Imagine this scenario: Pam is engaged to Roy.

Pam also has a close friend at work — his name is

Jim. Pam and Jim enjoy each other’s company, buy each other the occasional vending machine
snack, listen to each other’s complaints about work, etc. If you’ve seen The Office, you know
exactly how this story ends. At first, we try to accept that Jim is in the friend zone, but this just
isn’t so. It’s impossible to deny that they have chemistry — Jim is not merely a friend. As the
story unfolds (sorry for the spoiler!), Pam and Roy’s relationship ends, a new relationship
begins with Pam and Jim, and the two of them go on to live happily ever after. You could argue
here that Jim started out as Pam’s “backup” boyfriend — he was waiting in the bull pen and
ready to step up to the plate the moment Roy was benched. Whether Pam was consciously
aware of the fact that she had a backup boyfriend is another matter, but objectively that’s
exactly what Jim was.

I think this is a familiar scenario to a lot of people in the real world, and that’s what makes it so
relatable in the show. Even women who are already with Mr. Right (Jim, in our example)
sometimes still have a Mr. Plan B . . . just in case. Or at least that’s how it seemed to me when I
was in graduate school. I bartended nights and weekends, and I couldn’t help but notice this
phenomenon going on around me.

Romantic Partner Insurance As a Mating Strategy

Humans employ a wide array of mating strategies (Gangestad & Simpson, 2000). The research
here focused on some of the mating strategies of heterosexual women. Prior research has
shown that women will actually modify their behavior depending on what type of relationship
they’re looking for (Cashdan, 1993). Those looking to settle down with Mr. Right will dress with
more elegance and emphasize behaviors that indicate loyalty and an interest in fidelity. Those
looking for more of a Mr. Right Now will flaunt their sexuality a bit more. Even among other
women on the prowl, female mating strategies morph into something more competitive. Those
who are generally more narcissistic in nature tend to display intrasexual competition more
frequently than others (Carter, Montanaro, Linney, & Campbell, 2015). An example of this
might be one woman giving another a false compliment — telling a woman at the bar that you
love her shoes, when actually you think your crush will find them hideous, is one way to try and
eliminate some competition for your desired mate. It’s not a very kind approach, but it
happens.
So how does this relate to Pam? I looked into existing research to see if this “backup” boyfriend
idea had ever been studied. As it turns out, Dibble et al. (2015) found that college women, on
average, have 3.78 Mr. Plan B's. In fact, roughly two-thirds of all college students who are in a
committed relationship openly admit to having at least one Mr./Ms. Plan B (Dibble et
al., 2015). I decided to narrow my sample to only heterosexual women and study this a bit
more in-depth.
First, I had to define what it was that I was actually studying. With the help of Glenn (who was
my thesis advisor), and other members of the New Paltz Evolutionary Psychology Lab, I coined
the term "partner insurance." Just as you might have homeowner’s insurance in the
unfortunate event that your house burns down, maybe women have partner insurance — a
backup boyfriend, ready and waiting in case your current relationship burns down. If this is
indeed a discernible phenomenon, A) how do we measure it, and B) what predicts it?
Measuring the Tendency to Have a Backup Boyfriend
To answer the first question, we created a new scale, called the Plan B Proclivity Scale (PBP). It
measures the degree to which women consider their closest platonic male friend a romantic
“backup plan.” It includes items that participants rated with a close male friend in mind from
"Strongly Disagree" to "Strongly Agree." A couple examples of these items are: “I’m fairly sure
that, if given the chance, this person would want to date me,” and “I discuss personal things
with this person.” At the end of the scale, we offered a dichotomous "Yes or No" question to
participants: “Separate from anything else, would you say that, in your life, you have a
heterosexual male friend that you consider to be a 'Plan B'?” The answer to this question
lumped participants into a category of either having partner insurance or not having partner
insurance. (Note: In Part II, we will present that scale in full and will provide a scoring key — so
stay tuned.)

Predictors of Having a Backup Boyfriend

To answer the second question (What predicts this phenomenon?), we have to examine
heterosexual female mating strategies through a Darwinian lens. We already know that humans
have evolved to utilize a variety of mating strategies, so perhaps partner insurance is
just another one. From an evolutionary perspective, considering that fitness is measured strictly
by the number of offspring one produces into future generations; it might actually be adaptive
for a woman to have a Mr. Plan B lined up. If anything were to happen with the current
relationship that caused its demise, raising children alone would be awfully tough. Having an
insurance plan for your love life would increase the probably of genetic success. If partner
insurance is indeed another one of these female mating strategies, we need to figure out what
predicts it.
Relationship satisfaction seemed like an obvious place to start. Folks start looking and
interviewing for new jobs when they’re unhappy in their current position. We can easily argue
that someone unhappy in her current relationship may start to wander and look for other
romantic opportunities. Sure enough, those who rated their current committed relationship
with low satisfaction were significantly more likely to indicate that yes, they had partner
insurance.
"Sociosexual orientation" is a fun term that essentially describes an individual’s attitude,
behavior, and desire for commitment-free sex. Prior research has demonstrated that having an
unrestricted sociosexual orientation predicts a desire for preferred mating traits in opposite-sex
platonic friends (Lewis, Al-Shawaf, Conroy-Beam, Asao, & Buss, 2012). Simply explained, this
means that if you score relatively high on the scale measuring sociosexual orientation (SOI-R),
you’re more likely to have non-romantic opposite-sex friends who are very much like what you
are attracted to in terms of romantic partners. This was a huge sign to me that something could
be going on here. Lo and behold, women with an unrestricted sexual orientation are
significantly more likely to report that they also have partner insurance.
An unexpected predictor of partner insurance turned out to be age. After discovering this
finding, I had a bit of a “Duh!” moment. In hindsight, it makes so much sense. Younger women
in the sample were significantly more likely to report having partner insurance than were older
women in the sample. The reason this was retrospectively obvious to me is partly due to the
nature of menopause. From a strictly evolutionary and biological perspective, once a female
has surpassed the ability to reproduce, she has no reproductive need to have backup mates
lined up. It could also be the case that partner insurance is simply a younger woman's game
that women tend to grow out of. Who knows!?
Personality of course occurred to me as a potential predictor as well — after all, if those who
are more narcissistic engage in more competitive mating strategies, maybe they are also more
likely have a high Plan-B proclivity. The Dark Triad (Paulhus & Williams, 2002) measures three
different, but related personality traits — Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and narcissism. I
predicted that women scoring high in these traits may be more likely to have a Mr. Plan B, and
sure enough, that is exactly how the data panned out. Women who report being generally
more socially manipulative, emotionally apathetic, and overly concerned with themselves are
significantly more likely to have a high Plan-B proclivity than do others, thus supporting the
prediction that Dark Triad personality traits serve as a function of increased sexual competition,
as well as short-term mating strategies.
Bottom Line
So, when all is said and done, what are we looking at? I found that 20 percent of heterosexual
women in committed relationships — one in five — will report having a Mr. Plan B. My research
here provides support to the idea of partner insurance being a possible mating strategy among
heterosexual women. To the extent that women in committed relationships may consider their
closest male platonic friend to be a backup romantic partner, we also now have a new scale
which measures this phenomenon