Why We Want What We Want: Love, Sex & Evolution

Evolutionary biology holds the keys to understanding modern dating, attraction, and relationship dynamics. In this episode of Daily Practice with Benita, we explore how reproductive asymmetry and parental investment theory shape our mate preferences—and how awareness can transform these primal patterns into a conscious, sacred connection.

🔍 What you'll learn:
• Why women evolved to be more selective, seeking partners with resources, protection, and stability
• Why men prioritize youth and fertility signals—think “Leonardo DiCaprio effect”
• How strip clubs reveal core truths about sexual selection and value exchange
• The biological roots of male jealousy (paternity uncertainty & mate guarding)
• The emotional and economic roots of female jealousy (resource redirection)
• Why age-gap relationships may have evolutionary logic—but ethical complexity
• How the mismatch between erotic desire and domestic stability challenges modern marriage
• What Esther Perel teaches us about passion, safety, and the human longing for more
• How understanding our instincts can help us love from choice, not just chemistry

Whether you're navigating dating, long-term love, or inner conflict, this episode will help you decode what’s driving attraction and jealousy—and how to meet it with clarity and compassion.

✨ Let’s Stay Connected:
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🙏 If this episode resonated with you, please leave a review and share it with someone you love.

📚 Research References & Sources

1. Buss, D. M. (2003). The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating

2. Trivers, R. L. (1972). Parental Investment and Sexual Selection

3. Buss, D. M. (2000). The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy Is as Necessary as Love and Sex.

4. Goetz, A. T., & Shackelford, T. K. (2006). Mate guarding in humans: Evidence of its evolutionary function
 

5. Gangestad, S. W., & Simpson, J. A. (2000). The evolution of human mating: Trade-offs and strategic pluralism
 

6. Perel, E. (2006). Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence

Chapters

• 0:01 Introduction to Evolutionary Dating
• 3:15 Sexual Selection Science Explained
• 7:24 Reproductive Asymmetry Between Sexes
• 11:04 Modern Dating Dynamics & Leo DiCaprio
• 16:32 Strip Clubs as Mate Selection Microcosms
• 19:01 Male vs Female Sexual Jealousy
• 25:37 Sacred Connection in Modern Marriage
• 32:57 Invitation to Conscious Relationships

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

Hello everybody and welcome back to the Daily Practice with me, benita. Today's topic is how evolutionary biology shapes mate preferences, collides with modern dating and invites us to cultivate conscious and sacred love. So this episode has been inspired by some of the conversations or disagreements or even arguments I've had on X recently and it seems like the manosphere and the red pill, whatever men and trad wives, or only fans, girls, and everybody's talking about. Okay, who are we in relation to the other sex? Who are we supposed to be as men and women, trying to make it a good experience for everybody and ourselves in the modern world. And to move forward with this, we need to recognize that dating, marrying and having families and just existing in today's world is a wild mix of primal instincts, societal pressures and also a soul-level yearning to share our lives with a loving partner and to live a harmonious life where we feel connected through family, through partnership. So that's what we're diving into this messy, beautiful intersection. So in this episode I'm going to talk about how strip clubs are like a microcosm of our mating strategies or how they highlight in, I guess, a perverted or distorted version of the mating preferences or mating strategies of men and women. Also we're going to look at how male and female sexual jealousy differ. How male and female sexual jealousy differ. We're going to look at how certain pop culture items like Beyonce music highlights how women feel when they get cheated on and what that feels like for the wife, and how would that be? How is that different for the husband or the partner of a woman who's cheating, and what the difference is and why that is important in when we're dating or living together with another person, another human, and how this understanding can help us actually live more consciously and have more loving, understanding and nurturing relationships. So first we're going to just lay out the science or biology or evolutionary psychology of sexual selection.

Speaker 1: 3:31

This is actually something I really enjoyed studying and writing about at university, so I've done extensive research on mate selection criteria, mating preferences and the like at the University of Glasgow and it's pretty interesting and wild and eye-opening to really start understanding what the evolutionary drives are when it comes to dating, marriage, infidelity, reproduction and all those things. So really my favorite essay at university was actually titled Do Men and Women have Fundamentally Conflicting Mating Preferences? And my answer was yes and I actually then heavily drew on this research by David Buss. It's called the evolution of desire, published in 2003, and he found that women prioritize resources, or potential for accruing resources, stability, ambition, intelligence, emotional availability and protection and, I guess, loyalty to some extent and whereas men's priorities in mate selection include youth, fertility cues and beauty, which is kind of the same thing. Fertility cues include waist to hip ratio, facial symmetry, clear skin, health, signs of health and well-being.

Speaker 1: 5:15

Okay, so why is this? Because women have a higher reproductive cost. I, we carry children. We are pregnant for almost a year, and then, if you breastfeed your child which I think you should you might be tied to your newborn for another year or two or three, however long you choose to nurse. I chose to nurse, for instance, for two and a half years, and that's how long I was with my baby, all day, around the clock, no exceptions. Okay, this is what drives selectivity. Why are women so picky? Because we need somebody who's going to be there for us, providing and protecting, for at least three years per child. Okay, so that's why women are more selective.

Speaker 1: 6:10

Men, on the other hand, by default have a lower investment, parental investment. They can stick it in for a couple of minutes, shoot a load and disappear if they so choose. Okay, luckily, most men don't do that because women have selected for stable, loyal and good providers. So men have realized that it is actually in the best interest of their offspring to be able to provide and protect the infant mother dyad. But it still remains that, evolutionarily speaking, the biology is such that men are looking for fertility signals, fertility cues, and if they can have sex with as many women as possible young, beautiful women and even if they don't stick around, the chances are that the mother will somehow figure it out and take care of the kid. So their progeny will be more prevalent in the next generation. And that's evolution, that's biology, that's what our bodies want. So let's highlight a little bit more this reproductive asymmetry aspect. For more information or research regarding this, you can look into Robert Trivers' parental investment theory from 1972. So he agrees that the sex with the greater parental investment, so he agrees that the sex with the greater parental investment women is choosier, whereas the other man will compete for access to women. So what are the implications of this? It means that, for women, fucking down is fucking up, because you as a woman, have something that the men want, which is a womb. You are the one who says yes or no, who gets to enter and who gets to have their genes in the next generation.

Speaker 1: 8:21

Of course, like I got reminded on X by some man-hating men, is that, like a lot of the times in history, women didn't really have a say. There was a lot of arranged or forced marriages and rape throughout history. And well, we could go into a whole other conversation about how maybe some fantasies or kinks about, like rough sex or rape fantasies may actually go back to women having to find ways to enjoy forced penetration. Okay, but that's a whole other conversation. That's a whole other conversation. But the point is that in societies, in cultures where women have a say which we do in modern the West at least, mostly is that it makes sense for women to be choosy and date up. Is that it makes sense for women to be choosy and date up?

Speaker 1: 9:25

We want a guy who has more resources, is taller, is richer, is more intelligent and better than us in every way, so that actually our offspring can inherit those things as well. Things as well, because men want like okay. So there's a quote women choose their man from the men that choose her. So that's it. Yeah, it's our job to be picky and it's our job to choose what gets propagated, what characteristics, genetics will be present in the future generations, and that's not necessarily selfish. That is actually on a species level. We got to be picky so we don't end up in a world full of losers okay there, losers, okay there.

Speaker 1: 10:25

Whereas men can be more indiscriminate because they can produce as much sperm as you know they although actually that's another conversation. Obviously, sperm count, sperm motility, sperm health has been going down, down down in the modern era, and that's a whole other thing. But in theory, in principle, you know, shooting a load in any girl that walks by is a good strategy for most men. Of course there's been like legal protections put in place so that these men actually would have to be responsible for their children equally, but that's a whole other conversation. I'm just talking about biology now. Children equally, but that's a whole other conversation. I'm just talking about biology now.

Speaker 1: 11:07

So obviously this is reflected in modern dating dynamics, and examples such as Leonardo DiCaprio highlight this again in a very extreme way. So Leo is a man who is very, very successful, very high status, and he's getting to be 50 plus years old, but he doesn't seem to date anybody below the age of 25. And women in their 30s, 40s or whatever are like outraged. But this is obvious. Why would he be with somebody who's probably at the end of their fertility window or already past it, somebody his own age, when, with his level of status, he obviously has access to anybody he likes? So it's pure biology. He is doing the natural thing, which is swapping out girlfriends as soon as they turn 25 or whatever. For more detail about this, I'm going to link a Forbes article about his dating timeline. But yeah, it's like just a reflection of evolved preferences.

Speaker 1: 12:23

And this is where women who have been brainwashed or being taught that okay, no, like you know, you do your career first, you do this and then think about kids, and then, when you hit 30, 35, 40, and you still haven't found a husband because you've prioritized your career, then you're mad that there are no good men left. Well, obviously because they want women who are young and fertile and beautiful, not to say that older women can't be beautiful and also I do believe that actually older women are very able to still have successful pregnancies and very healthy children and they can be very, very good and effective and loving and actually more mature as parents as well, but obviously, evolutionarily speaking, it makes sense for guys to go for younger women if they are able to. So then if a successful woman in her 30s or 40s wants a man who's her equal in success and maybe material success or whatever else like she's going to struggle, because this is another thing that men tend to cluster more at the extremes of the standard distribution. So you'll have more men who are like top performing. Then you have an equal number of men who are kind of like at the bottom, who are so-called losers or don't have much going for them, whether it's looks or status or resources or intelligence or whatever these other things that women look for in a mate, whereas women tend to be clustered more towards the middle of the standard distribution. So there are more pretty good women that want a really good guy and they don't want to settle for a shitty guy. So that's where it comes from, and these highly successful men will not want just one average woman. He can actually have access to 10 of them, because women will even tend to want to share, even be on the so-called rotation for a top dog, okay, a guy who is highly successful and attractive, than just have one loser to herself. So therefore, okay, that's why polygamy has existed and still does in many societies, because women are better off sharing a high-status man than just have one loser to themselves, because that way they are actually more secure and their offspring will more likely be provided for. Because that guy like we're living in an era where there's more millionaires, more billionaires, more highly highly successful men than ever before. So you'd rather get a guy who can share some of that with you than somebody who is some kind of incel loser.

Speaker 1: 16:03

Okay, that sounds harsh, but that's what it is very crystallized, albeit a little bit perverted example of these dynamics, which is the strip club. It is like a microcosm of mate preferences or sexual selection. These are spaces where young women display fertility, cues, beauty, youth, you know all of those things, and older often might be younger, but often older men trade resources for the attention of these young, beautiful, attractive women, and this is just a dynamic that is kind of an amplification or, yeah, crystallization of these evolutionary patterns. It's just what it is and it's not to say that it's like an appropriate thing or a right thing, but here we can see what is valued by men and what is valued by women. Women want status, resources, a provider, and men want attention from pretty girls. It's obvious, right and obviously OK. Then we have even more in the modern day, like OnlyFans, which is an even more perverted thing about how OnlyFans, especially in our new era of AI, is even more crazy and perverted because you have actual AI-generated images or videos of so-called young hot girls that men want to look at or have the attention from, but they're actually generated by lonely dudes just like them. So that's the crazy thing.

Speaker 1: 18:27

And here we could also go into another kind of side note about jealousy and sexual jealousy specifically, and this relates to the strip club also and to OnlyFans and porn. So, especially in the case of OnlyFans or the strip club, where money is exchanged or attention or images or whatever of these young women are there and they are there in exchange for resources or money, financial gain for the at least presumed female. So I would argue and I tweeted this, I wrote a post on x about this that it's often not the case that a woman will be mad at the guy for looking at other women at the strip club or on porn or OnlyFans or whatever, but it's actually often about the resource exchange. This is like you are investing your finances into another woman, and that's where the betrayal is, and that's where the betrayal is. So this is especially interesting because male sexual jealousy is more about mate guarding and it comes from paternity uncertainty and like the concealed ovulation in women. So men that are intimate with a woman, that are having sexual relations with a woman, will tend to be highly, highly possessive of that woman, especially if they're investing resources into her ie spending money taking out for dinners, paying for rent, whatever it is Because if she is in contact with other men, he might also be intimate with her and in that case the providing boyfriend, husband, whatever the first dude will not be able to know whose baby it is. Therefore, he has to keep tabs on his bitch. Means that he needs to know what she's doing, where she is, who she's like hanging out with, because if she's intimate with another guy, he might be cucked. And this is what it is.

Speaker 1: 21:06

Cuckoo. This is where the word cuck comes from, by the way. It's not like a weird porn thing. Originally. A cuck is someone who gets the same treatment like cuckoo. The bird does. Okay.

Speaker 1: 21:20

Cuckoo, the bird lays its egg in other birds' nests and the other birds will take care of the eggs, and that's the strategy of a cuckoo. Okay, that's why, if you're a cuck, you're being cuckooed, meaning that you're letting some other dude have sex with your girl, get her pregnant and you're going to take care of the baby. That means cuck, right. So this is the risk that men run when they're in a relationship, and if they're investing into a female, they are primed to make sure that if that lady gets pregnant, that the baby will be his Right, and that's why male sexual jealousy is different to women. Okay. So what is the female sexual jealousy? This is what I already briefly mentioned in the context of the strip club.

Speaker 1: 22:29

Women don't get pissed off because their dude is like looking at other women, or that might also be irritating or might be triggering, but often the underlying thing is that, like, is he gonna invest his resources into that other girl? That money, support, loyalty belongs to me, okay. So as an example of this, we can listen to Beyonce. Okay, I don't like Beyonce anymore. I've come to realize that a lot of this pop music is actually brainwashing and programming and that she's some kind of high witch priestess whose role is to well, I don't even know exactly what, but I don't trust it. Okay, that's my point. But anyways, her song Ring the Alarm is perfect here.

Speaker 1: 23:26

It captures the raw fear of losing emotional and material investment to another woman. So she goes. She gonna profit everything I taught if I let you go. I don't want you, but I want it and I can't let it go. She, she gonna take everything I own if I let you go. She gonna be rocking chinchilla coats if I let you go. So it's not about the dude, necessarily. It's not about the body you know about of the person. It's about she's losing the investment from her mate, that there's a rage and a fear of an other woman reaping the rewards of her emotional labor, the shared dreams and life and future with that person and, like I said, even and I think especially the material gains like luxury lifestyle, chinchilla coats built over several years of commitment.

Speaker 1: 24:32

So women's jealousy often centers on emotional betrayal and the loss of both tangible and intangible investments. So I think this is a really key thing to understand in relationships that both sexes have jealousy, but the triggers of that jealousy are different and it's about biology. It's about what we look for in a mate. The man wants your sexuality, your fertility. As a woman, we look for a provider and a protector and emotional loyalty and support. That's where the betrayal is for us. So how does this look in love, marriage and actually fostering some kind of sacred connection? So if we look at the difference between historical and modern marriage, like it's really really different, because historically marriage was often about survival, alliances and a function of it was like a financial arrangement. It wasn't about falling in love or having a soul connection with somebody, because what's happened is that today we expect one partner our husband or wife to fulfill a lot of different roles a soulmate, a co-parent, a therapist. You know we want a sexual connection but then also want somebody who, who's there for us in the everyday grind of like keeping the family going and all this stuff. And this really creates a lot of tension.

Speaker 1: 26:31

And I think one author that has really succinctly and effectively highlighted these problems is a relationship and sexual therapist. I think she's from Belgium, called Esther Perel. She wrote a book called Mating in Captivity and she highlights the fact that sexual fantasy, which is often driven by biology, clashes with long-term compatibility, which is about emotional safety and shared values. So I think maybe the title of that book requires a little bit more reflection. So, mating in captivity is like where we are domesticated, in a sense, and we come to these arrangements, marriages, you know households where we're expected to be a certain way and then we still expect to have the spark or the desire for our partner, who is also supposed to be our emotional support and is going to help us take the garbage out, and oh hey, okay, we need to pay the phone bill Like that's not sexy, okay. How do we keep that desire alive in those situations? Well, one of the things we can do is like understanding our desires.

Speaker 1: 28:01

Okay, why do marriages work or not? You know, it's actually like being honest about who you are as a being, that what are you actually attracted to, and then creating that in the relationship. So she highlights things like there needs to be a certain distance for you to desire something. If you yoked or become one with your husband or wife in every sense, then it's really hard to like want them because you already got them and you're maybe going to the bathroom with your door open. That's not sexy, ok, you need to. There needs to be an element of mystery of desire, and that's why, like the whole thing with this affair that I mentioned earlier, where the it's like high performing CEO ends up cheating with somebody at work. It's not that, like his wife or whatever wasn't like the right person for him, but it's like the other thing was just more interesting, more novel, more exciting. And there was that tension of like okay, we're doing something naughty or it's like it's it's.

Speaker 1: 29:19

It's a natural desire in in long-term relationships to have excitement. And when you as a wife, become almost like taken for granted, or as a husband, like the natural desire is to like get, find the thing that you were at the beginning of the relationship, which is exciting and new and something to look forward to, instead of being there nagging or whatever. And I think we are all to some extent guilty of that. And actually for men and for women, like understanding that we will be attracted to other people, we will have connections with other people throughout. Say, if you're married for 10 years, 20 years, 30, 50 years, like you will look at other people and be like, oh damn, they're hot. Or hey, I would like to like get to know that person better. But then as a couple, actually being honest about that and deciding is this something we want to act on or no, like okay, yeah, I get it. Like, oh, that that's like something, but you choose not to. Maybe, or maybe you do and maybe that's okay for your relationship.

Speaker 1: 30:38

Actually, the same author, esther Perel, that's how I found out about her initially was actually. The same author, esther Perel that's how I found out about her initially was I think it was in the New Yorker. She published an article called in defense of adulterers and there she argued that a lot of long-term marriages don't last despite infidelity, but because of it, that because there was this lapse or there was a certain adventure that one of the partners went on, just to come back to remember why they chose their partner or husband or wife in the. So, yeah, it's about discerning what's our biological drives, desires, lust, versus our true intentions. Are we chasing a dopamine hit of validation, of excitement, of adventure, or are we in the business of building a real, lasting love and marriage? So what is it all about then? About moving forward, and how can we be our best selves when we're dating or when we're in our relationships or married or whatever?

Speaker 1: 32:04

Is remembering that love is something that we do and it's a choice and this is actually I said recently is that if you are married just because if you're married to a person because you didn't have any other options, then that's not really anything Like marriage is only worth something if you both had other options but you chose each other and you continue to choose each other. You chose each other and you continue to choose each other, like you came together because you're willing to put in the work, you're willing to look at the messy stuff, you're willing to grow together and keep choosing each other every day and keep choosing each other every day. So are we able to recognize our triggers, recognize our biology, recognize the evolutionary drives, but can we look at that stuff? See it's there? Look at that stuff, see it's there. But then from our hearts and our frontal lobes, you know, keep choosing to create a sacred connection of love.

Speaker 1: 33:39

So I would like to emphasize right now that none of this is justification for toxic behavior, for infidelity, for raging jealousy on either side or saying that dropping your wife of 20 years for younger is morally acceptable or desirable. But it's just like recognizing those drives and being human, being aware of what kind of creatures we are and where we come from and how these things have come to be, and then maybe still choosing to rise above and, you know, also being aware of the fact that maybe age gap relationships are the way to go and that maybe having a husband who is 10 or 5 or even 15 years older than you are might be a good strategy for women, for multiple reasons. Yeah, anyways, this is not dating advice. This is just me wanting to share some of these concepts from evolutionary psychology, how they manifest in our society, pop culture, our lives, and how being more and more aware of these things and making our choices accordingly and staying in our center and not trying to fight it or getting mad because somebody picked a younger girlfriend or somebody cheated on somebody like just looking at, okay, yeah, those are the drives. But can we be better people? Can we be who we are meant to be?

Speaker 1: 35:38

And maybe for some people it means unconventional relationships. So, and maybe for some people it means unconventional relationships. So sexual selection in many ways does shape our desires, but we have the power to transform it into something sacred and something different. So this is just an invitation into look at all this stuff, look at all these patterns or drives with curiosity and compassion, and maybe this is something you want to bring into your daily practice. Maybe you're writing in your journal this evening and you want to think about what are the things that drive my attraction, how can I feel safer in my nervous system when it comes to relationships, mate preferences, what is really the thing that I yearn for and what kind of love do I wish to cultivate there? Okay, I guess this was maybe a lot for some. I probably made it clear that this is something I'm very, very interested in, very, very passionate about, so please do join the conversation on.

Speaker 1: 37:08

If you're watching on YouTube or listening on YouTube, drop a comment and let me know what you think about these things. Do you agree, do you disagree? And obviously, please do subscribe to this podcast, my YouTube channel, daily practice with benita like, and if you're whatever platform you're listening on, reviews mean so much, so please do leave a review. And also, I have recently opened up my Patreon, so if you do want to support or join the community, there you are so so, very, very welcome. There are different tiers of support and I think that's going to be a really beautiful place of exchange and community and joy of just being a messy human.

Speaker 1: 38:12

And, of course, I will continue to post also short practice videos on YouTube every Friday morning. Practice videos on YouTube every Friday morning. So, again, subscribe to get a notification about those too. And, as always, I am active on X and please do reach out there as well if you want, and maybe shoot me a DM or drop a comment about the kind of topics you'd want to hear about. So, yeah, on each platform it's Daily Practice with Benita. And yeah, thank you for joining me today and I'll be back next week with some more.