Finding someone with whom you want to be in a committed relationship is tough but making the relationship last may be even tougher. In the American Psychological Association's (APA) February issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, evolutionary psychologists examine, for the first time, mate retention tactics that range from being overly watchful to threatening violence.

To find out what husbands and wives value in their partners and what they do to keep their marriages intact, psychologist David M. Buss, Ph.D., the leading expert on the evolution of mating strategies as well as author of "The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating," and psychologist Todd K. Shackelford, Ph.D., of the University of Texas at Austin asked 214 married people what tactics they used to keep their mate. Some of the tactics included how often the partners participated in some of the following behaviors:

"I called her at unexpected times to see who she was with"
"I didn't take him to a party where other females would be present"

The men and women in the study were also asked if a mate's attractiveness, likeliness of infidelity, age, resources and effort to get ahead would affect their level of effort in staying married.

Men, more than women, clearly displayed their social status and financial success as a tactic to keep their mate interested in them, said the authors, and women were more likely than men to work on their appearance as a tactic to keep their mate interested.

"The reproductive value of a woman indicated by her youth and attractiveness was consistently linked with a man's increased efforts at staying married," said Dr. Buss. Men also reported other efforts at keeping their mates interested such as making promises of change in order to please their spouse and making threats of sexual betrayal.

"Women, on the other hand, married to men with higher incomes reported being more watchful of their husband's behavior, more punishing of their infidelity threats, more concerned with their own appearance and more emotionally manipulative than were women married to men with lower incomes. Men's retention efforts were unrelated to their wife's income," the study reported.

"If a man suspected that his wife was cheating," said Dr. Buss, "he would try and keep his wife from public activities, threaten punishment and criticize other men more than men who didn't suspect that their wives were cheating. Interestingly, women who suspected their husbands of infidelity did not work at the marriage any harder than those without suspicions."

A reason for this could be that "a husband's sexual infidelity signals less of a loss for women than for men given that a women's infidelity might make it hard to determine who the father is," said the authors. It is possible that women married to men they perceive to be likely to have affairs also perceive their partners to be higher in mate value and do not feel justified or in a position to keep them from these activities.

Unfortunately, some forms of mate retention may be early indicators of the physical abuse of wives, said the authors. In an earlier study, 72 percent of women who required medical attention reported that their husbands limited their contact with family and friends, insisted on knowing the women's whereabouts and called the women names.

Reference: "From Vigilance to Violence: Mate Retention Tactics in Married Couples," by David M. Buss, Ph.D., and Todd K. Shackelford, Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin, in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 72, No. 2.

5/29/98