Since the beginning of the history of humanity, women and men have always been dependent to each other due to undeniable natural reasons and cultural and social reasons. As these reasons and every part of human life have changed for ages, the strategies and preferences that form in people’s lives have changed too. The main reason for the necessity of mating between women and men is the physiology and biology of humans and the need of reproduction. There are many other factors that change during time and differ among societies and individuals. Humans’ have been evolving and during this process new mating preferences and strategies come along while some get eliminated.
In history, various theories were proposed; Freud proposed that humans seek for the characteristics of their opposite-sex partner, Winch proposed that humans’ are in the pursuit of complimentary, that they want their partners to have the characteristics they don’t have and many others offered theories in contrast with Winch, that humans’ want to have partners that have similar characteristics with them. Some of these theories had supports, some were nearly disproved but these theories all offered explanations that have a common point; that the purpose is to find someone who matches a criterion. However, they were all lacking the reason that comes in the first place, the source of the motivation that shapes humans’ mating preferences and strategies (Buss & Schmitt, 1993). In order to explain this, so many theories and predictions can be made, but the most ostensible ones are the short-term, long-term approaches and the differences between women and men’s mating preferences and strategies.
Men and women show differences in many components of the concept of mating, however the need of reproduction is a common thing. Both males and females want to have sexually healthy partners who are able to perform the most basic function of sexual intercourse. The reason is