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

Would you rather be handsome, but with an ordinary partner, or be unattractive yourself, but with a hot date? How you answer this question probably depends on what gender you are. A survey of more than 1,200 heterosexual American adults found that when forced to choose between having a trait in themselves or assigning it to their partner, men and women differed sharply in their choices.

“Men will happily sacrifice their attractiveness for a very attractive partner, but women will do the opposite,” says Bill von Hippel at Research with Impact, an Australian consulting firm.

For six personality traits—wealth, beauty, ambition, humor, intelligence, and kindness—von Hippel and his colleagues asked participants whether they would rather have the trait or have their partner have it, and to indicate how much of a gap between themselves and their partner they were willing to tolerate. “As if you could be as ugly as a dirty fence and only date supermodels,” von Hippel says.

Unlike previous similar studies, the researchers forced participants to express preferences one way or another. The team found that the sexes differed most in appearance and were most similar in kindness: Men and women wanted to date someone who was similar in their level of kindness.

In general, women themselves tend to want to be attractive and smart and date men who are richer, funnier and more ambitious than themselves, while men generally want to be rich and date women who are better looking than them.

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

Von Hippel says the responses of individual men and women varied—what was true for one man or woman was not true for all—but on average the results held up. “These are big effects,” he says.

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

Steve Stewart-Williams from the University of Nottingham in Semenyih, Malaysia, says that overall the results are not surprising, but forcing people to choose may have made their true feelings more obvious. The researchers may have “underestimated the magnitude of sex differences in mate preferences because of the way we measured them,” he says. For example, previous research may not have adequately considered the fact that people may 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 raising children—need to ensure that a potential mate has the resources to care for their offspring, whereas the evolutionary pressures of men are more focused on choosing a fertile and healthy woman.

Stewart-Williams also believes the study may show fingerprints of the evolution of modern populations, but he cautions that the survey only includes heterosexual people in the US – it remains to be seen whether the results apply to other people.