After my post about people’s fondness for other people’s partners, (“Do Single Women Seek Attached Men?”), more than 300 Lab readers weighed in with their anecdotes and theories. Now here’s some more guidance from the expert who coined the term for this practice: mate poaching.

David Buss, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, is the author of many books, including the “Evolution of Desire,” the 1994 book that introduced the term “mate poaching,” and the forthcoming “Why Women Have Sex,” co-written with Cindy Meston. His paper with Dr. Meston about the 237 reasons for having sex inspired a most lively discussion here at the Lab last year.

Dr. Buss told me that he tried to come up with a less pejorative term than “mate poaching” but wasn’t able to find one. Here’s his reaction to the debate that’s been going on at the Lab, along with some findings about men who poach:

John Tierney’s piece on mate poaching clearly struck a powerful chord, evoking an amazing array of excellent insights and personal experiences. As someone who has published on the topic in articles and in books, I thought I’d add my two cents to the discussion.

A couple important distinctions are worth introducing. The first is the distinction between poaching for short-term sexual encounters versus poaching for more committed mateships. The first scientific study of mate poaching (Schmitt & Buss, 2001) found that substantially more men (60%) than women (38%) admitted to having attempted to poach an already mated person for a sexual encounter. The sex difference was smaller for long-term mate poaching, but still present—60% of the men and 53% of the women.

Similar sex differences have been discovered in the most massive cross-cultural study of mate poaching ever conducted [by my colleague David Schmitt], which involved 16,954 participants from 53 different countries. So although the study reported by Tierney highlighted the interesting finding for single women, available evidence suggests that men are more likely than women to mate poach, or more likely to admit to it, a sex difference especially pronounced for sexual liaisons.

Labels: committed relationships, gender differences

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