Women prefer to be prettier than a partner, but men want to be funnier

Would you rather be good-looking but with a plain partner or be unattractive yourself but with a hot date? How you answer the question probably depends on what sex you are. A survey of more than 1200 heterosexual US adults found that when forced to choose between having a trait themselves or assigning it to their partner, men and women starkly differed in their choices.

“Men will very happily sacrifice their own attractiveness to have a highly attractive partner, and women are just the opposite,” says Bill von Hippel at Research with Impact, an Australian consultancy firm.

Across six traits – wealth, beauty, ambition, humour, intelligence and kindness – von Hippel and his colleagues asked participants whether they would prefer to have the trait, or for their partner to have it, and to indicate how big a gap between themselves and their partner they were willing to tolerate. “Like you can be ugly as a mud fence and only date supermodels,” says von Hippel.

Unlike previous similar studies, the researchers forced participants to express a preference one way or another. The team found that the sexes diverged from each other most strongly on looks and were most aligned on kindness – men and women wanted to date someone with similar levels of kindness to themselves.

In general, women tended to want to be attractive and intelligent themselves and to date men who are wealthier, funnier and more ambitious than they are, while men mostly wanted to be wealthy and to date women who are better looking than they are.

For example, on average, women rated their desire for beauty for themselves at 7.01 out of 11, while men rated the importance of their own beauty at 4.77. On the other hand, men’s own desire to be funny was 7.08, while women’s was 5.81,  A score below 6 indicates that someone prefers their partner to have the trait over themselves.

Von Hippel says that individual men and women did vary in their responses — what’s true for one man or woman isn’t true for all of them — but on average, the findings held up strongly. “These are big effects,” he says.

Lisa Welling at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, says the forced choice was an interesting way to tease apart underlying preferences, but she cautions that such an artificial construct might not be relevant to real relationships. The trade-offs also didn’t specify whether people should be thinking about short-term or long-term partners “and that distinction often matters”, she says.

Steve Stewart-Williams at the University of Nottingham in Semenyih, Malaysia, says that, in general, the results aren’t surprising, but that forcing people to choose may have made their true feelings more apparent. Researchers may “have been underestimating the size of sex differences in mate preferences because of the way we’ve been measuring them”, he says. For example, previous studies might not have properly accounted for the fact that people could desire a trait for themselves simply because they think it will help them seduce a partner with that trait.

Von Hippel says the findings make sense from an evolutionary perspective. Women – with the greater biological burden of child-rearing – need to ensure a potential partner will have the resources to care for their offspring, whereas men’s evolutionary pressures are more focused on selecting for a fertile, healthy woman.

Stewart-Williams also thinks that the study may show the fingerprints of evolution in a modern population, but he cautions that the survey self-reports from only heterosexual people in the US – whether the findings are applicable to other people remains to be seen.