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so obvious I almost blush to write it, first you have to literally find a mate. Men’s greater spatial skills when it comes to things like map reading likely aided them in their search. Women, as the precious egg holders, could sit around and wait for suitors to show themselves, much like Amanda Wingfield with her eighteen gentlemen callers in The Glass Menagerie. For evidence of this in the animal world, you only need look at the humble vole. We are interested in two particular species, the pine vole and the meadow vole. Pine voles are monogamous. The males and the females have similar brains, and each sex does about the same when required to run through a maze. The meadow vole, however, is polygamous, and males have to cover much greater distances than the females because they have to visit the different burrows of their various female partners. Not only does a male meadow vole have a bigger hippocampus than the female, he also is much better at finding his way through a maze. This may finally explain men’s unwillingness to ask for help when lost. Before the age of GPS, the ability to find one’s way was probably one of the tests of a man’s genetic fitness.

Needless to say, there are some fairly obvious differences when it comes to sex and the brain. When researchers scanned the brains of people watching a neutral conversation between a man and a woman, the male brains immediately showed activity in the sexual areas, while the women’s brains did not. As Louann Brizendine aptly put it in her fascinating book The Female Brain, men have an eight-lane superhighway in their brains when it comes to sex, while women have an eight-lane superhighway when it comes to emotion. But it’s not just sex. It appears that men and women also tend to fall in love differently. For men in love, the visual areas of the brain are the most active, while for women a number of different areas are involved.

This confirms what we have already found about human behavior, but what is fascinating is how the female brain has developed in ways that help women counter the ferocious sex drives of men. This is where her greater facility with language and emotion come into play. As we have seen, men are perfectly willing to lie about themselves or about their commitment in order to have sex, so women have to be good at spotting that deception. And a number of studies have found that women are better at reading the facial expression and emotional nuances of an encounter. For example, in one study, men were able to pick up signs of sadness in a female face only 40 percent of the time, while women succeeded 90 percent of the time. Women’s brains are also designed to remember the emotional details of an encounter. So, even on the level of brain development, men and women appear to be locked in an evolutionary struggle, what Geoffrey Miller has called “a never-ending arms race of romantic skepticism and excess.” And women continually hone their abilities as well. As I discussed in the last chapter, researchers have found that women often have detailed talks decoding encounters with the opposite sex or analyzing the character of a man, while men tend not to talk about those things very much. This will hardly come as a shock—women, after all, flock to Sex and the City, while men tune in to Entourage.

One controversial theory is that autism might be the result of an overly masculinized brain. I don’t want to make light of a serious condition, but given the vast differences on average between men and women when it comes to dealing with the intricacies of human relationships, such as intuiting the emotions of another, I think many women might find it useful when dating and even in long-term relationships to think of most men as slightly autistic compared to women.

THE IMPORTANCE OF WAIST-TO-HIP RATIOS AND OTHER ODD METRICS OF ATTRACTION

Okay, so we have these big brains, but are they hardwired to look for certain things? The romantic story line says no, claiming that we are all unique and that love itself is as varied as a snowflake. In this view, beauty