CHAPTER EIGHT
Making a Mess of Marriage, Mating, and Monogamy
Marriage is the most natural state of man, and therefore the state in which you are most likely to find solid Happiness.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
When Albert Einstein proclaimed that E=mc2, no physicists asked each other, “What’s he mean by E?” In the hard sciences, the important stuff comes packaged in numbers and predefined symbols. Imprecise wording rarely causes confusion. But in more interpretive sciences such as anthropology, psychology, and evolutionary theory, misinterpretation and misunderstanding are common.
Take the words love and lust, for example. Love and lust are as different from each other as red wine and blue cheese, but because they can also complement one another splendidly, they get conflated with amazing, dumbfounding regularity.
In the literature of evolutionary psychology, in popular culture, in the tastefully appointed offices of marriage counselors, in religious teachings, in political discourse, and in our own mixed-up lives, lust is often mistaken for love. Perhaps even more insidious and damaging in societies insistent on long-term, sexually exclusive monogamy, the negative form of that statement is also true. The absence of lust is misread as indicating an absence of love (we’ll explore this in Part V).
Experts inadvertently encourage us to confuse the two. Helen Fisher’s Anatomy of Love, a book referenced earlier, is far more concerned with shared parental responsibility for a child’s first few years than with the love joining the parents to one another. But we can’t blame Fisher, as the language itself works against clarity. We can “sleep with” someone without ever closing our eyes.1 When we read that the politician “made love” with the prostitute, we know love had little to do with it. When we report how many “lovers” we’ve had, are we claiming to have been “in love” with all of them? Similarly, if we “mate” with someone, does that make us “mates”? Show a guy a photo of a hot-looking woman and ask him if he’d like to “mate with her.” Chances are good he’ll say (or think), “Sure!” But chances are also high that marriage, children, and the prospect of a long future together never entered into his decision-making process.
Everyone knows these are arbitrary expressions for an almost infinite range of situations and relationships—everyone, it appears, but the experts. Many evolutionary psychologists and other researchers seem to think that “love” and “sex” are interchangeable terms. And they throw together “copulating” and “mating” as well. This failure to define terminology often leads to confusion and allows cultural bias to contaminate our thinking about human sexual nature. Let’s try to hack a path through this tangled verbal undergrowth.
Marriage: The “Fundamental Condition” of the Human Species?
The intimate male-female relationship … which zoologists have dubbed a ‘pair bond,’ is bred into our bones. I believe this is what sets us apart from the apes more than anything else.
FRANS DE WAAL2
The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.
HONORé DE BALZAC
The holy grail of evolutionary psychology is the “human universal.” The whole point of the discipline is to tease out intrinsically human patterns of perception, cognition, and behavior from those determined on a cultural or personal level: Do you like baseball because you grew up watching games with Dad or because the sight of small groups of men strategizing and working together on a field connects to a primordial module in your brain? That’s the sort of question evolutionary psychologists love to ask and aspire to answer.
Because evolutionary psychology is all about uncovering and elucidating the so-called psychic unity of humankind—and because of the considerable political and professional pressure to discover traits that conform to specific political agendas—readers need to be cautious about claims concerning such universals. Too often, the claims don’t hold up to scrutiny.
The supposed universality of human marriage—and the linked omnipresence of the nuclear family—is a case in point. A cornerstone of the standard model of human sexual evolution, the claim for this universal human tendency to marry appears to be beyond question or doubt—“unquestioningly correct” in Malinowski’s words. Though the tendency has been assumed since before Darwin, evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers’s now-classic paper Parental Investment and SexualSelection, published in 1972, consolidated the position of marriage as foundational to most theories of human sexual evolution.3
Recall that marriage, as defined by these theories, represents the fundamental exchange underlying human sexual evolution. In his BBC television series The Human Animal, Desmond Morris flatly declares, “The pair bond is the fundamental condition of the human species.” Michael Ghiglieri, biologist and protégé of Jane Goodall, writes, “Marriage … is the ultimate human contract. Men and women in all societies marry in nearly the same way. Marriage,” continues Ghiglieri, “is normally a ‘permanent’ mating between a man and a woman … with the woman nurturing the infants, while the man supports and defends them. The institution of marriage,” he concludes, “is older than states, churches, and laws.”4 Oh my. The fundamental condition? The ultimate human contract? Hard to argue with that.
But let’s try, because slippery use of the word marriage in the anthropological literature has resulted in a huge headache for anyone trying to understand how marriage and the nuclear family really fit into human nature—if at all. The word, we’ll find, is used to refer to a whole slew of different relationships.
In Female Choices, her survey of female primate sexuality, primatologist Meredith Small writes of the confusion that resulted when the term consortship drifted away from its original meaning—a striking parallel to the confusion over marriage. Small explains, “The word ‘consortship’ was used initially to define the close male-female sexual bond seen in savannah baboons and then usage of the word spread to the relationship of other mating pairs.” This semantic leap, says Small, was a mistake. “Researchers began to think that all primates form consortships, and they applied the word to any short or long, exclusive or nonexclusive mating.” This is a problem because “what was originally intended to describe a specific male-female association that lasted during the days surrounding ovulation became an all-inclusive word for mating…. Once a female is described as ‘being in consort,’ no one sees the importance of her regular copulations with other males.”5
Biologist Joan Roughgarden has noted the same problematic application of present-day human mating ideals to animals. She writes, “Sexual selection’s primary literature describes extrapair parentage as ‘cheating’ on the pair bond; the male is said to be ‘cuckolded’; offspring of extrapair parentage are said to be ‘illegitimate’; and females who do not participate in extrapair copulations are said to be ‘faithful.’ This judgmental terminology,” concludes Roughgarden, “amounts to applying a contemporary definition of Western marriage to animals.”6
Indeed, when familiar labels are applied, supporting evidence becomes far more visible than counter-evidence in a psychological process known as confirmation bias. Once we have a mental model, we’re much more likely to notice and recall evidence supporting our model than evidence against it. Contemporary medical researchers attempt to neutralize this effect by using double-blind methodology in all serious research—where neither the researcher nor the subject knows which pills contain the real medicine.
Without a clear definition of what they’re looking for, many anthropologists have found marriage wherever they’ve looked. George Murdock, a central figure in American anthropology, asserted in his classic cross-cultural anthropological survey that the nuclear family is a “universal human social grouping.” He went on to declare that marriage is found in every human society.
But as we’ve seen, researchers trying to describe human nature are highly susceptible to Flintstonization: unconsciously tending to “discover” features that look familiar, and thereby universalizing contemporary social configurations while inadvertently blocking insight into the truth. Journalist Louis Menand noted this tendency in a piece in The New Yorker, writing, “The sciences of human nature tend to validate the practices and preferences of whatever regime happens to be sponsoring them. In totalitarian regimes, dissidence is treated as a mental illness. In apartheid regimes, interracial contact is treated as unnatural. In free-market regimes, self-interest is treated as hardwired.”7
Paradoxically, in each of these cases, so-called natural behavior has to be encouraged and unnatural aberrations punished.
The now-forgotten diseases drapetomania and dysaethesia aethiopica illustrate this point. Both were described in 1851 by Dr. Samuel Cartwright, a leading authority on the medical care of “Negroes” in Louisiana and a leading thinker in the pro-slavery movement. In his article “Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race,” Dr. Cartwright explained that drapetomania was the disease “causing Negroes to run away … the absconding from service” to their white owners, while dysaethesia aethiopica was characterized by “hebetude of and obtuse sensibility of the body.” He noted that slave overseers often referred to this disease, more simply, as “rascality.”8
Despite high-minded claims to the contrary—often couched in language chosen to intimidate would-be dissenters (dysaethesia aethiopica!)—science all too often grovels at the feet of the dominant cultural paradigm.
Another weakness of many of these studies is known as the “translation paradox:” the assumption that a word (marriage, for instance) translated from one language to another has an identical meaning.
We can agree that birds sing and bees dance only as long as we remember that their singing and dancing has almost nothing in common with ours—from motivation to execution. We use identical words to signify very different behaviors. It’s the same with marriage.
People everywhere do pair off—even if just for a few hours, days, or years. Maybe they do it to share pleasure, to make babies, to please their families, to seal a political alliance or business deal, or just because they like each other. When they do, the resident anthropologist standing in the shadows of love says, “Aha, this culture practices marriage, too. It’s universal!” But many of these relationships are as far from our sense of marriage as a string hammock is from Grandma’s featherbed. Simply changing the jargon and referring to long-term pair bond rather than marriage is no better. As Donald Symons put it, “The lexicon of the English language is woefully inadequate to reflect accurately the texture of human experience…. To shrink the present vocabulary to one phrase—pair-bond—and to imagine that in so doing one is being scientific … is simply to delude oneself.”9