From the New York Times Review of The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy
Is as Necessary as Love and Sex By DAVID M. BUSS
Think of a committed romantic relationship that you have now, or that
you had in the past. Now imagine that your romantic partner becomes
interested in someone else. What would upset or distress you more:
(a) discovering that your partner is forming a deep emotional
attachment, confiding and sharing confidences with another? or (b)
discovering that your partner is enjoying passionate sex with the
other person, trying out different sexual positions you had only
dreamed about? Both scenarios are distressing, of course, but which
one is more distressing? If you are like the majority of women we
surveyed recently in the United States, the Netherlands, Germany,
Japan, Korea, and Zimbabwe, you will find the emotional infidelity
more upsetting. The answer seems obvious, at least to women. The
majority of men, however, find the prospect of a partner's sexual
infidelity more agonizing. The gulf between the sexes in emotional
reactions to infidelity reveals something profound about human mating
strategies.
The Dangerous Passion
Jealousy is not only inbred in human nature, but it is the
most basic, all-pervasive emotion which touches man in all
aspects of every human relationship.
– Boris Sokoloff, 1947, Jealousy: A Psychological Study
Every human alive is an evolutionary success story. If any of
our ancestors had failed to survive an ice age, a drought, a
predator, or a plague, they would not be our ancestors. If any
had failed to cooperate with at least some others in the group
or dropped below a minimal position in the social hierarchy,
they would have met certain death by being cast out from the
group. If even one had failed to succeed in choosing,
courting, and keeping a mate, the previously inviolate chain
of descent would have irreparably broken, and we would not be
alive to tell the tale. Each of us owes our existence to
thousands of generations of successful ancestors. As their
descendants, we have inherited the passions that led to their
success – passions that drive us, often blindly, through a
lifelong journey in the struggle for survival, the pursuit of
position, and the search for relationships.
We usually think of passion as restricted to sex or love, the
burning embrace or constant craving. But it has a broader
meaning, referring to the drives and emotional fires that
propel us in our quests through life. They sometimes glow
quietly, but at other times they burst into full flame. They
range from tranquil devotion to violent eruption. Their
expression yields life's deepest joys, but also the cruelest
suffering. And although we commonly think of passion as a
force opposed to reason and rationality, something to be tamed
or overcome, passions when properly understood have a
crystalline logic, precise purpose, and supreme sensibility.
The drives that stir us out of bed at dawn and hurl us
headlong into our daily struggles have two sides. On the
positive side, passions inspire us to achieve life's goals.
They impel us to satisfy our desire for sex, our yearning for
prestige, and our quest for love. The dazzling plays of
Shakespeare, the mezmerizing art of Georgia O'Keeffe, and the
brilliant inventions of Thomas Edison would not exist if
passion had not stirred them from repose and impelled
creation. Without passion, we would lie listless in bed, for
there would be no motivation to do anything at all.
But passions carry a darker, more sinister side. The same
passions that inspire us with love can lead to the disastrous
choice of a mate, the desperation of unrequited obsession, or
the terror of stalking. Jealousy can keep a couple committed
or drive a man to savagely beat his wife. An attraction to a
neighbor's spouse can generate intoxicating sexual euphoria
while destroying two marriages. The yearning for prestige can
produce exhilarating peaks of power while evoking the
corrosive envy of a rival and a fall from a greater
height. The Dangerous Passion explores both the destructive
and triumphant sides of human desires.
Together with many colleagues, my research over the past
decade has centered on exploring the nature, origins, and
consequences of the passions of men and women, with a special
focus on jealousy, infidelity, love, sex, and status. Our
goal has been to seek a deeper understanding of what makes men
and women tick, the desires that drive people to heights of
success or depths of despair, and the evolved mechanisms of
mind that define who we are. This book illuminates the dark
side of sexual treachery, the mysterious puzzle of romantic
love, and the central role of jealousy in our intimate
relationships.
Some argue that these mysteries should be left alone, pristine
and untrammeled, shielded from the harsh glare of scientific
scrutiny. But is the woman who has her freedom and sense of
safety crushed by a jealous husband better off unequipped with
the knowledge of how to prevent her torment? Is the man
obsessed by unrequited love better off failing to understand
the underlying reasons for his rejection? Ignorance may
sometimes be bliss, but it can also cause needless anguish. My
hope is that revealing the underlying logic of dangerous
passions will be intellectually illuminating, provide one path
for understanding the distress we experience at the hands of
our lovers and rivals, and just possibly improve in some small
measure the tools for coping with the untamed demons in our
lives.
At the center of The Dangerous Passion is an exploration of a
hazardous region of human sexuality – the desires people
experience for those who are not their regular partners and
the jealous shield designed to combat its treacherous
consequences.
The Green-Eyed Monster
Think of a committed romantic relationship that you have now,
or that you had in the past. Now imagine that your romantic
partner becomes interested in someone else. What would upset
or distress you more: (a) discovering that your partner is
forming a deep emotional attachment, confiding and sharing
confidences with another? or (b) discovering that your partner
is enjoying passionate sex with the other person, trying out
different sexual positions you had only dreamed about? Both
scenarios are distressing, of course, but which one is more
distressing? If you are like the majority of women we surveyed
recently in the United States, the Netherlands, Germany,
Japan, Korea, and Zimbabwe, you will find the emotional
infidelity more upsetting. The answer seems obvious, at least
to women. The majority of men, however, find the prospect of
a partner's sexual infidelity more agonizing. The gulf between
the sexes in emotional reactions to infidelity reveals
something profound about human mating strategies.
The explanation for sex differences in jealousy lies deep in
the evolutionary past of the human species. Consider first a
fundamental sex difference in our reproductive biology:
fertilization takes place inside women's bodies, not men's.
Now, internal female fertilization is not universal in the
biological world. In some species, such as the Mormon
crickets, fertilization occurs internally within the male. The
female takes her egg and literally implants it within the
male, who then incubates it until birth. In other species,
fertilization occurs externally to both sexes. The female
salmon, for example, drops her collection of eggs after
swimming upstream. The male follows and deposits his sperm on
top, and then they die, having fulfilled the only mission in
life that evolution gave them. But humans are not like
salmon. Nor are we like Mormon crickets. In all 4,000 species
of mammals, of which we are one, and in all 257 species of
primates, of which we are also one, fertilization occurs
internally within the female, not the male. This posed a grave
problem for ancestral men – the problem of uncertainty in
paternity.
From an ancestral man's perspective, the single most damaging
form of infidelity his partner could commit, in the currency
of reproduction, would have been a sexual infidelity. A
woman's sexual infidelity jeopardizes a man's confidence that
he is the genetic father of her children. A cuckolded man
risks investing years, or even decades, in another man's
children. Lost would be all the effort he expended in
selecting and attracting his partner. Moreover, he would lose
his partner's labors, now channeled to a rival's children
rather than his own.
Women, on the other hand, have always been 100 percent sure
that they are the mothers of their children (internal
fertilization guarantees that their children are genetically
their own). No woman ever gave birth and, watching the child
emerge from her womb, wondered whether the child was really
hers. One African culture captures this sex difference with a
phrase more telling than any technical summary: “Mama's baby,
papa's maybe.” Biology has granted women a confidence in
genetic parenthood that no man can share with absolute
certainty.
Our ancestral mothers confronted a different problem, the loss
of a partner's commitment to a rival woman and her
children. Because emotional involvement is the most reliable
signal of this disastrous loss, women key in on cues to a
partner's feelings for other women. A husband's one-night
sexual stand is agonizing, of course, but most women want to
know: “Do you love her?” Most women find a singular lapse in
fidelity without emotional involvement easier to forgive than
the nightmare of another woman capturing her partner's
tenderness, time, and affection. We evolved from ancestral
mothers whose jealousy erupted at signals of the loss of love,
mothers who acted to ensure the man's commitment.
But who cares who fathers a child or where a man's commitments
get channeled? Shouldn't we love all children equally? Perhaps
in some utopian future, we might, but that is not how the
human mind is designed. Husbands in our evolutionary past who
failed to care whether a wife succumbed to sex with other men
and wives who remained stoic when confronted with their
husband's emotional infidelity may be admirable in a certain
light. Perhaps these self-possessed men and women were more
mature. Some theories, in fact, propose that jealousy is an
immature emotion, a sign of insecurity, neurosis, or flawed
character. Nonjealous men and women, however, are not our
ancestors, having been left in the evolutionary dust by rivals
with different passionate sensibilities. We all come from a
long lineage of ancestors who possessed the dangerous passion.
Jealousy, according to this theory, is an adaptation. An
adaptation, in the parlance of evolutionary psychology, is an
evolved solution to a recurrent problem of survival or
reproduction. Humans, for example, have evolved food
preferences for sugar, fat, and protein that are adaptive
solutions to the survival problem of food selection. We have
evolved specialized fears of snakes, spiders, and strangers
that are adaptive solutions to ancestral problems inflicted by
dangerous species, including ourselves. We have evolved
specialized preferences for certain qualities in potential
mates, which helped to solve the problems posed by
reproduction. Adaptations, in short, exist in modern humans
today because they helped our ancestors to combat all of the
many “hostile forces of nature,” enabling them to successfully
survive and reproduce. Adaptations are coping devices passed
down over millennia because they worked – not perfectly, of
course, but they helped ancestral humans to struggle through
the evolutionary bottlenecks of survival and reproduction.
Jealousy, according to this perspective, is not a sign of
immaturity, but rather a supremely important passion that
helped our ancestors, and most likely continues to help us
today, to cope with a host of real reproductive threats.
Jealousy, for example, motivates us to ward off rivals with
verbal threats and cold primate stares. It drives us to keep
partners from straying with tactics such as escalating
vigilance or showering a partner with affection. And it
communicates commitment to a partner who may be wavering,
serving an important purpose in the maintenance of
love. Sexual jealousy is often a successful, although
sometimes explosive, solution to persistent predicaments that
each one of our ancestors was forced to confront.
We are typically not conscious of these reproductive
quandaries. Nor are we usually aware of the evolutionary logic
that led to this dangerous passion. A man does not think, “Oh,
if my wife has sex with someone else, then my certainty that
I'm the genetic father will be jeopardized, and this will
endanger the replication of my genes; I'm really mad.” Or if
his partner takes birth-control pills, “Well, because Joan is
taking the pill, it doesn't really matter whether she has sex
with other men; after all, my certainty in paternity is
secure.” Nor does a woman think, “It's really upsetting that
Dennis is in love with that other woman; this jeopardizes my
hold on his emotional commitments to me and my children, and
hence hurts my reproductive success.” Instead, jealousy is a
blind passion, just as our hunger for sweets and craving for
companionship are blind. Jealousy is emotional wisdom, not
consciously articulated, passed down to us over millions of
years by our successful forebears. One goal of The Dangerous
Passion is to bring to the surface the deep roots of the
inherited emotional wisdom we possess.
The Othello Syndrome
Despite its value for people past and present, jealousy is an
emotion that exposes partners to extreme danger. The dark side
of jealousy causes men to explode violently to reduce the odds
that their partners will stray. Women seeking refuge at
shelters for battered women almost invariably report that
their husbands seethe with jealousy. In one study of battered
women, many of whom required medical attention, the typical
woman reported that her husband “tries to limit my contact
with friends and family” (the tactic of concealment), “insists
on knowing where I am at all times” (the tactic of vigilance),
and “calls me names to put me down and make me feel bad about
myself” (the tactic of undermining self-esteem). Jealousy is
the leading cause of spousal battering, but it's even worse
than that. Men's jealousy puts women at risk of being killed.
Consider the following remarks made to police by a 31-year-old
man who stabbed his 20-year-old wife to death, after they had
been reunited following a six-month separation.
Then she said that since she came back in April she had
fucked this other man about ten times. I told her how can
you talk about love and marriage and you been fucking this
other man. I was really mad. I went to the kitchen and got
the knife. I went back to our room and asked: Were you
serious when you told me that? She said yes. We fought on
the bed, I was stabbing her. Her grand-father came up and
tried to take the knife out of my hand. I told him to go
and call the cops for me. I don't know why I killed the
woman, I loved her.
Jealousy can be emotional acid that corrodes marriages,
undermines self-esteem, triggers battering, and leads to the
ultimate crime of murder. Despite its dangerous
manifestations, jealousy helped to solve a critical
reproductive quandary for ancestral men. Jealous men were more
likely to preserve their valuable commitments for their own
children rather than squandering them on the children of their
rivals. As descendants of a long line of men who acted to
ensure their paternity, modern men carry with them the
dangerous passion that led to their forebears' reproductive
success.
A professional couple therapist I know related to me the
following story. A young couple, Joan and Richard, came to her
with a complaint of irrational jealousy. Without provocation,
Richard would burst into jealous tirades and accuse Joan of
sleeping with another man. His uncontrollable jealousy was
destroying their marriage. Richard and Joan both agreed on
this point. Could the therapist help cure Richard of
irrational jealousy? A common practice in couple therapy is to
have at least one session with each member of the couple
individually. The first question the therapist posed to Joan
during this individual interview was: Are you having an
affair? She burst into tears and confessed that, indeed, she
had been carrying on an affair for the past six
months. Richard's jealousy, it turned out, had not been
irrational after all. He had been picking up on subtle cues of
his wife's infidelity that triggered his jealousy. Since he
trusted Joan and she had assured him of her fidelity, however,
he believed that his jealousy had been irrational. In a sense,
Richard had failed to listen to his internal emotional
whisperings. He came to the wrong conclusion because he
overrode his feelings with “rationality.”
This episode gave me the first hint that jealousy represented
a form of ancestral wisdom that can have useful as well as
destructive consequences. Despite the possible hazards of
conducting research on jealousy, its potency convinced me that
it could not be ignored by science. In surveys we discovered
that nearly all men and women have experienced at least one
episode of intense jealousy. Thirty-one percent say that their
personal jealousy has sometimes been difficult to control. And
among those who admit to being jealous, 38 percent say that
their jealousy has led them to want to hurt someone.
Extreme jealousy has been given many names – the Othello
syndrome, morbid jealousy, psychotic jealousy, pathological
jealousy, conjugal paranoia, and erotic jealousy syndrome.
Jealousy, of course, can be pathological. It can destroy
previously harmonious relationships, rendering them hellish
nightmares of daily existence. Trust slowly built from years
of mutual reliance can be torn asunder in a crashing
moment. As we will explore in a later chapter, jealousy leads
more women to flee in terror to shelters than any other
cause. A full 13 percent of all homicides are spousal murders,
and jealousy is overwhelmingly the leading cause.
But destruction does not necessarily equal pathology. The
pathological aspect of extreme jealousy, according to the
mainstream wisdom, is not the jealousy itself. It is the
delusion that a loved one has committed an infidelity when
none has occurred. The rage itself upon the actual discovery
of an infidelity is something people everywhere intuitively
understand. In Texas until 1974, a husband who killed a wife
and her lover when he caught them in flagrante delicto was not
judged a criminal. In fact, the law held that a “reasonable
man” would respond to such extreme provocation with acts of
violence. Similar laws have been on the books
worldwide. Extreme rage upon discovering a wife naked in the
arms of another man is something that people everywhere find
intuitively comprehensible. Criminal acts that would normally
receive harsh prison sentences routinely get reduced when the
victim's infidelity is the extenuating circumstance.
The view of jealousy as pathological ignores a profound fact
about an important defense designed to combat a real
threat. Jealousy is not always a reaction to an infidelity
that has already been discovered. It can be an anticipatory
response, a preemptive strike to prevent an infidelity that
might occur. Labeling jealousy as pathological simply because
a spouse has not yet strayed ignores the fact that jealousy
can head off an infidelity that might be lurking on the
horizon of a relationship.
Excessive jealousy can be extraordinarily destructive. But
moderate jealousy, not an excess or an absence, signals
commitment. This book explores both sides of this double-edged
defense mechanism.
To understand the power of this extraordinary emotion, we must
trace it to its origin, long before capitalism, long before
agriculture and cash economies, long before writing and
recorded history, and long before humans fanned out and
colonized every habitable continent. We must trace its roots
to the evolution of one of the most unusual adaptations in
primate history, yet one that we take so much for granted that
its existence is hardly questioned: the emergence of long-term
love.
The Evolution of Love
Our closest primate cousins, the chimpanzees, lack exclusive
sexual bonds. Most mating takes place within the narrow window
of female estrus. When a female chimpanzee is in heat, a
variety of physiological changes take place. Her genitals
become swollen and pink for four to six days. The swellings
peak just before ovulation when she is most likely to
conceive. She emits pheromonal signals, hormone-saturated
substances that males find especially attractive, sometimes
driving them into a sexual frenzy. Sarah Hrdy of the
University of California at Davis notes that males sometimes
touch the vagina of the estrous female, gathering her
secretions on their fingers to smell or taste. Males use these
signals to monitor the female's reproductive state.
A male chimpanzee's position in the social hierarchy strongly
determines his sexual access to estrous females. Among the
chimpanzees at a large zoo colony in Arnham, the Netherlands,
for example, the dominant male achieves as many as 75 percent
of the matings with estrous females. The relationships
between male and female chimps are complex and can extend over
time, but chimps do not form the long-term committed
relationships that most humans desire.
Men and women have always depended on each other for survival
and reproduction. Love was not invented a few hundred years
ago by European poets, contrary to conventional wisdom in this
century. Love is a human universal, occurring in societies
ranging from the !Kung San of Botswana to the Ache of
Paraguay. In my study of 10,041 individuals from 37 different
cultures, men and women rated love as the single most
important quality in selecting a spouse. Across the globe,
people sing love songs and pine for lost lovers. They elope
with loved ones against the wishes of parents. They recount
personal tales of anguish, longing, and unrequited love. And
they narrate great love stories of romantic entanglements down
through the generations. The German writer Herman Hesse summed
it up best: Life is “the struggle for position and the search
for love.” Love is the universal human emotion that bonds the
sexes, the evolutionary meeting ground where men and women lay
down their arms.
The universal existence of love, however, poses a puzzle.
From an evolutionary perspective, no single decision is more
important than the choice of a mate. That single fork in the
road determines one's ultimate reproductive fate. More than
in any other domain, therefore, we expect evolution to produce
supremely rational mechanisms of mate choice, rational in the
sense that they lead to wise decisions rather than impetuous
mistakes. How could a blind passion like love – a form of
dementia that consumes the mind, crowds out all other
thoughts, creates emotional dependency, and produces a
delusional idealization of a partner – possibly evolve to
solve a problem that might be better solved by cool
rationality?
To penetrate this mystery, we must start with the scientific
evidence for mate preferences. Worldwide, from the coastal
dwelling Australians to the South African Zulu, women desire
qualities such as ambition, industriousness, intelligence,
dependability, creativity, exciting personality, and sense of
humor – characteristics that augur well for a man's success in
acquiring resources and achieving status. Given the
tremendous investment women undertake to produce a single
child, the nine months of costly internal fertilization and
gestation, it is perfectly reasonable for women to want men
who can invest in return. A woman's children will survive and
thrive better if she selects a resourceful man. Children
suffer when their mothers choose “slackers.” Men, in contrast,
place a greater premium on qualities linked with fertility,
such as a woman's youth, health, and physical appearance -
clear skin, smooth skin, bright eyes, full lips, symmetrical
features, and a slim waist. These preferences are also
perfectly sensible. We descended from ancestral mothers and
fathers who chose fertile and resourceful partners. Those who
failed to choose on these bases risked reproductive oblivion.
Although these rational desires set minimum thresholds on who
qualifies as an acceptable mate, rationality profoundly fails
to predict the final choice of a mate. As the psychologist
Steven Pinker of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
observes, “Murmuring that your lover's looks, earning power,
and IQ meet your minimal standards would probably kill the
romantic mood, even if statistically true. The way to a
person's heart is to declare the opposite – that you're in
love because you can't help it.”
One key to the mystery of love is found in the psychology of
commitment. If a partner chooses you for rational reasons, he
or she might leave you for the same rational reasons: finding
someone slightly more desirable on all of the “rational”
criteria. But if the person is blinded by an uncontrollable
love that cannot be helped and cannot be chosen, a love for
only you and no other, then commitment will not waver when you
are in sickness rather than in health, when you are poorer
rather than richer. Love overrides rationality. It's the
emotion that ensures that you won't leave when someone
slightly more desirable comes along or when a perfect “10″
moves in next door. It ensures that a partner will stick by
you through the struggles of survival and the hazards of
childbirth.
Love, however, has a tragic side. The stories of great lovers
of the past, in fiction and in history, are often marked by
disaster. Juliet died of poison. Romeo chose to kill himself
rather than live without her. Love suicides have pervaded
Japanese culture for centuries, a final vindication of the
intensity of a person's commitment. When parents and society
conspire to keep lovers apart, lovers sometimes tie themselves
together and jump off a cliff or hurl themselves into a
well. The most perilous side of love, however, comes not from
a folie � deux, but from a folie � un – the demonic possession
that consumes a person when love is not
reciprocated. Unrequited love is the foundation for fatal
attraction.
Consider the case of John W. Hinckley, Jr., who scrawled a
final letter to the actress Jodie Foster on March 30, 1981,
shortly before attempting to assassinate President Ronald
Reagan:
Dear Jodie:
There is a definite possibility that I will be killed in my
attempt to get Reagan. It is for this very reason I am
writing you this letter now.
As you well know by now I love you very much. Over the
past seven months I've left you dozens of poems, letters
and love messages in the faint hope that you could develop
an interest in me…I know the many messages left at your
door and in your mailbox were a nuisance, but I felt that
it was the most painless way for me to express my love for
you…
Jodie, I would abandon this idea of getting Reagan in a
second if I could only win your heart and live out the rest
of my life with you…I will admit to you that the reason
I'm going ahead with this attempt now is because I just
cannot wait any longer to impress you. I've got to do
something now to make you understand, in no uncertain
terms, that I am doing this for your sake! By sacrificing
my freedom and possibly my life, I hope to change your mind
about me. This letter is being written only an hour before
I leave for the Hilton Hotel. Jodie, I'm asking you to
please look into your heart and at least give me the
chance, with this historic deed, to gain your respect and
love.
I love you forever.
John Hinckley
Cases as extreme as John Hinckley are rare, but the experience
of unrequited love is quite common. In one recent survey, 95
percent of men and women indicated that, by the age of 25,
they had experienced unrequited love at least once, either as
a would-be lover whose passions were rejected or as the object
of someone's unwanted desires. Only one person in 20 has
never experienced unrequited love of any kind.
Although unrequited love is a perilous passion, producing
fatal attractions and unwanted stalking, the dogged
persistence it produces sometimes pays off. One of the great
love stories in history is that of Nicholas and
Alexandra. Nicholas inherited the Russian throne at the end of
the 19th century. During his adolescence his parents started
looking for a suitable mate for him. At age 16, contrary to
his parent's wishes, he became obsessed with Alexandra, a
beautiful princess then living in England with her
grandmother, Queen Victoria. Despite parental objections,
cultural chasms, and a separation spanning thousands of miles,
Nicholas was determined to capture Alexandra's
love. Alexandra, however, found him a bit dull and did not
relish the thought of moving to the harsh climate of
Moscow. She spurned his advances. In 1892, Nicholas turned 24
and, having loved Alexandra for nearly eight years, resolved
to make one final effort to win her heart. Given this state of
mind, he was devastated when she wrote saying that she had
definitely decided not to wed him. She asked him not to
contact her again. All seemed lost.
Nicholas left his beloved Moscow immediately. He traveled
across Europe, suffering rough terrain and treacherous weather
in the journey to London. Although exhausted from travel,
Nicholas immediately began to persue Alexandra with great
passion. After two months, she finally relented and agreed to
marry him. The young couple thus became man and wife, rulers
of the Russian empire.
Although Nicholas's love was initially unrequited, their
marriage proved a joyful one. Diary entries from each revealed
sublime happiness, the great joy of their union, and the depth
of their love for each other. They produced five
children. Nicholas so enjoyed spending time with Alexandra and
their children that the Russian empire apparently suffered
from his neglect. When forced to be apart, they pined for each
other, wrote often, and endured great psychological pain until
their reunions. Their mutual love lasted throughout their
lives, until the Russian Revolution brought down the czarist
rule and they were executed. They died on the same day, their
lifelong love never having diminished. Had Nicholas given up
when initially spurned, their great love would have been lost
forever.
The same passion that led John Hinckley to pursue Jodie Foster
with desperate measures led Nicholas to succeed in turning an
unrequited obsession into lifelong love. In retrospect, one
seems irrational and unbalanced, the other logical and
normal. One we call pathological, the other a love story. But
what if Hinckley had succeeded in winning Jodie Foster's love
and Nicholas had failed in his quest for Alexandra? Love is a
dangerous passion that cuts both ways. There's a rationality
to the irrationality.
Once humans evolved love, the bonds they created required
protection. It would be extraordinarily unlikely that
evolution would fail to defend these fragile and fruitful
unions against interlopers. In the insect world, there is a
species known as the “lovebug.” Male lovebugs venture out in a
swarm of other males each morning in search of a chance to
mate with a female. When one succeeds, the couple departs from
the swarm and glides to the ground to copulate. Because other
males sometimes attempt to copulate with her, even after the
pair has begun mating, the couple maintains a continuous
copulatory embrace for as long as three days, hence the
nickname “the lovebug.” This strategy guards the union against
outside intruders.
In humans, guarding a bond must last more than days, months,
or even years because love can last a lifetime. The dangerous
emotion of jealousy evolved to fill this void. Love and
jealousy are intertwined passions. They depend on each other
and feed on each other. But just as the prolonged embrace of
the lovebug tells us that their bonds can be threatened, the
power of jealousy reveals the ever-present possibility that
our love bonds can be broken. The centrality of jealousy in
human love reveals a hidden side of our desires, one that we
typically go to great lengths to conceal – a passion for other
partners.
Hidden Desires
One Sunday morning William burst into the living room and
said, “Dad! Mom! I have some great news for you! I'm
getting married to the most beautiful girl in town. She
lives a block away and her name is Susan.” After dinner,
William's dad took him aside. “Son, I have to talk with
you. Your mother and I have been married 30 years. She's a
wonderful wife, but has never offered much excitement in
the bedroom, so I used to fool around with women a
lot. Susan is actually your half-sister, and I'm afraid you
can't marry her.”
William was heartbroken. After eight months he eventually
started dating again. A year later he came home and proudly
announced, “Dianne said yes! We're getting married in
June.” Again, his father insisted on a private conversation
and broke the sad news. “Dianne is your half-sister too,
William. I'm awfully sorry about this.”
William was furious. He finally decided to go to his mother
with the news. “Dad has done so much harm. I guess I'm
never going to get married,” he complained. “Every time I
fall in love, Dad tells me the girl is my half-sister.”
His mother just shook her head. “Don't pay any attention to
what he says, dear. He's not really your father.”
We find this story funny not simply because the ending carries
a surprise. It's amusing because the mother ultimately gets
payback for the “father's” philandering. Cuckolds are
universal objects of laughter and derision, and a constant
source of engaging tales from the tragedy of William
Shakespeare's Othello to the middle-class marital dramas
portrayed in the novels of John Updike.
To understand the origins of sexual passion we must introduce
a disturbing difference between the sexes. Everyday
observation tells us that men are more promiscuously inclined
than women. “Men found to desire more sex partners than women
desire” would be no more likely to make the headlines than
“Dog bites man.” But scientific verification is always useful,
since common sense, which tells us that the earth is flat,
sometimes turns out to be wrong. Science, in this case, has
verified the everyday knowledge that men do display a greater
passion for playing around. In one of our recent studies of
more than 1,000 men and women, men reported desiring eight sex
partners over the next three years, whereas women reported
desiring only one or two. In another study, men were four
times more likely than women to say that they have imagined
having sex with 1,000 or more partners.
Observing that men and women differ, however, is not the same
as explaining why they differ. There are compelling
evolutionary reasons for the fact that this difference in
desire for sexual variety is universal, found not just in
cultures saturated with media images of seductive models, not
just among Hugh Hefner's generation of Playboy readers, and
not just in studies conducted by male scientists. To explain
this desire, we must introduce another key fact about human
reproductive biology.
To produce a single child, women bear the burdens and
pleasures of nine months of pregnancy – an obligatory form of
parental investment that men cannot share. Men, to produce the
same child, need only devote a few hours, a few minutes, or
even a few seconds. Wide is the gulf between men and women in
the effort needed to bring forth new life. Over time,
therefore, a strategy of casual mating proved to be more
reproductively successful for men than for women. Men who
succeeded in the arms of many women out-reproduced men who
succeeded with fewer. An ancestral woman, in contrast, could
have had sex with hundreds of partners in the course of a
single year and still have produced only a single
child. Unless a woman's regular partner proved to be
infertile, additional sex partners did not translate into
additional children. As a consequence, men evolved a more
powerful craving for sex with a variety of women.
This sex difference in desire creates an intriguing puzzle.
Sexual encounters require two people. Mathematically, the
number of heterosexual encounters must be identical for the
sexes. Men cannot satisfy their lust for sex partners without
willing women. Indeed, men's passion for multiple partners
could never have evolved unless there were some women who
shared that desire. Is casual sex a recent phenomenon, perhaps
created by the widespread prevalence of birth control devices
that liberated women from the previous risks of pregnancy? Or
did ancestral women do it too?
Three scientific clues, when taken together, provide a
compelling answer. Men's sexual jealousy provides the first
clue, the ominous passion that led us to this mystery. If
ancestral women were naturally inclined to be flawlessly
faithful, men would have had no evolutionary catalyst for
jealousy. Men's jealousy is an evolutionary response to
something alarming: the threat of a loved one's infidelity.
The intensity of men's jealousy provides a psychological clue
that betrays women's desire for men other than their regular
partners.
Second, affairs are known in all cultures, including tribal
societies, pointing to the universal prevalence of infidelity.
Prevalence rates vary from culture to culture (high in Sweden
and low in China), but affairs occur everywhere. Sexual
infidelity causes divorce worldwide more than any other
marital violation, being closely rivaled only by the
infertility of the union. The fact that women have affairs in
cultures from the Tiwi of northern Australia to the suburbs of
Los Angeles reveals that some women refuse to limit themselves
to a single partner despite men's attempts to control them and
despite the risk of divorce if discovered.
A third line of evidence comes from new research on human
sperm competition. Sperm competition occurs when the sperm
from two different men inhabit a woman's reproductive tract at
the same time. Human sperm remain viable within the woman's
tract for up to seven days, not merely one or two days as
scientists previously believed. Indeed, my colleagues have
discovered hundreds of “crypts” recessed within the vaginal
walls of women in which they store a man's sperm and then
release it several days later to enter a marathon race to her
egg. If a woman has sex with two men within the course of a
week, sperm competition can ensue, as the sperm from different
men scramble and battle for the prize of fertilizing the
egg. Research on sperm competition reveals that men's sperm
volume, relative to their body weight, is twice that which
occurs in primate species known to be monogamous, a clue that
hints at a long evolutionary history of human sperm
competition.
Human sperm, moreover, come in different “morphs,” or shapes,
designed for different functions. Most common are the “egg
getters,” the standard government-issue sperm with conical
heads and sinewy tails designed for swimming speed – the Mark
Spitzes of the sperm world. But a substantial minority of
sperm have coiled tails. These so-called kamikaze sperm are
poorly designed for swimming speed. But that's not their
function. When the sperm from two different men are mixed in
the laboratory, kamikaze sperm wrap themselves around the egg
getters and destroy them, committing suicide in the
process. These physiological clues reveal a long evolutionary
history in which men battled with other men, literally within
the woman's reproductive tract, for access to the vital egg
needed for transporting their genes into the next
generation. Without a long history of sperm competition,
evolution would have favored neither the magnitude of human
sperm volume nor the specialized sperm shapes designed for
battle.
All these clues – the universality of infidelity, men's sexual
jealousy, and the hallmarks of sperm competition – point to a
disturbing answer to the question of ancestral women's sexual
strategies. They reveal the persistent expression of women's
passion for men other than their husbands, a phenomenon that
must have occurred repeatedly over the long course of human
evolution. Modern women have inherited this passion from their
ancestral mothers.
Why Women Have Affairs
Because scientists have focused primarily on the obvious
reproductive benefits of men's desire for sexual variety, the
potential benefits to women of short-term sexual passion
languished for years unstudied. The puzzle is compounded by
the fact that a woman's infatuation with another man comes
laden with danger. An unfaithful woman, if discovered, risks
damage to her social reputation, the loss of her partner's
commitment, physical injury, and occasionally death at the
hands of a jealous man. Undoubtedly, many women weigh these
risks, and choose not to act on their sexual desires. The
benefits to women who do act on their passion for other men,
given the possibility of catastrophic costs, must be perceived
as sufficiently great to make it worth the risk.
For the past seven years, Heidi Greiling and I have been
studying why women have affairs. Our lab has focused on the
benefits that are so alluring that women from all walks of
life are willing to take great risks to pursue sex and love
outside of marriage. Our research centered on three questions:
What benefits do women reap from affairs? What circumstances
are most likely to drive a woman into another man's arms? And
which women are most prone to affairs?
Historically, women may have benefited from an affair in
countless ways. The first and most obvious benefit comes from
the direct resources that an affair partner may provide. A few
expensive dinners may not seem like much today, but an extra
supply of meat from the hunt would have made the difference
between starving and surviving during ancestral winters when
the land lay bare, or between merely surviving and robustly
thriving during more plentiful times.
Women also can benefit from affairs in the currency of quality
genes. The puzzle of the peacock's tail provided the telltale
clue to this benefit. A peahen's preference for peacocks with
brilliant plumage may signal selection for genes for good
health. When peacocks carry a high load of parasites, their
diminished health is revealed in duller displays. By selecting
for luminescence, peahens secure good genes for health that
benefit their offspring. Research by Steve Gangestad and Randy
Thornhill of the University of New Mexico reveals that women
may be choosing affair partners with especially healthy
genes. Women who have sex with different men can also produce
more genetically diverse children, providing a sort of “hedge”
against environmental change.
Although genetic and resource benefits may flow to women who
express their hidden sexual side, our studies uncovered one
benefit that overshadowed the others in importance, a benefit
we call “mate insurance.” During ancestral times, disease,
warfare, and food shortages made survival a precarious
proposition. The odds were not trivial that a husband would
succumb to a disease, become debilitated by a parasite, or
incur injury during a risky hunt or a tribal battle. The
paleontological and cross-cultural records reveal this clue -
the skulls and skeletons show injuries mostly on males. A
woman's husband, in short, stood a significant chance of
suffering a debilitating or lethal wound.
Ancestral women who failed to have mate insurance, a backup
replacement in the event that something happened to her
regular partner, would have suffered greatly compared to women
who cultivated potential replacements. Modern women have
inherited the desires of their ancestral mothers for
replacement mates. In the words of one woman in our study,
“Men are like soup – you always want to have one on the back
burner.” Mate insurance provides a safeguard against
reasonable risks of losing a partner.
And mate insurance remains relevant today, even though we've
conquered many of the hazards that felled our
forebears. American divorce rates now approach 67 percent for
those currently getting married, up from the mere 50 percent
figure that alarmed many over the past two decades. Remarriage
is rapidly becoming the norm. The Dangerous Passion explores
how women's desire for additional partners is ancestral wisdom
that, however alarming to husbands, continues to serve a
critical insurance function for women today.
Urges of Ovulation
Women's attraction to lovers has another mysterious
ingredient: the puzzle of concealed ovulation. Unlike
chimpanzees, women's genitals do not become engorged when they
ovulate. Women have “lost estrus” and engage in sex throughout
their ovulatory cycle. Conventional scientific wisdom has
declared that a woman's ovulation is cryptic, concealed even
from the woman herself. But have the urges associated with
ovulation totally vanished?
In the most extensive study of ovulation and women's
sexuality, several thousand married women were asked to record
their sexual desires every day for a period of twenty-four
months. The methods were crude but straightforward: women
simply placed an X on the recording sheet on each day that
they experienced sexual desire. Basal body temperature was
recorded to determine the phase of the menstrual cycle. These
thousands of data points yielded a startling pattern. On the
first day of a woman's period, practically no women reported
experiencing sexual desire. The numbers rose dramatically
across the ovarian cycle, peaking precisely at the point of
maximum fertility, and then declining rapidly during the
luteal phase after ovulation. Women, of course, can experience
sexual desire at any phase of their cycle. Nonetheless, they
are five times more likely to experience sexual desire when
they are ovulating than when they are not.
Women sometimes act on their passions. A recent survey of
1,152 women, many of whom were having affairs, revealed a
startling finding. Women who stray tend to time their sexual
liaisons with their affair partners to coincide with the peak
of their sexual desire, when they are most likely to
conceive. Sex with husbands, in sharp contrast, is more likely
to occur when women are not ovulating, a strategy that may be
aimed at keeping a man rather than conceiving with him. None
of this is conscious, of course. Women do not think “I'll try
to time sex with my affair partner when I'm ovulating so that
I'll bear his child and not my husband's.” Psychologically,
women simply experience sexual desire more when they are
ovulating, and if they have an affair partner, have urges to
have sex with him during this phase. Ovulation may seem
concealed to outside observers, but women appear to act on the
impulses that spring from it. And when that desire for men
other than their husbands occurs, it's difficult for most men
to tell when their mates are straying or may be likely to
stray. I call this the signal detection problem.
The Signal Detection Problem
Across cultures, people have affairs that are specifically
designed to avoid detection. In Arizona, one motel marquee
boasts that it is the “No-Tell Motel.” In states across
America, you can rent some hotel rooms at an hourly rate. The
woman returning from a business trip does not make her brief
fling on the road the first topic of conversation. The
husband who conceals his finances from his wife may be
funneling resources to support a mistress on the side.
Spouses experience a signal detection problem. Consider
camping in the woods at night and hearing a sound somewhere in
the dark. Was that the sound of a twig snapping, merely the
wind blowing, or the unfamiliar night sounds playing tricks on
your ears? Assuming that you have correctly detected the
signal as a twig snap, the possible causes of this event are
many, but they are not infinite. It could be a rock that
somehow got dislodged. But it could also be a dangerous animal
or a hostile human. The signal detection problem is not merely
about picking up accurate signals in the face of an uncertain
and ambiguous welter of information. It is also about making
correct inferences about the cause of the signal.
Since sexual infidelities are almost invariably secret, the
signals they might emit are intentionally muted. An unfamiliar
scent, the purchase of a sharp new jacket, the running of a
yellow light, a new interest in Beethoven or the Beastie Boys,
an unexplained absence – all of these can be signals, but they
can originate from many causes other than infidelity. The
jealous person experiences an elevated sensitivity to signals
of infidelity: “He may see a red flush on his wife's cheek,
she may appear to be standing awkwardly, or sitting sideways
on a chair, she has put on a clean dress, there is a
cigarette-end in the fireplace…the jealous man sees a
handkerchief on the floor, a wet cloth in the bathroom,
newspapers in a ditch, and attaches to all the same import.”
Consider the case of a European psychiatrist who counseled
many couples referred to him in which one of the spouses
experienced “morbid jealousy.” Most cases were husbands who
had delusions that their wives were sexually unfaithful, and
these delusions destroyed the fabric of trust required for
harmonious marriage. Because he believed that extreme jealousy
was a psychiatric illness that could not be cured, his most
common recommendation was that the couples separate or
divorce. Many couples followed his recommendations. Because he
was keenly interested in the subsequent fate of his patients,
he routinely contacted them after a number of months had
passed. To his astonishment, he discovered that many of the
wives of his patients had subsequently become sexually
involved with the very men about whom their husbands had been
jealous! Some of these women actually married the men who were
the objects of their husbands' suspicions. In many cases, the
husbands must have been sensing signs of infidelity. But
because the wives proclaimed innocence and declared that their
husbands' jealousy was irrational, the husbands ended up
believing that the problem was in their heads. The problem of
signal detection is how to identify and correctly interpret a
partner's betrayal in an uncertain social world containing a
chaos of conflicting clues.
Jealousy is often triggered by circumstances that signal a
real threat to a relationship, such as differences in the
desirability of the partners, as illustrated by the following
case. The man was 35 years old, working as a foreman, when he
was referred to a psychiatrist and diagnosed with “morbid
jealousy.” He had married at age 20 to a woman of 16 whom he
deeply loved. During their first two years of marriage, he was
stationed in military service in England. During this
two-year separation, he received several anonymous letters
saying that his wife was carrying on an affair. When he
returned to America to rejoin her, he questioned her intensely
about the allegations, but she denied them. Their own sexual
relations proved disappointing. He became obsessed with the
earlier time in their marriage, repeatedly accused his wife of
infidelity, and hit her from time to time, especially after a
bout of drinking. He tried to strangle her twice, and several
times he threatened to kill himself.
He openly admitted his problems to the psychiatrist: “I'm so
jealous that when I see anyone near her I want to hurt her. I
have always loved her but do not think she has returned my
affection. This jealousy is something I feel in my stomach and
when it comes out of me there is nothing I can do about
it. That is why I behave so madly….My wife is always telling
me that other men are stronger and can beat me….I'm not a
big chap or a handsome chap but my wife is so pretty and I
don't think I come up to her high standards.” In other words,
he perceived a difference in their level of desirability; she
was attractive and alluring, and he saw himself as beneath
her. When the psychiatrist questioned the wife in private, she
admitted to meeting and having an affair with a married
man. The affair was carried on in secret, and throughout the
duration of her affair she insisted that her husband's
jealousy was delusional. The affair began roughly one year
before the husband was referred to the psychiatrist to treat
“his problem.”
Differences in desirability – when an “8″ is married to a “10″
- can heighten sensitivity to signals of infidelity in the
partner who has fewer outside mating options. Elaine Hatfield
and her colleagues at the University of Hawaii discovered that
the more desirable partner in the couple in fact is more
likely to stray. Those who have been in relationships with
both more attractive and less attractive partners have an
acute awareness of how jealousy is attuned to these
differences. These differences represent one among many signs
of actual or impending infidelity explored in depth later in
the book.
Emotional Wisdom
Jealousy is necessary because of the real threat of sexual
treachery. In a hazardous world where rivals lurk, partners
harbor passions for other people, and infidelity threatens to
destroy what could have been a lifelong love, it would be
surprising if evolution had not forged elaborate defenses to
detect and fend off these threats. Exposing these threats, and
the psycho-logical arms we have to combat them, is a first
step toward comprehending the wisdom of passions that
sometimes seem so destructive.
The Dangerous Passion takes us on a journey through the
rationality of these seemingly irrational emotions, examining
the fundamental desires of what men and women want, and why
these longings so often produce conflict. Chapter 2 introduces
the jealousy paradox – why an emotion that evolved to protect
love can rip a relationship apart. It explores the evolution
of conflict between men and women, why painful emotions are
necessary in resolving conflicts, and why men and women are
locked in a never-ending spiral of love and strife.
Chapter 3 focuses on why men and women differ in their
underlying psychology of jealousy. It reveals that men and
women are neither unisex equivalents nor aliens from different
planets. When it comes to adaptive problems that differ for
men and women, passions diverge; for adaptive problems that
are the same, their emotions joyfully commingle.
Chapter 4, “The Othello Syndrome,” investigates seemingly
bizarre clinical cases in which a jealous person becomes
untethered, resulting in delusional suspicions about a
partner's infidelity. We explore why our minds are designed
not merely to pick up on infidelities that have already
occurred, but also to detect circumstances that signal an
increased likelihood that a partner will stray in the
future. Chapter 5 delves into the frightening abuses produced
by the dangerous passion – battering, stalking, and killing -
and identifies when women are most vulnerable to these
violations.
Although I call jealousy the dangerous passion, it cannot be
disentangled from the risky cravings that men and women harbor
for other lovers. Chapter 6 examines the qualities of
relationships that make a person susceptible to infidelity,
the personality characteristics that predict who's likely to
cheat, and why some people unwittingly drive their partners
into the arms of a paramour. Chapter 7 explores why women have
affairs, and why modern women have inherited from their
ancestral mothers a roving eye.
Chapter 8 identifies the strategies we use to cope with
jealousy and infidelity and why some therapeutic efforts to
eradicate jealousy are often misguided. The final chapter
reveals the positive uses of jealousy for enhancing sexual
passion and life-long love, and examines how we can harness
emotional wisdom to enrich our relationships.
