Backup To The Future

Two years ago, I met this beautiful, intriguing girl. I gave her my number, but she never called. Last week, she texted out of the blue. Weird! My friend said she probably had a boyfriend until now. Do women really hoard men's info in case their relationship tanks?

--Wondering

Consider the male BFF. A woman may not consciously think of hers as her backup man. But should her relationship go kaput, there he is -- perfectly situated to dry her tears. Um, with his penis. There seems to be an evolutionary adaptation for people in relationships -- especially women -- to line up backup mates. It's basically a form of doomsday prepping -- except instead of a bunker with 700 cans of beans and three slightly dented Hellfire missiles, there are two eligible men on the shelves of a woman's mind and the phone number of another on a crumpled ATM receipt in the back of her wallet. Evolutionary psychologists Joshua Duntley and David Buss explain that in ancestral times, even people "experiencing high relationship satisfaction would have benefited from cultivating potential replacement mates" in case their partner cheated, ditched them, died, or dropped a few rungs in mate value. A woman whose partner left or died "would have suffered a lapse in protection, mate investment, and resources for her children, much like people who transition between jobs in the modern environment sometimes suffer a lapse in insurance coverage." Duntley and Buss note that female psychology today still has women prepping for romantic disaster like they're living in caves and lean-tos instead of condos and McMansions. For example, in research on opposite-sex friendships, "women, but not men, prioritize economic resources and physical prowess in their opposite-sex friends, a discrepancy that mirrors sex-differences in mate preferences." Getting back to this woman who texted you, she probably saw something in you from the start but was otherwise encumbered. So, yes, she's likely been carrying a torch for you, but for two years, it's been in airplane mode.