Describe and evaluate research relating to the formation and/or maintenance of relationships

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Describe and evaluate research relating to the formation and/or maintenance of relationships

From an evolutionary perspective, we choose a partner, and hence form a relationship, by assessing how useful they will be for the purposes of reproduction and survival. For example, it is predicted that males look for youthfulness and a low waist-hip ratio (Singh, 1993) in women as they are indications of fertility and health. As male fertility has little dependence on age, females may seek older and stronger men as they would be fertile and able to offer protection for them and their children. Evidence for this comes from Dunbar (1995) who, in a study of lonely hearts advertisements, women sought resources and offered good looks, and men offered resources and sought good looks. Singh (1993, 1994) developed a set of line drawings of women with different waste-hip ratios (WHR) and found that men typically preferred a low WHR of about 0.7. This study was criticised for lacking mundane realism as they were just line drawings, but Henss (2000) found, when using real-life photographs of women which were altered computationally to represent different WHRs, that 0.7 was still the preferred ratio.

Theories suggest that, although interpersonal