Choosing a mate is perhaps the most important decision a sexually reproducing organism makes in its lifetime. And yet, psychologists lack a precise description of human mate choice, despite sustained attention from several theoretical perspectives. Here, I argue this limited progress owes to the complexity of mate choice and describe a new modeling approach, called “couple simulation,” designed to compare models of mate choice by challenging them to reproduce real couples within simulated mating markets. I present proof-of-concept simulations that demonstrate couple simulation can identify a population’s true model of mate choice. Furthermore, I apply couple simulation to two samples of real couples and find that the method (a) successfully reconstructs real-world couples, (b) discriminates between models of mate choice, and (c) predicts a wide range of dimensions of relationship quality. Collectively, these results provide evidence that couple simulation offers a framework useful for evaluating theories of human mate choice.

选择配偶可能是有性繁殖生物一生中做出的最重要的决定。然而，尽管从多个理论角度持续关注，心理学家仍缺乏对人类择偶的准确描述。在这里，我认为这种有限的进展归因于配偶选择的复杂性，并描述了一种新的建模方法，称为“夫妻模拟”，旨在通过挑战他们在模拟的交配市场中重现真实的夫妻来比较配偶选择的模型。我提出了概念验证模拟，证明夫妻模拟可以识别群体的真实配偶选择模型。此外，我将夫妻模拟应用于两个真实夫妻样本，发现方法 (a) 成功地重建了现实世界的夫妻，(b) 区分了择偶模型，(c) 预测关系质量的广泛维度。总的来说，这些结果提供了证据，证明夫妻模拟为评估人类择偶理论提供了一个有用的框架。