Healthy approaches to dating

Men prefer women who are intelligent, too, but not as much." These differences really shouldn't surprise anybody, says Helen E.

The theory that men's and women's sexual desires are hard-wired isn't new. Now a central tenet of evolutionary psychology, the theory holds that our sexual behavior evolved over millennia and is encoded in our brains. If that's true, men's sexual desires should be the same for men everywhere."What we are talking about is that when they go for infidelity or promiscuity, men focus on large numbers and women focus on quality." What really irks Schmitt is that many people interpret this finding to mean that women are designed to be faithful but men are predestined to be promiscuous. Instead, both women and men are fully equipped for one-night stands and lifelong relationships.Schmitt and colleagues asked men and women all over the world about what they wanted from long-term and short-term sexual relationships.The title sums it up: "Universal Sex Differences in the Desire for Sexual Variety: Tests From 52 Nations, 6 Continents, and 13 Islands." "Both men and women show signs of being programmed to be monogamous in a certain way and promiscuous in a certain way," Schmitt tells Web MD."The main difference is in short-term mating strategies, or how men and women go about being promiscuous." "We don't say men and women always opt for short-term strategies," Schmitt says.