A woman who yearns to have sex with someone other than her husband can blame it on evolution.
That's the excuse...er, scientific finding, of researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles and the University of New Mexico, who say women with a wandering eye are just trying to improve the species.
Here's the logic, although we're thinking most husbands won't buy it as an excuse for an unfaithful wife: The pool of exceptional men is only so big. When a woman finds a sexy man, she innately deduces that he has better genes to pass on to a baby, reports HealthDay News. A wife is most likely to be attracted to men other than her husband while she is ovulating.
"The mating market is driven by supply and demand, and therefore not all women will attract long-term mates offering good genes," the study authors stated in the journal Hormones and Behavior. "Ancestrally, these women may have benefited from a strategy in which they secured investment from a long-term mate and obtained genetic benefits from extra-pair partners," the study added.
Nature is no fool. Men who are less attractive seem to have an innate sense to guard their ovulating wives from other men by showering attention on them and acting particularly possessive. "What is at stake is not just the loss of face or the loss of love," study co-author Martie G. Haselton of UCLA told HealthDay News. "This is about Darwinian prosperity. Males who did not successfully guard their mates are not our ancestors."
Put more crudely, ovulating women who are married to men who score low on the "stud scale" tend to notice men whose faces, voices, odors and demeanor could be deemed more masculine. The men have to protect what is theirs.
The researchers based their findings on responses from 38 college women who attend a large, unnamed university in the United States. They were asked to rate their partner's sexual desirability and then submitted diaries rating the strength of their attraction to other men, whether they flirted with the men and if they acted out on any of these attractions. A second study, which confirmed the findings of this first study, involved 43 women who also rated their partner's sexual attractiveness at a time when they were ovulating and on a non-fertile day.
"We aren't saying that women are genetically programmed to be unfaithful," study co-author Steven W. Gangestad of New Mexico told HealthDay News. "They aren't robots following genetic instruction. You have psychology, biology that is some product of selection. But relationships are mixtures of loving aspects and conflicts, and this is a part of conflict. Infidelity itself is a choice."
