Essentials: How Humans Select & Keep Romantic Partners in the Short & Long Term | Dr. David Buss

Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. And now my conversation with Dr. David Buss. Well, David, delighted to be here.

Excited to ask you a number of questions about these super interesting topics about how people select mates. Just to start off, perhaps you could just orient us a little bit about mate choice, you know, some of the primary criteria that studies show. men and women use in order to select mates, transient mates as well as lifetime mates. Right. Well that's a critical distinction because what people look for in a long-term committed mateship like a marriage partner or a long-term romantic relationship is different from what people look for in a hookup or casual sex.

So that's actually critical. I wonder if we could maybe just back up a second and just talk a little bit about the theoretical framework. for understanding mate choice, it basically stems from Darwin's theory of sexual selection. Darwin noticed that there were phenomena that couldn't be explained by this so-called survival selection. So he came up with the theory of sexual selection, which deals not with the evolution of characteristics due to their survival advantage, but rather due to their mating advantage.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (36 minutes, 5,747 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 10 episodes for $5, and monthly plans are cheaper still.