Using money to find a mate isn’t all that new.

“How do humans compete for access to mates? What you find across cultures is that men often do it through money, through status and through products,” Griskevicius said.

When the economics times get tough women are probably more likely to respond to men who are willing to share their resources.

Well, men think about sex just about as often as they think about food and sleeping.

And while women don’t think about sex as often they are not far behind men. And thoughts of food and sleep are proportionately less, as well.

“The story about this paper that’s been reported in the press has been ‘Men think about sex 19 times a day!’ ” said Terri Fisher, a psychology professor at Ohio State University at Mansfield, and the study’s lead author. But that isn’t all that much when you consider the study’s participants were college students, those repositories of raging hormones and unfettered urges.

“The more interesting finding is that male college students think just as much about food and sleep as they do about sex,” Dr. Fisher said.

Jealousy rears it’s ugly head from time to time with all of us but men and women feel the sting in different ways.

“Relative to women, men are more distressed by sexual infidelity, and women are more upset over emotional infidelity, relative to men,” says study author Barry X. Kuhle, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Scranton in Scranton, Penn.