What Women and Men Really Want in a Partner?

The common concept says that men seek for physical beauty in women, while women look for power and money. The typical men are from Mars and women from Venus. But a new research published in the "Journal of Personality and Social Psychology" shows that both sexes have the same romantic expectations.

The two psychologists at the Northwestern University say that no matter if you're a man or a woman, being attractive means being both physically and financially appealing.

The team has investigated the romantic lives of speed-dating subjects, for a month. There was a discrepancy between what volunteers said and did in choosing a romantic partner.

"True to the stereotypes, the initial self-reports of male participants indicated that they cared more than women about a romantic partner's physical attractiveness, and the women in the study stated more than men that earning power was an aphrodisiac," said lead author Paul Eastwick, a graduate student in psychology in the Weinberg School of Arts and Sciences, at Northwestern.

But the reality was that both sexes were interested in both issues.

"In other words good looks was the primary stimulus of attraction for both men and women, and a person with good earning prospects or ambition tended to be liked as well. Most noteworthy, the earning-power effect as well as the good-looks effect didn't differ for men and women," said Eli Finkel, assistant professor of psychology at Northwestern.

The subjects' interactions were based on quite different factors than those reported 10 days earlier, during the speed-dating event.

"We found that the romantic dynamics that occurred at the speed-dating event and during the following 30-day period had little to do with the sex-differentiated preferences stated on the questionnaires," said Finkel.

The results not only strengthen other researches, but they also point that people often cannot say why they do certain things, explaining them based on commonly cultural behavioral theories.

"(the study) leads us to question whether people know what they initially value in a romantic partner," said Eastwick.