Abstract: People were given highly constrained low budgets of mate dollars to allocate across various characteristics pertaining to their ideal partners and to their ideal selves for long- and short-term mating. First, results replicated findings from Li et al. (2002) and Li & Kenrick (2006). For ideal long-term mates, men prioritized physical attractiveness and women prioritized social status. For ideal short-term mates, both sexes prioritized physical attractiveness. Second, people’s design of their ideal selves mirrored what the opposite sex ideally desired in their mates. For a long-term mating context, men prioritized social status in themselves and women prioritized physical attractiveness in themselves. For ideal short-term selves, both sexes prioritized physical attractiveness. Findings were consistent with a domain-specific view of psychological mechanisms, in that processes for valuing potential mates and processes for valuing one’s own mate value may be specialized mechanisms.

Key words: mate selection, long-term mating, short-term mating, self-ideals