The Myth of Monogamy: Fidelity and Infidelity in Animals and People (32 page)

In one of Shakespeare's lesser-known plays,
Cymbeline,
Posthumus is made to think that his wife has been unfaithful. When shown her ring, which convinces him of his wife's adultery (although actually she has been altogether faithful), Posthumus cries out his jealous anguish:

It is a basilisk unto mine eye, Kills me to look on't. Let there be no honor WTiere there is beauty; truth, where semblance, love WHiere there's another man. The vows of women Of no more bondage be to where they are made Than they are to their virtues, which is nothing. O, above measure false!

As his overheated mind dwells on the imagined act, the husband's words become more and more specific: "No, he hath enjoyed her." And later: "She has been coked by him." Eventually, his wife's imagined single act of adultery becomes equivalent to innumerable such events: "Spare your arithmetic; never count the turns. Once, and a million!"

Jealousy is one of those things that appears to make no sense, yet afflicts us anyway. Indeed, some of our most deep-seated traditional teachings are ambivalent--if not downright contradictory--as regards jealousy. The Old Testament spoke approvingly of the emotion--at least in High Places: "I the Lord your God, am a jealous God" (Deuteronomy 5:9). And yet St. Paul cautioned: "Love is not jealous or boastful" (I Corinthians 13:4).

By and large, jealousy is not one of our more admired emotions. Shakespeare's Iago called it "the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on." John Dryden described jealousy as "the jaundice of the soul," and in
Paradise Lost,
Milton referred to it as "the injured lover's hell." The English poet Robert Herrick derided jealousy as "the canker of the heart." And

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yet the Roman poet Lucian opined that "When a man is not jealous he is not really in love." Insofar as there is a possessive quality to love--and there may always be, to some extent--love rarely exists without jealousy. Would an absence of jealousy simply be an absence of possessiveness--or an absence of caring?

According to anthropologist Ruth Benedict, there is a connection between jealousy and passionate intensity: You can't have one without the other. In her description of the Dionysian inhabitants of the island of Dobu, she recounts:

Any meeting between man or woman is regarded as illicit, and in fact a man by convention takes advantage of any woman who does not flee from him. It is taken for granted that the very fact of her being alone is license enough. Usually a woman takes an escort, often a small child, and the chaperonage protects her from accusation as well as from supernatural dangers.

The deep-seated prudery of Dobu is familiar enough from our own cultural background, and the dourness of Dobuan character that is associated with it also accompanied the prudery of the Puritans. But there are differences. We are accustomed to associate the Puritans with a denial of passion and a lesser emphasis on sex. But this disassociation of prudery and passion is not inevitable. On Dobu, prudery coexists with prenuptial promiscuity and a high valuation of sexual passion and techniques. Men and women alike rate sexual satisfaction as highly important and make achievement of it a matter of great concern. The stock sex advice given to women entering marriage is that the way to keep a husband is to keep him as sexually exhausted as possible. There is no belittling of the physical aspects of sex. The Dobuan, therefore, is dour and prudish, consumed with jealousy, suspicion, resentment--and also sexual passion!

Adultery, jealousy, and violence often make for a lethal mix. Among the Venezuelan Zorcas, an adulterous woman isn't punished by the tribal leaders... provided that her husband kills the lover. The ancient Maya allowed the husband to decide whether his wife's lover should be killed. Male responses to adultery are not invariably violent, however, with or without the involvement of civil authorities. We have already seen cases in which wives are traditionally exchanged, and there have even been some societies--although not many--in which EPCs are seen as "no big deal." In certain Eskimo groups, men responded to their wives' adultery by challenging the lover to a public song contest. The Gabriellino Indians of southern California had an even less resentful and somewhat more practical solution: The offended husband could give his wife to her lover and take the other's wife as his own.

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A woman is generally less likely than a man to behave violently--including, under most circumstances, in response to adultery--but she is is not necessarily any less likely to be emotionally hurt, even infuriated by a spouse's infidelity. As William Congreve put it: "Heaven has no rage like love to hatyred turned; Nor hell a fury, like a woman scorned." The "scorned" wife is the closest English equivalent to a cuckolded husband, although the former part of the Congreve phrase has never been quoted as widely as the latter.

For all the power of jealousy, however, it is noteworthy that, despite nagging doubts, most people retain substantial confidence in monogamy as an institution generally and in the monogamous inclinations of their partner in particular ... regardless of whether either is justified. "It is the property of love," wrote Marcel Proust in
Remembrance of Things Past,
"to make us at once more distrustful and more credulous, to make us suspect the loved one, more readily than we should suspect anyone else, and be convinced more easily by her denials." Whatever the human penchant for jealousy, the desire to think well of a loved one is generally even greater. The facade of fidelity is terribly important to most people, although, to be sure, there are those who enjoy being publicly victimized in the hope of gaining spectator sympathy.

In general, however, virtually no one wants his or her spouse to be unfaithful, and virtually everyone will go to great lengths to ignore or deny evidence to the contrary. One might think that a bit of introspection would convince most people that even a much-loved and much-loving spouse is at least capable of "going outside" a marriage, any marriage, should the opportunity arise.

Behind sexual jealousy and the widespread human concern with adultery there lurks--as with other animals--concern about parentage. Such concern need not be conscious and may even be denied if made explicit; there is no reason to think, for example, that childless couples are any less prone to sexual jealousy than are "breeders." The point is that intentional childlessness is relatively new to the human experience; after all, genes for
not
reproducing would generally face a rather bleak evolutionary future! And so we have almost certainly evolved with reproduction-relevant tendencies, no less than have doves, dunnocks, or donkeys. And once again, the spotlight is especially on men, not because they are more important than women but because they are
less
important: Whereas mammalian mothering is obligatory, fathering is more problematic. Not surprisingly, for mammalian fathers in particular, their mates' EPCs pose a special problem.

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Female birds are generally more prone to desert than are female mammals, at least in part because male birds are as capable as females of doing the parenting chores, whereas female mammals are to some extent tied by their breasts to their kids. At the same time, it seems likely that EPCs by their mates are more hurtful to male birds than to male mammals, since, among birds, males can do--and actually do--much of the child-rearing. (A cuckolded male mammal at least doesn't end up lactating for someone else's offspring!) We might expect, therefore, that male birds might object more strongly to female infidelity. On the other hand, human beings are unusual--perhaps unique--in the amount of parental care often provided by males. So we can expect that, among human beings, infidelity by a mate would typically be seen as a very grave offense. It is.

Considering all mammals, primates are the subgroup (technically, the "order") among which fathers are most involved with their offspring. Perhaps 40 percent of mammalian genera have some form of father-offspring interaction. At the same time, infanticide--the polar opposite of paternal aid--is also frequent among primates. This is not contradictory, however, because it is probably the substantial amount of paternal involvement that inclines nonpaternal males to kill juveniles to whom they are not related, so that their paternal care goes only to those young to whom they
are
related.

Monogamy, too, is somewhat more common among primates than among most mammals, but as already pointed out, it remains rare, and the more we know of the private lives of the generally secretive monogamous primates (or rather, those purported to he monogamous), the fewer of them there appear to be. Human beings--although, to be sure, not reliably monogamous--are more monogamous than most primates and far more so than most mammals. Maybe men would be even better fathers if women were more reliably monogamous. (Wliich, in turn, would require that men be more reliably monogamous, too!)

It may be a tall order. A review of 56 different human societies found that in fully 14 percent nearly all women engaged in EPCs, whereas in 44 percent, a moderate proportion did so, and in 42 percent relatively few-- but still some--did so. It is revealing to compare these figures with those of their male counterparts: Nearly all men engaged in EPCs in 13 percent of societies, a moderate proportion of men did so in 56 percent, and a few-- but still some--did so in 31 percent. In short, cross-cultural analysis of infidelity rates shows that females and males are remarkably similar.

The United States is no exception. According to Kinsey and colleagues, slightly more than one-fourth of adult females in the United States had engaged in EPCs. A
Cosmopolitan
magazine poll reported numbers closer to 50 percent (perhaps reflecting the readership of
Cosmopolitan).
A differ-

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ent survey found that 12 percent of women had been sexually unfaithful to their husbands during their first year of marriage; after 10 years of marriage, this number rose to 38 percent.

Compared with the high probability of male retribution after female infidelity, it is quite rare for male infidelity to trigger female retribution. (Female retribution, similarly, is almost unknown among animals, although interference, as we have seen, is not uncommon.) Among human beings, about 75 percent of societies permit male infidelity, whereas only about 10 percent permit female infidelity--and even in these cases, it is not guaranteed that males will actually be tolerant of such behavior. One can also predict a correlation between male suspicion of female EPCs and male neglect of, or even violence toward, that female's offspring.

Earlier, we considered the notion that multiple matings might serve several different animal species as a form of infanticide insurance; this would be a risky strategy, however, in
Homo sapiens,
whose large brain makes possible both a penchant for suspicion and an ability to put 2 and 2 together. Thus, female infidelity--if detected--could make infanticide
more
likely.

Among the Ache people of eastern Paraguay, women commonly rely upon their former lovers to provide not only food but also protection. Seventeen different Ache women were interviewed by a pair of anthropologists; among them, these women had 66 offspring, which were attributed--by their mothers--to an average of 2.1 fathers each! Interestingly, this was pretty much the optimum, because the chances of survival declined for an Ache child who had more than two or three possible fathers, apparently because no one felt sufficiently confident of fatherhood to help out.

The Ache, according to the interviewing anthropologists, recognize three different types of fatherhood: "One type refers to the man who is married to a woman when her child is born. Another type refers to the man or men with whom she has had extramarital relations just prior to or during her pregnancy. The third type refers to the man who
she
believes actually inseminated her." It seems likely that Ache men, for their part, make parallel distinctions, at least concerning children they might have fathered versus those they definitely did not. This has not as yet, however, been reported in the literature.

On the other hand, paternal care need not be driven strictly by confidence of genetic relatedness. The man's "quality" seems likely to be relevant as well, although, at this point, we cannot predict how the correlation will go. For example, males in general and men in particular who are in poor condition might contribute relatively little to the care of their offspring, for no other reason than that they are less able to do so, whereas males in good condition might contribute more, simply because they can. Low-quality,

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less-desirable men might also be cuckolded more, as has been documented for numerous animals. If both are true, then such men would both have a low chance of being related to their offspring and display a low level of paternal involvement--and yet the two would not be causally connected.

It is also possible, however, that a male in poor condition would invest
more
in his offspring; if he has a low chance of surviving, he might therefore place all his bets on his present family. For their part, women--like females in other species--might well be prepared to invest more in offspring fathered by attractive males. If those offspring were generated via EPCs, and if the high-quality mate of a heavily investing female is himself inclined to invest less (because she is investing more), then there would once again be a correlation between low probability of paternity and low paternal investment--although, once again, one not mediated by confidence of genetic relationship!