Men and Women with Multiple Sex Partners Are Less Desirable as Long-term Mates

A not infrequent caricature of evolutionary psychology in social media and elsewhere is that men are genetically hardwired to always mate with multiple women, particularly younger women, and that there are alpha males out there (so-called “chads”) that dominate all sexual activity.

Everyone has heard the stories of the highly promiscuous alpha males (and sometimes alpha females): the rock stars, professional athletes, etc. My favorite is one I heard from my cleaning lady, who (at the time) had a grandson playing for the NFL. She found a picture of a naked woman with a phone number on it in his apartment when she was cleaning, and she confronted him about it. He told her that women regularly come by the bench while players were waiting to go on the field, handing out nude pictures of themselves with their phone numbers scrawled on them. When I relayed this story to a male colleague (another sociology professor), he noted that it wasn’t happening to him. The vast majority of people, of course, are like him: they live in the real world where this sort of thing doesn’t happen. 

Another caricature of evolutionary psychology is that men avoid women who have had multiple sex partners, but women do not do the same to men. Certainly in modern societies, there is sometimes a double-standard where men who sleep around are praised, and women who sleep around are denigrated. But psychology and behavior are different, and one of the first rules of evolutionary psychology is that context matters for behavior. As Rob Kurzban memorably put it: “evolutionary psychologists, biologists and, as far as I know, nearly everyone else, believes that organisms behave contingently on the environment and their own current state.” 

For humans, that environment includes their immediate situation and culture. Most men and women are not rock stars or professional athletes, nor do we live in a society where polygyny or polyandry are legal or generally condoned. Our culture—at least outwardly—condemns the double standard of sexual morality for men and women. But is it true that men prefer their future wives to have had fewer sexual partners, while women don’t care how many previous sexual partners their future husbands have had?

New research from 11 countries across five continents (Europe, North America, South America, Asia, and Australia) addresses this question, finding that the number of previous sexual partners matters for both men and women, and that this is influenced by the national culture. The study consisted of a total of 5,331 participants recruited for an on-line survey where they looked at images representing different sexual histories of prospective long-term mates. Each image had a set of vertical lines with one line equivalent to a past sexual partner. In the first task, participants were asked “How willing would you be to get involved in a long-term, committed relationship with someone whose full sexual history looked like ….? (here, they were shown images with sexual histories corresponding to 4, 12, or 36 prior partners). 

In line with previous research, the authors of the new study found that in contemporary societies all over the world, both men and women were less willing to enter into a committed long-term relationship with a person with a large number of previous sexual partners—and that the larger that number, the less willing they were to consider that person as a good long-term mate. While there were differences between countries in the size of this effect, in all countries, the more sex partners a person had in the past, the more negatively that person was judged as a good potential spouse. Further, there was little evidence that women were judged more harshly than men. 

Figure 1. The effect of the number of past sexual partners on the willingness to enter a long-term relationship with a prospective partner

Note: The effect of past partner number on willingness to enter a long-term relationship with a prospective partner. Panels (A–C) show results from studies 1 to 3 respectively. Bars reflect estimated marginal means with 95% CIs. Abbreviations reflect ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 country codes. Source: Andrew G. Thomas, et al., "Sexual Partner Number and Distribution Affect Long-term Partner Evaluation," Scientific Reports 15 (July 2025). 

National culture mattered most in the size of the effect, not in the nature. For example, people in the U.S. and Norway had a higher level of willingness (on average) to consider a person with four previous sexual partners as a potential long-term mate compared to people in Poland or China, likely reflecting a culture of less disapproval of premarital sex in the U.S. and Norway compared to Poland and China. But the pattern of less willingness to consider a person with 12 previous partners (compared to 4), and even less willingness to consider a person with 36 previous partners (compared to 12), was the same. In addition, men in China showed greater willingness to marry a woman with 12 or 36 previous sex partners than Chinese women (which likely reflects the context of severe male overrepresentation in the Chinese population due to the one-child policy and the traditional Chinese preference for a son). 

In contemporary societies all over the world, both men and women are less willing to enter into a committed long-term relationship with a person with a large number of previous sexual partners.

But context mattered in other ways. In a second task, the researchers showed participants a variety of images of a prospective mate’s sexual history ranging from a pattern where the number of their new sexual partners had increased sharply over time to a pattern where the number of their new sexual partners had decreased sharply over time. Participants were again asked how willing they would be to get involved in a long-term, committed relationship with someone whose full sexual history followed the pattern shown in each image. The study found that participants were more willing to consider a person as a long-term mate if he or she had many sexual partners in the past but the number had recently decreased sharply, and less willing to consider a person as a long-term mate if that person had new sexual partners on a regular basis—or if the number of sexual partners had recently increased. The size of this effect on their desirability as a long-term mate was not as big as the size of the effect of the number of previous sexual partners on desirability, but it was still medium-to-large in size.

This study found that across five continents, people were sensitive to the number of previous sexual partners a prospective mate has had, and that the more previous partners, the less desirable the person was as a spouse or long-term mate. Further, people were also sensitive to the pattern of past sexual behavior. A person with a large number of previous sexual partners in the distant past but not the present was judged more favorably than a person who had a large number of sexual partners more recently.

These findings make sense. To commit to a long-term relationship, most people want their future spouses to be trustworthy and faithful, and there are good reasons for this (trustworthy, faithful people are likely to make better parents of children, for instance). Further, past behavior is the best guide to future behavior. If a potential partner has not been sexually promiscuous in the past, it is likely he or she will continue to behave that way in the future. If the person has been sexually promiscuous in the past but no longer behaves that way, it is also likely that he or she will continue to be non-promiscuous in the future. However, if that person has both a history of promiscuity and is getting more promiscuous over time, that person is unlikely to be a faithful mate and is likely to have other traits that are undesirable. Such people are best avoided in a committed relationship by both men and women (exceptions may be given to rock stars and professional athletes).

Rosemary L. Hopcroft is Professor Emerita of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She is the author of Evolution and Gender: Why it matters for contemporary life (Routledge 2016), editor of The Oxford Handbook of Evolution, Biology, & Society (Oxford, 2018), and author (with Martin Fieder and Susanne Huber) of Not So Weird After All: The Changing Relationship Between Status and Fertility (Routledge, 2024).