Verified by 
Attraction is complicated.
How intelligent must a person be? How handsome, beautiful, funny, or kind? There are so many factors we might quickly evaluate, and at the other end of this implicit calculation, we somehow land at a tentative judgment that someone is, or isn’t, a potential romantic partner. We each use standards to decide who makes the cut, but do these standards ever change? Or do we have an established threshold that works for us in all circumstances?
Recent evidence suggests that a change in standards may be an important factor in attraction—or at least, the kind of attraction that motivates action. In fact, the baseline that determines whether we’d be tempted by another person’s allure may depend on our own current romantic situation (Davies & Shackelford, 2015).
The basic idea: If we’re already romantically attached, someone else has to be quite attractive to get our attention—more attractive, in fact, than if we were single. In other words, our standards change. If we’re being pursued as an unattached individual we might be more flexible in our standards than if someone’s trying to mate poach us, or steal us from a current partner.
This idea that our standards change was based on an analysis of wealth and physical attractiveness standards, two factors long-established as influential in overall judgments of attractiveness. Davies and Shackelford (2015) sampled 215 heterosexual undergraduates and revealed that individuals’ own romantic status impacted how wealthy or physically attractive a hypothetical partner needed to be, in order to lead to a new relationship. Those who were asked to imagine themselves not in a monogamous relationship required less wealth and physical appeal than if they were asked to imagine themselves as already dating, living with someone, or married.
Why do our standards change?
This question gets at an important aspect of human decision-making, which is that context matters. Viewing a person’s mate standards in isolation, as though they were fixed judgments, fails to recognize the way costs and benefits factor into complex decisions. If we’re not in a relationship, the costs of having a short-term affair, for example, are socially minimal. If we’re already in a relationship, however, those costs skyrocket. Presumably, the “benefits" must then be greater to lure us away from a committed partnership than if we were we more socially free to engage in a new romantic encounter.
So what does this all mean? For those being pursued, this research hints at an internal mechanism that keeps us tied to our current partners: We require a substantial degree of romantic appeal in an outside suitor to forsake an established relationship. For those in romantic pursuit, the current research suggests your tactics depend on who you’re pursuing. What works in attracting an available person might not cut it, if you’re playing the more dangerous game of mate poaching.
Reference
Davies, A. P., & Shackelford, T. K. (2015). Comparisons of the effectiveness of mate-attraction tactics across mate poaching and general attraction and across types of romantic relationships. Personality and Individual Differences, 85, 140-144.
