Evolutionary Reasons for Hotwifing

I enjoy trying to figure out evolutionary reasons for Hotwifing - specifically the sexual lifestyle where 'she plays and he doesn't. I don't believe hotwifing is a kink that exists by accident - rather that in some way it represents a successful survival strategy to procreate in the face of odds males face (please see disclaimers at end of this post).

I believe the hotwife-evolution connection starts with recognizing how vital pair bonding was to offspring survival throughout most of human existence. Hard to appreciate in today's age of relative abundance, but through much of time humans lived at subsistence level where small differences in resources could have major impact on survival. Committed pair bonds not only doubled the resources to raise offspring but offered the complementary support of one partner protecting and nurturing the children while the other was off hunting or gathering.

Conventionally we think of women being more committed to pair bonds because of the time needed to carry children to term. Men can impregnate a woman in as little as five minutes as we recognize early on. But this 'spread the seed' strategy only works for men of high reproductive status (the 'studs' or the wealthy/powerful).

Men of ordinary reproductive status tend to have precious few opportunities to procreate - maybe fewer than women overall because some of women's reproductive opportunities will be monopolized by high status males. So men with little ability to attract a dalliance with a wandering female must invest all their reproductive hopes into their pair-bonded partner. Ordinary males thus on average end up with as much evolutionary drive to be committed to the pair bond as their female partner.

On the surface then this would seem to place men and women on equal footing as far as inclinations toward fidelity vs. the drive to mate opportunistically. Disadvantage lurks for the male however. When a man sires children outside his primary relationship he creates the conflict that some of his children reside inside his pair bond and some reside elsewhere.

He cannot care for both sets (excluding polymorphic type relationships which are rare) so the all-important survivability of his children that he can influence by being around as a parent is diminished. Females especially see their men mating with others as a potentially huge distraction of his interest in the pair bond. Lifestyle stores (including the reactions my own almost murderously-jealous partner) indicate an almost universal disinterest in females for her partner playing with others.…