“Hey DDD, men will sleep with anything? Right?🐷” Oh boy! That’s a view I’ve heard many times before. Like a lot of folk psychology, there’s a tiny kernel of truth🌽here that's blown way out of proportion. And I think I know what it is… [1/17]

First of all: There's a full spectrum of mating pickiness both sexes. Men so picky they never lose their virginity and women with unusually low standards. There’s a lot of noise and variation. Thus, we should be sceptical about neat black and white🐧claims about the sexes. [2/17]

That being said, there are often patterns to be found in the noise. Enough to draw some conclusions about the *typical* mating behaviour of each sex, but not enough to predict the behaviour of individuals with a high degree of accuracy. [3/17]

One of those patterns appears to be that more men than women “lower their standards” when it comes to sex. But, and here’s the important part, it’s in a particular context: short-term mating. [4/17]

Humans, by and large are pair-bonded mammals. From megacities to small bands of hunter gatherers, humans seek a special partner to fall in love💕and share their life with. And as far as we know, this has been the case thousands (perhaps millions) of years. [5/17]

Today on Darwin Does Dating. Love may be blind but it stills sees quite well. Surely that's a contradiction? How we evolved to doublethink about our partners. A thread! [1/15]

When judging the qualities of our partner, people tend to see the best in them, thinking of them as smarter, sexier, and funnier than they really are. Relationship psychologists call this “mean level bias”. We see our partner through rose tinted glasses.🌹👓[2/15]

At the same time, people tend to have a really accurate view of the relative strengths and weaknesses of their partner. They’re able to recognize when they are stronger than they are funnier, smarter than patient, and so on. This is often called “tracking accuracy”. [3/15]

So, there’s an elephant in the room here🐘. People appear to both hold accurate and inaccurate views of their significant other. A bit reminiscent of Orwell’s “doublethink” in 1984 - the idea that people can learn to sit comfortably with contradiction in their heads. [4/15]

Dig deeper and we find that these two judgments appear to have different functions in relationships. Let’s start with mean-level bias. First of all, it’s quite variable, and much larger among those satisfied with their relationships (at least in the early stages). [5/15]