How to be a Successful Homewrecker

Poaching is something we tend to associate either with Victorian street urchins who nicked a rabbit or two and were transported for life to Australia, or those who chop off elephant’s tusks to make penis medicine for the lucrative Chinese penis medicine market.

But attractiveness researchers have co-opted the term poacher to mean something that the rest of us already have a word for: homewrecker. Not being fans of loaded terms, scientists decided to replace homewrecking with another, pretty much identically loaded term. Anyway, mate poaching it is.

It’s clear that some people mate poach morning, noon and night, while others wouldn’t dream of it. And it’s also obvious that some are more attractive to poachers than others. So, what are the reasons for these differences? How can we tell who’s likely to poach, and who’s likely to be poached?

Shafik Sunderani and colleagues from McMaster University in Canada recruited 150 men and women for a study of poaching. The research participants completed a barrage of questionnaires, including items on submissiveness, sex drive, self perceived attractiveness, aggression and psychopathy. They provided saliva for hormone analysis and, crucially, reported whether they‘d poached or been poached in the past.

Men who poach women away from their partners tend to have a score on the psychopathy scale just a couple of notches down from Hannibal Lecter

Perhaps unsurprisingly, a person was more likely to have been targeted by a poacher if they were attractive. In fact, for women, attractiveness was the only trait that mattered to a poacher. We know that men value all kinds of characteristics in a long term partner besides physical appearance, so the fact that poachers seem only to care about beauty suggests they’re only in it for the short term.

Again, the only trait that predicted successful mate poaching by women was attractiveness. A woman could have all kinds of positive personality traits, but a man isn’t going to risk losing his long term partner unless the person poaching him away is a stunner.

When it came to what made a successful male poacher, Sunderani found that it was a lot more complicated. Men who are able to poach women away from their partners tend to be taller, have higher self esteem, a cold demeanour and criminal tendencies, and a score on the psychopathy scale that was just a couple of notches down from Hannibal Lecter.

Taller men, we know, as more attractive than their shorter peers, so no surprise there. And high self esteem could allow men to present a convincing case to women as to why they’re worth leaving a partner for. The fact that men high in psychopathy are good poachers is also no shock. Being cold, calculated and only out for yourself, the typical marks of a psychopath, could inure these poachers to the harm they’re doing to the men whose partners they’re trying to steal away. In other words, it might be easier to wreck homes, if you’re sufficiently psychopathic to not care about making a mess.

So, the next time someone tries to poach you for a date, you can take your chances. But if you get to the restaurant and he orders a bottle of chianti and some fava beans, it’s probably time to hail a cab.