Love Matters: Why Waiting for Mr. Right Not Prudent

The wait for the perfect partner is at odds with our evolutionary past, a new study claims.

According to News.com, primitive humans too faced crisis when they were forced to choose between a partner available and waiting for their Mr. Right given the odds of finding him. If they chose to wait, they risked never finding a mate. The researches programmed digital organisms to simulate the human thinking process in primitive communities only to find that humans were risk averse, preferring to mate with the partner available at hand and not risk the long haul.

"Primitive humans were likely forced to bet on whether or not they could find a better mate. They could either choose to mate with the first, potentially inferior, companion and risk inferior offspring, or they could wait for Mr. or Ms. Perfect to come around," he said. If they chose to wait, they risk never mating," said Chris Adami, professor at Michigan State University and the study's co-author, in a news release.

The key factor that influenced decision-making was community size, Daily Mail reports. Computer studies conducted showed that smaller communities prompted individuals to be more risk averse. Humans were known to live in small communities of about 150 people, with scarce resources.

"We found that it is really the group size, not the total population size, which matters in the evolution of risk aversion," Arende Hintze, another co-author said.

Researchers concluded that not all individuals developed risk aversion to the same degree with some individuals being less risk-averse than others which meant they took bigger risks. Such behaviour exists even today.