New York: According to a research, women prefer men with physical strength, especially in short-term contexts. When it comes to marriage, she chooses happy men.
Findings published in Personal Relationships showed that a partner’s humor is the most attractive quality for success in long-term relationships. Mitch Brown, a psychology instructor at the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Arkansas in the US, said that our data shows that women choose among powerful and cheerful men according to their preferences. However, we continue to show that women prefer men’s strength in short-term relationships and humor in long-term contexts.
This research focuses on approaches to understanding social perceptions and the motives that shape interpersonal preferences. It reflects how people prioritize physical characteristics and behavior in determining preferences for short-term and long-term mates. For the study, the preferences of 394 women who identified as heterosexual and bisexual at a large university were sampled.
With a mean age of 19 years, 251 participants identified as single and 143 as partnered. Historically, reproductive success has depended on identifying a partner with physical and psychological traits that meet relevant reproductive goals.
The ideal is to select a partner who is physically attractive and has positive behavioral traits. However, the difficulty in finding such a partner has made it necessary to give priority to one over the other. Researchers have sought to determine how women evaluate their partners in short-term and long-term contexts.
The researchers found no interaction effect between physical strength and humor. In other words, power and humor independently influenced women’s preferences. Overall, Brown said her results indicate that women have different preferences in male mates.
