Mate Switching Hypothesis is Cope

Written by Rollo Tomassi on July 30, 2024. Posted in Current News

If you follow me on Twitter or are a semi-regular viewer of my show Access Vegas, you’ve likely seen me being critical of what’s known as Mate Switching Hypothesis.

This hypothesis has been proffered as an alternative or a counter to the prevailing hypothesis known as Dual Mating Strategy. The Mate Switching theory was popularized by the Godfather of evolutionary psychology, Dr. David Buss, in 2017.

This theory made its way into his 2021 book Men Behaving Badly, which, in my opinion, was an effort in apologetics of conventional masculinity. This book’s release conspicuously coincided with Dr. Buss’ preselling his now-defunct The First Date Course in December 2020.

The official website for The First Date Course was scrubbed this year, but the Twitter account and all the marketing videos are still viewable.

Since the publication of Men Behaving Badly, I’ve been roundly scolded for challenging Dr. Buss’s convenient pivot to a kinder, gentler female-appeasing alternative to Dr. Martie Haselton’s Ovulatory Shift hypothesis and Dual Mating Strategy.

 The Gatekeepers of evolutionary psychology mistakenly assume that Red Pill advocates are ignorant of the intricacies of intersexual dynamics. Therefore, how can we possibly be taken as credible critics of luminaries of Dr. Buss’ caliber?

Okay. What better way, then, to critique the theory than to parse it out from the man himself?

The following essay is an article outlining Mate Switching Hypothesis written by Dr. David Buss for Aeon in 2017. This was the earliest, most comprehensive writeup I could find by Buss himself.

Remember that this piece was written in 2017, four years before the publication of Men Behaving Badly or The First Date Course. Emphasis is my own.

Scientists now know much about human mating. The menu includes at a minimum: brief sexual flings, long-term pair-bonding, some infidelity, some polygyny (one man, multiple wives), rare polyandry (one woman, multiple husbands), occasional polyamory, some divorce, and frequent serial mating.

These strategies are not well-captured by single labels such as ‘monogamous’ or ‘polygamous.’ And we know with reasonable certainty that lifelong monogamy does not describe the primary pattern.

This last sentence is key because it contradicts the base premise of evo-psych Gatekeepers in 2024—that monogamous pair bonding (marriage) and family creation are the metrics by which an innate evolved sexual strategy should be measured.

Furthermore, polygyny, polyamory, monogamy, etc., are not mating strategies. Rather, they are practices that facilitate men’s and women’s mating strategies. Brief sexual flings and long-term pair bonding are means to a sexual strategy’s ends, not the strategies themselves.

Divorce rates in the United States have hovered just below 50 per cent, and are variable but comparable across cultures around the globe. Among married couples, infidelity is far from a trivial occurrence. In 1952, the sexologist Alfred Kinsey estimated it at 26 percent for women and 50 percent for men, although other studies put rates lower or higher.

We know that infidelity is the leading cause of divorce worldwide, from the Inuit in Alaska to the !Kung San of Botswana. And we know that most adults in the modern world, including roughly 85 percent in the US, have experienced at least one romantic break-up.

Divorce rates in the US in 2024 can be tracked at between 43% and 73%. Only 43% of first marriages are dissolved.

Second and third marriages fail at a far higher rate, though, with 60% of second marriages and 73% of third marriages ending in divorce. Forty percent of new marriages include a partner who is remarrying.

Using Kinsey Institute statistics on infidelity from 1952 is a deliberate attempt to paint women as innocent players in the cheating game. According to recent data gathered from the General Social Survey, 20% of married men and 13% of married women admitted to having sex with someone other than their spouse.

However, infidelity rates among women are on the rise – having increased by 40% in the last 20 years. Data from married adults ages 18 to 29 says that women are slightly more guilty of infidelity.

Despite popular opinion, in 2024, 75% of individuals and couples cited lack of commitment as the reason for their divorce.

This was the most common cause of a marriage ending, exceeding even infidelity.[1] So, we’re already off to a lousy start in selling the premises of Mate Switching Hypothesis (MSH).

But there has always been one missing piece of the puzzle when it comes to understanding mating strategies, especially among women. Why do women have so many affairs when these do not increase the number of offspring they can produce?

Now, we can get to the nuts and bolts of MSH. The base premise here is in error. The presumption is that mating strategies are validated according to pair bonding being the ultimate outcome. It prioritizes monogamy as the framework in which the Switching takes place.

This infidelity presupposes an established paired heterosexual relationship. It has nothing to say about the strategies employed to create that relationship in the first place.

From an evolutionary perspective, male infidelity is fairly straightforward. Men have evolved a strong desire for sexual variety, stronger than women’s on average, due to the large asymmetries in parental investment.

Men can reproduce with as little effort as it takes to inseminate a fertile woman. Women require a metabolically costly nine-month pregnancy to produce a single child. Stated differently, an ancestral married man with two children could have increased his reproductive output by 50 percent by a single successful reproduction with an affair partner.

Adding additional sex partners for women who already have one generally does not, and never could have, dramatically increased their reproductive success.

This is Red Pill 101. Eggs are expensive. Sperm is cheap. I will point out that Dr. Buss has always had a habit of reducing male sexuality to “Well, duh!” simplicity.

We all know men will fuck anything, are indiscriminate breeders, and need variety to feel like a man. So, what’s the point in trying to understand why men have sex?

Women are far more discriminating because their reproductive liabilities are much greater – at least when we lived in hunter-gatherer tribes on the Subsaharan African savannahs 200,000 years ago.

Yet women do have affairs, a phenomenon that, up until now, has been explained by the ‘good genes hypothesis’: the concept that women have evolved a dual mating strategy – securing investment from one man while mating on the side with men who have better genes than their regular partners.

This is where the inconsistencies begin with Dual Mating vs. Mate Switching hypotheses. The biggest conflict here is in the definitions of these hypotheses and how they are applied. Much, but not all, of these mischaracterizations are deliberate attempts to paint the Red Pill’s broadened definition of Hypergamy as something misunderstood by non-academics in the Red Pill.

Hypergamy in the Red Pill sense is distilled to ‘Alpha Fucks’ / ‘Beta Bucks.’ Don’t let the Red Pill jingoism throw you off here. Women seek a balance in a mate between genetic benefits (good genes) in short-term sexual strategies with long-term security/survival benefits in the same man.

Ideally, this is what women call the ‘complete package’: the man who combines physical arousal and a satisfying sexual experience with the provisioning, protection, and parental investment potential for long-term security and emotional investment.

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