Buss and Schmitt's 1992 article "Sexual Strategies Theory: An Evolutionary Perspective On Human Mating" is a worthwhile article, primarily because it stimulates discussion. Buss provides empirical evidence to support his conclusions about why we mate with the people we do, but leaves the reader to decide whether that evidence really does support the findings. The reader must decide if the premises Buss uses to base his arguments are reliable. The most important of these premises is the notion that humans seek both short-term and long-term relationships and that each sex has evolved particular preferences for partners within these divisions. The second important premise is Buss' definition of mating.

In the introduction to the article, Buss equates mating to marriage, declaring, "Mating is a human universal. All known societies have formal marriage [reproductive] alliances between men and women," (p.204). While this point is well taken, Buss then claims that mating can also be a one-night stand. Although Buss employs the values short and long-term sexual strategies, he never clearly differentiates between a marriage of 35 years and a one-night stand. Both situations, Buss deems as mating alliances. I would argue that the intentions behind the decision to marry or the decision to engage in an affair may or may not have anything to do with wanting to produce offspring. Buss continues by stating that differences in parental investment impacts the amount of effort each sex puts into either short-term or long-term sexual strategies.

Buss declares that these strategies (or preferences) for mate selection are unconscious, adaptive measures devised to ensure that resultant offspring will survive. Buss also seems to say that because males cannot be as sure of their paternity as females can be of their maternity, males will spend greater effort seeking many reproduction opportunities. However, mating frequently does not ensure that any given offspring will have a greater chance at survival, it simply means that a male will have a greater chance of having one replication of his genes passed on. If sexual strategies are devised to ensure offspring survival and if survival is a product of parental investment, then Buss should find that males mate and spend more time in long-term/high investment relationships. Buss indeed gives the example of a married man with two children having a short-term mating and increasing his reproductive success by 50%. This benefit, Buss acknowledges, assumes that the child survives to live to reproduce. This assumes a great deal. If this married man was only interested in inseminating, the woman must then be able to provide sustaining resources for the offspring. Buss' example serves to highlight the complexities of sexual strategies, which are not always driven by the desire to produce offspring that will survive.

Buss' Sexual Strategies Theory begins to unravel as he attempts to persuade his audience that their sexual or partner preferences are the results of thousands of years of witnessing what leads to surviving offspring and what does not. Buss reports, "Humans are attracted by some potential mates and repulsed by others without any awareness of the adaptive logic behind the preference," (p. 209). These assertions nearly blanket the widely accepted phenomena that genetically related people do not choose the same mates, and the simple truth that men and women shape their own, individual preferences through direct (yet non-reproductive) experiences. For example, I may decide that I prefer dark-haired men to light haired men, not because dark-haired men are more likely to have gone to Yale, earn over $80,000, and provide greater resources for their children, but because I first fell in-love with a dark-haired man and formed a socialized preference for them. There is no evidence that any adaptive logic would exist for preferring one hair color to another in mate choice. Buss extends this notion of adaptive preferences to explain why women often seek evidence of a man's ability to provide resources. Buss asserts because females have a higher parental investment they will be more likely to seek partners that have resources even in short-term mating scenarios. This argument lacks convincing power, especially in the case of a female prostitute. Buss contends that a female prostitute still makes sure that she will secure some sort of payment for her part in the mating. Buss assumes that this resource exchange is sought because the woman has heightened her chances of becoming pregnant and needs to secure resources as the man's paternal investment. I contend that the woman seeks payment for services rendered and to ensure her own survival. Buss' Sexual Strategies Theory assumes too many premises and tries to assimilate too many inconsistencies. His theory also lacks the power of prediction in a modern world where men neither seek low paternal investment, nor provide necessary financial resources for women who have long-since given up on simply bearing and nurturing children.