How Contemporary Society Breeds Confusion, Not Connection
The Conditional Logic of Human Mating
Human mating runs on conditional logic. Robert Trivers laid this out in 1972 with his theory of parental investment: any cost a parent bears that increases one offspring’s survival chances at the expense of investing in other offspring. The sex that invests more—typically the one with the larger initial gamete investment—becomes the choosier sex. The sex that invests less competes for access to the investing sex.
That’s the baseline. From there, things get interesting.
Trivers understood that parental investment isn’t binary. It’s a spectrum, and the optimal strategy depends on ecological conditions. Gangestad and Simpson’s strategic pluralism model picks up where Trivers left off. Their central claim is that both men and women evolved conditional mating strategies guided by cues signaling the circumstances. When conditions favor it, short-term mating can be successful. For some men, many short-term matings might produce more surviving offspring than a single long-term investment. For others, finding one mate and investing heavily in rearing her offspring is the better bet.
The key word is conditional. These aren’t fixed types. They’re responses to cues. Parental care availability, resource abundance, danger—all of these shift the weighting between mating effort and parental effort.
What Contemporary Society Does to Those Cues
Contemporary society has flooded the system with contradictory cues. Short-term mating is easier than it’s ever been—dating apps, urban density, delayed marriage, economic precarity—while the stakes on parental investment have risen. The result is strategic paralysis. People cycle between scripts without committing to either, because the environment keeps signaling that both are viable, and neither is fully rewarded.
Mate competition isn’t a metaphor. It’s a biological market. When there’s an imbalance between available mates and competitors, the market tightens. Shackelford’s work on intrasexual competition shows that women have historically benefited from competing with same-sex rivals to acquire and retain desired mates, and that this competition takes both direct and indirect forms—physical attractiveness enhancement, social maneuvering, reputation management. The costs of losing are real: wasted time, wasted effort, social victimization. The same logic applies to men, though the tactics differ.
Competition isn’t pathology. It’s the market clearing mechanism. The problem is that our current mating market has been engineered to maximize competition while minimizing the conditions that make long-term investment viable.
The Design of the Modern Mating Market
Dating apps concentrate mating effort into a high-frequency, low-commitment channel. They reward novelty-seeking and rapid evaluation. They optimize for the swipe, not the bond. That’s not a moral failure of the apps. It’s a design feature that aligns perfectly with short-term mating psychology. But it does so at the expense of the cues that would normally signal long-term investment potential.
The critical variable is that digitized mate selection artificially inflates the perceived size of the mating market. By removing the constraints that historically moderated mate choice—limited partner pools, the effort required for courtship to proceed—online platforms allow mating preferences to manifest at their logical extremes. Users are not merely presented with more options; they are presented with a global “leaderboard” of desirability that renders mate value indicators highly salient and compresses millions of potential partners into a single ranked comparison set.
This perceived abundance produces hyper-competition. When the market appears infinite, the opportunity cost of commitment rises. The research confirms the behavioral consequence: evaluating higher numbers of profiles decreases acceptance rates and increases perceived partner choice overload. The competition intensifies because everyone is competing for attention within a global, ranked hierarchy. Women’s evolved selectivity concentrates attention on a small set of highly desirable men, leaving the vast majority overlooked, while men must send large numbers of messages to secure even minimal reciprocation. The asymmetries result in large-scale hypergamy, with the top tier facing abundant alternatives and reduced incentives to commit.
Meanwhile, the economic conditions that once supported long-term parental investment—stable employment, affordable housing, community support—have eroded. Gangestad and Simpson’s conditional logic predicts that when resources are scarce and unpredictable, short-term mating becomes more attractive. Not because people are shallow, but because the future is uncertain, and the best strategy under uncertainty is to keep options open. The mating market isn’t broken. It’s responding rationally to irrational conditions—conditions that have been engineered to maximize competitive pressure while minimizing the structural supports that make long-term investment viable.
Parental Investment as a Function, Not a Virtue
The evolutionary function of parental investment is to keep offspring alive long enough to reproduce. That’s the function. It serves a role. And that role doesn’t disappear when a relationship ends.
Divorcees and single parents aren’t failures of the mating system. They’re running a different configuration of the same system: parental investment decoupled from pair-bonding. The parental role is committed to first. Mating effort continues on a separate track. These two tracks can overlap. They can diverge. They can conflict. But the parental commitment, once made, is functionally primary.
A person who engages in short-term mating while remaining committed to offspring from a prior relationship is not a hypocrite. They are executing a mating strategy that balances mating effort against parental effort in a context where pair-bonding is no longer the organizing principle. The biology doesn’t care about your moral framework. The biology cares about opportunity costs and reproductive fitness.
The Real Dysfunction
The real dysfunction isn’t short-term mating. It isn’t long-term mating. It isn’t even the tension between them. It’s that we’ve stripped away the stable cues that would normally tell a person which strategy to weight.
We’ve created a mating environment that is simultaneously hyper-competitive and commitment-resistant, resource-abundant in terms of sexual access and resource-scarce in terms of long-term partnership viability. The engineered abundance of the digital mating market inflates perceived choice, which intensifies competition, which raises the perceived cost of commitment, which pushes more people toward short-term strategies, which reinforces the perception that no one is committing. The system is getting contradictory signals, and it’s producing contradictory behavior.
The fix isn’t to return to some imagined past where everyone paired up at twenty and stayed together forever. That past didn’t exist for most people, and it wouldn’t work now even if it had. The fix is to recognize that mating strategies are conditional, that parental investment is a function rather than a virtue, and that the health of a mating system depends on the coherence of its cues.
Right now, the cues are incoherent. The market feels infinite. The hyper-competition makes commitment feel like surrender. People are doing their best to navigate a market that’s been rigged against clarity. That’s not a crisis of morality. It’s a crisis of signal. And signals can be fixed.
References
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Gangestad, S. W., & Simpson, J. A. (2000). The evolution of human mating: Trade-offs and strategic pluralism. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 23(4), 573-587.
Iyengar, S. S., & Lepper, M. R. (2000). When choice is demotivating: Can one desire too much of a good thing? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79(6), 995-1006.
Pronk, T. M., & Denissen, J. J. A. (2020). A rejection mind-set: Choice overload in online dating. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 11(3), 388-396.
Schwartz, B. (2004). The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less. Harper Perennial.
Shackelford, T. K. (2022). Female intrasexual competition. In The Cambridge Handbook of Evolutionary Perspectives on Sexual Psychology. Cambridge University Press.
Thomas, M. F., Binder, A., & Matthes, J. (2025). Decision-making on dating apps: Is swiping more less and swiping right wrong? Media Psychology, 1-22.
Trivers, R. L. (1972). Parental investment and sexual selection. In B. Campbell (Ed.), Sexual Selection and the Descent of Man, 1871-1971. Aldine.