Women's Sexual Strategies: The Evolution of Long-Term Bonds and Extrapair Sex

Abstract Because of their heavy obligatory investment in offspring and limited offspring number, ancestral women faced the challenge of securing sufficient material resources for reproduction and gaining access to good genes. We review evidence indicating that selection produced two overlapping suites of psychological adaptations to address these challenges. The first set involves coupling—the formation of social partnerships for providing biparental care. The second set involves dual mating, a strategy in which women form long-term relationships with investing partners, while surreptitiously seeking good genes from extrapair mates. The sources of evidence we review include hunter-gather studies, comparative nonhuman studies, cross-cultural studies, and evidence of shifts in women's desires across the ovulatory cycle. We argue that the evidence poses a challenge to some existing theories of human mating and adds to our understanding of the subtlety of women's sexual strategies.