adopted by one sex interferes with that adopted by the opposite sex. Conflict is expected among unrelated members of the same sex, for example, because they frequently compete for access to the same choice resources such as food, status, and mating opportunities. Conflict during certain periods is expected between parents and their children and between siblings because in these relationships half of the genetic interests are distinct (Trivers, 1974).
Recent research identified disillusionment in marriage as an important predictor of divorce, but no scale exists to measure this construct. Current projections estimate that up to 50% of today's first marriages will end in divorce. Divorce comes at a high price for families and for society in general (Larson, Swyers, & Larson, 1995); therefore, researchers have become interested in understanding the causes of marital unhappiness and instability as a way to predict, and ideally to forestall, divorce.
