Self-Esteem and Your Sexual Sociometer

Evolutionary psychologists have coined the term “mate value” to describe our desirability as a romantic partner. Our mate value is evaluated on at least three dimensions:

1. Attractiveness/Vitality: Are we a physically attractive person with an appealing personality?
2. Status/Resources: Are we a winner or a loser? Do we have money? Are we cultured and well-educated?
3. Warmth/Trustworthiness: Are we a warm, loving, loyal, and devoted person?

If you are high on all three dimensions, you are at the top of the sexual status hierarchy. Everyone wants to date you, have sex with you, marry you, and make babies with you. If you are low on all three dimensions, you are at the bottom of the sexual status hierarchy. Hardly anyone wants to date you, have sex with you, marry you, or make babies with you.

Our self-esteem is regulated by our self-perceived mate value. We judge ourselves on these dimensions relative to our standing in the local mating market. The local mating market is constituted by our rivals, the people we compete with to win someone with high mate value.

Individuals with high mate value at the top of the sexual status hierarchy are scarce commodities, so competition for such individuals is fierce. The mating market is especially competitive in high-cost-of-living urban areas where bright, beautiful, affluent, and ambitious young adults congregate to find their life partners or where successful divorcees hope to find an upgrade over their exes. If the competition is too stiff in the expensive urban centers, one could always reside someplace less expensive and less populated where one might have a better chance at being a big fish in a small pond.

Self-esteem and the sexual sociometer

Social psychologists have noted that much of self-esteem is based upon social comparison to others. We do have an inner ideal self to whom we try to live up. We judge ourselves by how closely our real selves approximate our ideal selves.

Our ideal selves form in childhood as we begin to fantasize about who we will be when we grow up. We feel proud of ourselves to the extent that we feel we are living up to our ideal selves. A lot of our fantasy life is about imagining ourselves living up to our ideal selves.

Yet that ideal self who we aspire to be and become is always being calibrated through a process of social comparison. We check out the competition and see how we compare. The competition is the reference group we use to judge how we’re doing. Our reference group is usually our peers (i.e., people like us, however we define ourselves). This inner sociometer is constantly making social comparisons with our peers that tell us how we’re doing.

We vary in how competitive and ambitious we are. The more narcissistic among us have to be at the top of the sexual status hierarchy in order to feel good about ourselves. For narcissists, it’s a humiliation to be just average or, God forbid, below average.

The less narcissistic among us can content ourselves with being average. As long as we feel we fit in with the norms of our reference group, we feel OK about ourselves. It’s OK to be equally attractive and equally successful to most of the people we know and to whom we compare ourselves.

It’s challenging to feel good about yourself if you judge yourself as below average. If everyone but you is physically fit, has a good job, has found a life partner, and has thriving children, it’s hard not to feel like a loser with low mate value. You might then feel like you have to settle for another loser like yourself or have no love life at all.

The sexual status hierarchy and assortative mating

Naturally, we always aspire to win someone a bit out of our league. Yet, for the most part, we end up with partners of roughly equivalent mate value. This is called assortative mating. That means that birds of a feather flock together. We end up with people like ourselves, people who are pretty much at our own level in the sexual status hierarchy.

In that sense, our partners are reflections of ourselves for better or worse. Just like our houses or cars constitute status symbols of how successful we are. Our partners are also status symbols who reflect our level of attainment in the sexual status hierarchy. Your partner’s mate value advertises your own because it’s what you were able to win and keep given your own romantic desirability.

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Upping your mate value versus self-acceptance

There are a number of ways we can cope with low self-esteem as a result of being unhappy with our place in the sexual status hierarchy. When we are younger, we can work on improving our self-perceived mate value. We can go to the gym to look better, we can get more education to get a higher paying job, and we can go to a psychotherapist to make our personalities more lovable. The higher our mate value, the more desirable a partner we can win and hold on to.

Yet despite the fact that we can always work on self-improvement, we are not infinitely perfectible, and time works against us. With age, we lose our youthful beauty and vitality, professionally, we reach a plateau in what we can realistically achieve, and no matter how many years we spend in psychotherapy, our basic personality stays the same, even if we have become a much more flexible, resilient, and actualized version of our true selves.

What do we do when we have risen as far as we can rise in the sexual status hierarchy, and it just doesn’t seem quite good enough, or we begin to decline with advancing age? We feel we are better than this, and it’s just not fair that we appear to be stuck at a place that seems beneath us. Maybe all we can do is learn to accept that fact with self-compassion because life isn’t fair. We don’t have total control of our looks, our career achievements, or even our personality. We are born with a certain genetic potential into a certain life situation that may be less than privileged, and all we can do is make the best of a bad situation.

We have an intuitive sense of our potential, but life is such that we don’t always live up to our full potential, and that’s a bitter pill to swallow. It’s probably better to try and fail rather than not try at all to get as high up in the sexual status hierarchy as we can. But at some point, we need to accept ourselves and forgive ourselves for not rising as high as we had hoped and dreamed. At some point, we must accept membership in a club that would happily have us as a member. Such self-acceptance allows us to be content with a life partner whose mate value is equivalent to our own and who is, therefore, an accurate reflection of our place in the sexual status hierarchy and be happy when that partner accepts us, warts and all.