Navigating Love’s Spectrum

Men and women have distinct preferences for certain traits in their romantic partners, which canbe elegantly explained by evolutionary theories of sexual selection. Specifically, men andwomen highly value the mate characteristics of warmth, attractiveness, and resources in arelationship partner, which all enhance their reproductive fitness. By manipulating differentcombinations of these attributes, the current research aimed to examine thresholds of acceptanceand desirability in different temporal relationship contexts. It also explored the effect of apreviously unexplored cue to health, a physical disability, on mating preferences. In Study One,568 participants were shown a photograph of a stimulus person, either with or without aphysical disability, paired with manipulated descriptions of economic status and warmth. Theywere asked to indicate their willingness to engage in both a short-term and long-termrelationship with the individual in the vignette, as well as complete questionnaires onsociosexuality and social desirability. The results showed the importance of warmth in the longtermfor both men and women, the value of economic status for women in the long-term, thesignificance of health on short-term relationships, and predicted individual variations accordingto sociosexual orientation. However, when the effects of social desirability were taken intoconsideration, health was not found to have an effect on the reported desirability of short-termrelationships. Study Two used a slightly different methodology to replicate the findings fromStudy One with a different sample of 566 participants, and explored the impact of heritability onboth short-term and long-term relationship preferences. The results from Study Two generallyreplicated the results from Study One, with the exception of health. The impact of a physicaldisability, whether inherited or not, was not found to be significant in Study Two, nor did socialdesirability. By exploring the evolutionary logic behind disability-based prejudice inrelationships, the current studies aimed to contribute to the existing knowledge on matepreferences and deepen our understanding about the contemporary negative attitudes towardsrelationships with individuals with disabilities.