The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy Is as Necessary as Love and Sex (31 page)

Another practice common in Africa is infibulation, the sewing
shut of the labia majora, sometimes done after clitoridectomy. According to one
estimate, 65 million women living today in 23 African countries have suffered
this form of genital mutilation. Infibulation effectively prevents sexual
intercourse. It is sometimes performed at the insistence of a woman’s kin as a
guarantee to a future husband of the woman’s fidelity. After marriage,
infibulated women must be cut open to permit sexual intercourse, because
otherwise the vaginal opening is too small. If the husband goes away for a
while, however, his wife may be reinfibulated. The decision to reinfibulate
usually rests with the husband and his appraisal of his wife’s likelihood of
infidelity.

Western nations have historically enacted laws that perform
similar functions, although by less brutal means. Today, industrial nations
have laws that approach a single standard for adultery, applicable equally to
both sexes, but this trend has been extremely slow in coming. Adultery
committed by a husband was nowhere considered a crime until 1810, and even then,
true equality was not codified. French law made it a crime for a man to keep a
mistress in the same house with his wife only if his wife objected to it. It
was not until 1852 that Austria (the first country to do so) made male and
female infidelity equal criminal acts. Historically, however, among the Aztecs,
Incas, Mayans, the Germanic tribes of western Europe, the Chinese and Japanese,
in older cities in the land now called Iraq, and in many other east Asian
cultures, the familiar double standard ruled: adultery was a crime against the
husband, and the laws permited recompense or revenge by the victim.

Our studies of dating and married couples have focused on
personal, rather than legal or culturally codified, coping strategies.
Maintaining vigilance is the first line of defense. When faced with an
uncertain threat, men and women alike start calling their partners at
unexpected times to see if they are where they said they would be. Other
strategies include snooping through the partner’s personal belongings, dropping
by unexpectedly, and reading personal mail. Husbands and wives keep a close eye
on their partners at parties, maintain close physical proximity when rivals
might be around, and even ask friends to keep an eye out on their potentially
errant partners.

Vigilance yields information that helps to clarify whether an
adaptive threat is real or not. Once it is determined to be real, however, a
new set of coping strategies kicks in.

One fundamental coping strategy involves self-enhancement. The
evolutionary psychology of desire actually predicts the qualities a person
targets for self-enhancement. Because men place a premium on women’s
appearance, whereas women care more about men’s resources, successful tactics of
self-enhancement should be sex-linked to correspond to the desires of one’s
mate. Does the evidence bear out this prediction?

Imagine watching a videotape of a couple sitting on a couch
engaged in conversation. They cuddle, kiss, and touch each other for a minute.
Then, one of the partners gets up to refill their glasses with wine. Seconds
later, an interloper enters and is introduced as the old girlfriend or
boyfriend of the partner who remained on the couch. The partner stands up and
briefly hugs the interloper, then the two sit down on the couch. Over the next
minute, they kiss, touch, and sit close to each other. Then the absent partner
returns, stops in his or her tracks, wine glasses in hand, and looks down at
the partner showing affection to a rival on the couch. The tape ends. Joyce
Shettel-Neuber and her colleagues at San Diego State University had both men
and women watch sex-specific videotapes; the men watched a version with an old
boyfriend interloper while the women watched a version with an old girlfriend
interloper. If you were the one standing there holding the wine glasses, what
would you do? How would you cope with this rival, a former mate of your
partner?

Women who see the tape are nearly twice as likely as men to
report that they would try to make themselves more physically attractive to
their partner. They would redouble their efforts at beauty treatments, hair
styling, and working out. Women enhance their appearance as a coping strategy
when threatened with a rival. The men reported that they would get angry or get
drunk.

Our studies of 107 newlyweds confirmed that a common strategy
women use to cope with threats of infidelity is to enhance their physical
appearance. In a follow-up study of this newlywed sample four years later,
women who felt the need to guard their partners continued to use appearance
enhancement as a primary coping strategy.

Appearance enhancement emerges prominently in case studies of
coping strategies, both in the clinical literature and in our studies. In one
case, a woman who had been married for 14 years and given birth to three
children one day discovered her husband in bed with another woman. She became
hysterical when he confessed that the affair had been going on for five years.
She considered a variety of options, including killing him and committing
suicide. After many months, she still struggled with her husband’s betrayal.
Every woman she met on the street evoked images of her husband in a bed of
betrayal. Every woman caused her to wonder: “Would he find her more attractive
than me? Should I exercise more, attempt to become sexier, have my hair tinted
or fixed more often?” She became obsessed with how she looked and took steps to
improve her appearance.

Men have at their disposal a parallel strategy—capitalizing on
women’s desire for men who show the ability and willingness to commit
attention, effort, and resources to them. Our studies of 107 married couples
and 102 dating couples discovered that men are far more likely than women to
increase their display of resources when feeling threatened with a mate’s
possible defection. Men report buying their partners gifts, flowers, and
jewelry, and taking them out to expensive restaurants. These increases in
resource display occur when men feel the need to step up their efforts at mate
guarding to discourage their partner from seeking love in the arms of another
man.

According to the biggest rock group of all time, the Beatles,
“love is all you need.” Although this proclamation undoubtedly overstates the
case, it carries an important message for coping with a partner’s threat of
defection. Although both sexes prize love in the long term, women are
especially sensitive to its signals. Love carries the promise of commitment
over the long haul. When faced with signals of a partner’s defection, we found
that both sexes, but especially men, redouble their displays of love and
affection. Consider these specific actions: I told her that I loved her; I went
out of my way to be kind, nice, and caring; I complimented her on her appearance;
I was helpful when she really needed it; I displayed greater affection for her.
All of these love acts scored in the top 10 percent of effective mate retention
tactics. In fact, these five acts were judged to be the most effective tactics
of mate retention out of the entire set of 104 acts we examined.

Two other key findings are worthy of note. First, the love
tactic showed the largest sex difference of all the tactics examined in its
effectiveness at mate retention. Men who are successful at keeping their
partners often step up their displays of love when threatened with a possible
partner defection. Men who fail in these displays tend to be losers in love.
Second, the display of love is closely linked with three key factors among the
dating couples: number of months they have been involved, emotional closeness,
and the probability that they will be together over the long term. Only
emotionally close couples who plan to stay together express their mate
retention tactics through love.

One strategy of coping with a partner’s possible defection is to
induce guilt. Why did humans evolve to experience guilt in the first place?
According to evolutionary theorist Paul Gilbert, guilt evolved as an internal
monitoring mechanism that allowed individuals to keep track of reciprocity in
relationships. Benefits bestowed and costs inflicted cannot get too far out of
balance in intimate relationships. If they do, participants run the risk of
being exploited (if they give more than they receive) or being branded an
exploiter (if they take more than they give). According to this theory, the
greater the love, the more strongly one is motivated to reciprocate, and hence
the more guilt one will experience at reciprocation failures. Guilt is evoked
when you perceive that you’ve caused pain and suffering in loved ones, falling
short of their expectations.

Once guilt has evolved, it is susceptible to co-evolutionary
exploitation as a mate retention device. In our studies of mate retention
tactics, participants told us that they intentionally induce guilt in their
partners by crying when their partners indicate interest in others, by
threatening to harm themselves if their partner leaves them, and by pretending
to be mad about a partner’s flirtation. A few became borderline anorexic,
blaming the partner for their loss of appetite. A few even threatened suicide
to induce guilt.

Contrary to common stereotypes, men and women use guilt tactics
equally. We discovered that these coping tactics were equally effective in
retaining a mate for both sexes, each scoring in the moderately effective
range. Stereotypes of women as the more emotionally manipulative sex, at least
when it comes to mate retention strategies, are false.

Inducing guilt through emotional manipulation acquires its
effectiveness by exploiting people’s evolved psychology of relationship balance
and reciprocity. By indicating that one is psychologically injured, the
strategist evokes attempts to restore balance by increasing commitment, by
redoubling love, by avoiding contact with others, and ultimately by remaining
with the mate. It works in part because crying and despondency convey the depth
with which one partner values the other—a signal that such commitment will be
difficult to replace. Becoming irreplaceable may be the key to commitment. It
can only work, however, if the target of this tactic is prone to respond by
restoring the balance.

Over the long run, emotional manipulation through guilt
induction is a “weak tactic” because it signals dependency on the partner and a
deficit in mate value. Inducing guilt may lose potency with frequent use, but
its sparing application, when used in conjunction with other coping strategies,
may keep a mate from straying and keep emotional commitments in balance.

That some coping strategies entail inward psychological
recalibration rather than outward action should come as no surprise. Actual or
suspected infidelities can shatter long-held worldviews of monogamy and marital
harmony, cause a person to question her or his own worth as a mate, and more
generally call for a reassessment of one’s life course. Psychological methods
of coping may be indispensable weapons in the arsenal required to deal with
betrayal.

In the course of interviewing married couples, one woman—I’ll
call her Tiffany to preserve confidentiality—reported that she suspected her
husband of cheating. Tiffany detected two clues. First, she discovered jewelry
in their bedroom closet just before her birthday. Believing that her husband
had bought the gift for her, she carefully rewrapped and replaced it. Her
birthday came and went, but she received no jewelry. When she confronted her
husband, he told her that she must be imagining things. So she let it drop. Second,
when giving him oral sex, Tiffany noticed that he tasted and smelled like
latex, even though they used pills rather than condoms as birth control. These
suspicious clues coincided with days when he stayed late at the office. The
signals screamed of infidelity, but her husband adamantly denied it. When I
asked her whether she thought that her husband was having an affair, she told
me that she didn’t think so. “He’s the most honest man I know,” she said, “and
if he says he’s not having an affair, then he’s not.”

At first blush, this denial seemed surprising. The clues
provided overwhelming evidence of betrayal. But knowing the details of her life
made the denial more understandable, if not supremely sensible. Tiffany had
four children and without a paying job was economically dependent on her
husband. If she failed to believe her husband and forced the affair into the
open, it could have resulted in a disastrous divorce. So she convinced herself
that she had imagined the clues and that all was well in her marriage after
all.

As it turned out, this coping strategy worked well. Over time,
Tiffany’s husband grew bored with his affair. He stopped staying late at the
office. When they had sex, he no longer smelled of latex condoms. Today, they
are happily married and enjoy raising their four beautiful children in a stable
marital environment.

Although both sexes sometimes use denial as a coping strategy, a
recent study revealed that men use it more frequently than women. In a study of
351 individuals in Dunedin, New Zealand, Paul Mullen and J. Martin studied
strategies used to cope with jealousy. They found that 21 percent of the men,
but only 13 percent of the women, used denial, ignoring threats of infidelity
in the hopes that they would go away.

Although denial may seem like a strange or maladaptive coping
strategy, there are clearly circumstances in which it is effective. Some
problems simply go away over time without anyone doing much of anything at all.