The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy Is as Necessary as Love and Sex (15 page)

Measures of desirability on the mating market are sometimes
crudely translated into numbers, as when actress Bo Derek was referred to as a
“10” in the movie
10
. An “8” might turn down a “6,” but in turn might
be rebuffed by a “10.” Individuals who differ in desirability, however, do
sometimes become coupled. And when they do, problems can ensue. Moreover,
nothing remains static over time. An initially equitable relationship may turn
into one marked by gaping differences in desirability.

Several factors cause gaps in mate value to widen over time.
Consider an initially well-matched couple in their mid-20s. The woman is
intelligent, young, and attractive; the man intelligent, young, and at the
entry stage of a successful career. Over time, the man’s career soars. Although
they both age chronologically at the same rate, aging sometimes takes a greater
toll on the woman’s attractiveness in a man’s eyes. Simultaneously, the man’s
elevated status opens up sexual opportunities previously absent. The adulation
he experiences by attractive young women starts to contrast sharply with that
of his aging wife. The reverse can happen as well. When a woman’s career takes
off, she may grow disgruntled with a less successful husband, since she’ll be
able to command a higher-status man on the mating market. As Donald Symons
notes, “a woman is most likely to experience desire for extramarital sex when
she perceives another man as somehow superior to her husband . . . her sexual
desire may function primarily as part of the process by which women trade up in
the husband market.”

Although menopause has not been examined systematically as a
trigger of jealousy in women, the clinical literature contains a number of
cases that point to its importance. In one case, a woman was referred to a
psychiatrist for her “delusions” that her husband had been carrying on numerous
affairs: “Several years before her delusions, she had been mortified to hear
her husband (who was her own age) express the opinion that men do well to marry
women much younger than themselves. With the approach of the menopause, she
became obsessed with the notion that her husband was bent on the seduction of
every young woman with whom he came into contact.”

Another woman, age 44, suddenly began to accuse her husband of
infidelity after many happy years of marriage. She started chain-smoking
cigarettes and became temperamental and easily irritated. Intercourse with her
husband was too infrequent, she complained, and she believed this to be caused
by his affairs with other women. She became convinced that her husband “made
signs” to other women on the street, using a handkerchief waved from their
bedroom window.

The husband admitted to the psychiatrist that sexual intercourse
with his wife had become less frequent, sometimes with many weeks in between
sexual episodes. The wife found this decrease strange and suspicious. Prior to
approaching menopause, the wife had never been jealous at all! As sex grew less
frequent, however, she developed “feelings of inferiority,” believing that she
had grown old and ugly. She became convinced that her husband would run off
with a “pretty young girl.” The woman’s jealous feelings reached a crescendo
when the couple rented a room in their house to a young woman. The wife had to
be hospitalized. During her stay at the psychiatric clinic, she improved substantially,
but could never expunge her jealous thoughts, especially about the young
renter.

In these cases, we cannot be sure whether the menopausal woman’s
suspicions of infidelity were delusional or accurate. As Claire Warga, author
of
Menopause and the Mind,
notes, menopause is sometimes accompanied
by changes in attention, memory, and a “fluctuating agility in prioritizing”
thoughts. Nonetheless, it is reasonable to suggest that women respond to modern
manifestations of ancestral cues that predicted a husband’s wandering eye.

A woman’s loss of physical attractiveness associated with aging
is a related precipitator of extreme jealousy. Consider the following case of a
woman diagnosed as having “excessive and irrational jealousy” that “defied . .
. therapeutic efforts” to resolve it. Betty had reached the age of 50 when the
jealous episodes began. She had been married for 30 years to her husband,
George. They lived in harmony for many years, sharing a home with her husband’s
sister, and the three shared nearly all of their leisure time together. As she
approached 50, however, she developed stomach problems, and became obsessed
with her health and aging. Over time, she “began to resent her graying hair,
her failing eyesight, her wrinkles, her age spots.” Seemingly “out of the blue”
she developed a “towering jealousy” of her sister-in-law, and started to accuse
George of having an affair with his sister. She started to eavesdrop on their
phone conversations, snooped through letters, rifled through the husband’s
pockets, studied credit card receipts, suspiciously viewed any time they spent
together, and vigilantly monitored all of their activities.

Oscar Wilde asserted: “Curious thing, plain women are always
jealous of their husbands, beautiful women never are!” He was probably wrong.
It is not the level of physical attractiveness per se, but rather a divergence
between spouses in desirability that triggers jealousy. A woman who is a “6”
married to a man who is a “6” should be no more jealous than an “8” married to
an “8.” In fact, the theory predicts a counterintuitive result that goes
against Oscar Wilde’s proclamation; a woman who is an “8” married to a man who
is a “10” will become more jealous than her less attractive counterpart who is
a “6” but who is equitably married to a man who is a “6.”

In the metric of perceived attractiveness, aging often takes a
greater toll on women than on men. This is especially true when the husband
experiences professional success, which elevates his attractiveness. As
therapist Mary Seeman noted in a report on five women diagnosed with
pathological jealousy: “Because of the general respect which the husbands
elicited, they were in reality constantly exposed to many young, available
females. The wives’ realistic opportunities for attracting men other than their
husbands were far fewer.”

In these cases, when questioned about the sexual fantasies they
had as adolescents, all five women reported what the author describes as “a
variant of the raped virgin fantasy as their most common masturbation
accompaniment. Whereas they themselves had played “the heroine” in the fantasy
during adolescence, they were now putting the suspected rival into that role.
She [the rival] was seen as the young, resisting virgin, with the husband who
cajoles her into submission.”

Although each of the five women in this study was diagnosed as
“pathologically jealous,” each of the husbands had reported to the therapist
that he felt “sexual guilt,” even if he had not been unfaithful. The husbands
reported in private that they frequently had sexual fantasies about precisely
the acts their wives accused them of committing. The wives often guessed
correctly about the women to whom their husbands were attracted. Women, like
men, seem sensitive to signals of real threats of defection, even in cases that
may not have culminated in sexual intercourse, a hypersensitivity explained by
Error Management Theory. Women’s ancestral wisdom has decreed that it is more
costly to fail to perceive an impending infidelity than to suspect infidelities
that won’t happen. These cases also call into question the label Othello
syndrome, which some psychiatrists attach to jealous individuals. Many women
diagnosed with “delusional jealousy” are in fact picking up on authentic cues,
if only in their husband’s real attraction to other women. As someone once said
in a different context, “you’re not paranoid if they’re really after you.”

Although the idea of desirability differences widening to the
disadvantage of women is part of folk wisdom, the reverse can also occur.
Consider a professional couple, both ambitious and devoted to their careers.
The woman’s career takes off, and her income starts to exceed her husband’s. As
she gets promotions, bonuses, and status from work, her husband’s career starts
to languish. He becomes depressed; she becomes dissatisfied. Over time, his
attractiveness to other women languishes along with his career failures.
Simultaneously, she develops self-confidence and verve, and starts to radiate a
new-found attractiveness. Men begin to notice her, and although some become
intimidated by her success, high-status confident men are turned on and find
her radiant. When she comes home after a day of flourishing successes, she
encounters a dour husband who has started to drink to drown his anguish. A
chasm in desirability has opened that shows no signs of closing and she begins
to notice other men.

Another change in desirability favoring women centers on health.
Women live longer than men. At an earlier age men contract a wide variety of
illness, from cancer to heart disease. A married couple initially well matched
can suddenly experience a gap when the man falls ills since health is an
important component of mate value. When the illness causes the man to be
house-bound, with his wife free to venture into the world, jealousy and fears
of defection can follow.

Although systematic large-scale studies of illness and jealousy
have not yet been conducted, one study examined seven cases of “delusional
jealousy” linked with failing health. In one case, a 77-year-old man had
developed a severe case of osteoarthritis, which left him house-bound. His wife
was eight years his junior, in robust good health, and they had been married
for 51 years. Although their marriage had been generally harmonious, it took a
severe turn when he developed his disease. He began to look much older and
considerably more frail than his wife, creating a difference in desirability
where none previously existed. He started questioning her intensely whenever
she left the house. He accused her of having an affair with a taxi driver, and
these accusations were increasingly accompanied by threats of violence. The
psychiatrist determined that the man was “cognitively intact” in every way,
other than his delusions about his wife’s infidelity.

Another case involves a man, age 73, whose delusions about his
wife’s infidelity started when he developed Parkinson’s disease, which left him
cooped up at home. His delusions were so extreme they resulted in visual
hallucinations in which he literally imagined that he was witnessing his wife
having sexual intercourse with other men. He questioned her whenever she was
about to leave the house, and accused her of being a prostitute. Prior to
Parkinson’s disease, he was a successful butcher, and was described by others
as a “well-mannered, courteous, charming man.” After his Parkinson’s, he aged
in appearance noticeably, looking a full generation older than his wife.
Although his basic cognitive functions were largely intact, with only minor
short-term memory problems, his hallucinations and delusions grew worse over
time. An initially well-matched couple, the husband’s failing health had
created a contrast in desirability.

A final case illustrates the modern manifestations of this
ancient jealousy trigger. The man was an 83-year-old, who had been married for
43 years to a woman who was eight years younger. Their marriage had been
harmonious until he had a cardiac pacemaker inserted, which caused his
activities to be restricted mostly to his house. He began to look much older
than his wife, who brimmed with robust health. He began to harass his wife with
accusations of infidelity and asserted that her “shopping trips” were really
secret liaisons with her lover. He hallucinated seeing her in bed with other
men and believed that she denied her infidelities in order to make him appear
to be mentally incompetent. Other than the “pathological jealousy” and its
associated symptoms, however, the psychiatrist could find no mental
deterioration other than minor problems with short-term memory.

The fact that men’s health fails, on average, substantially
sooner than women’s creates desirability differences where none previously
existed. In ancestral times, a man’s aging and ill health would in fact lower
his value to his wife, since health is a key component of mate value, ranking
fifth in my cross-cultures studies. As his death begins to loom, it would make
adaptive sense for a women to begin seeking an alternative mate, or at least
begin to lay the groundwork for it.

Marriage vows frequently dictate remaining with a partner “in
sickness and in health” and “for richer or for poorer.” Sickness and poverty
are singled out for special precaution in marriage vows because they are key
conditions that cause a person’s desirability as a mate to plummet, triggering
infidelity or divorce. Jealousy has evolved to defend against such defections,
even though, like all defenses, it only works some of the time.

Those who are lower in desirability are more vulnerable to getting
unceremoniously dumped. The person higher in mate value comes to feel
“under-benefited” in the relationship, sensing that there exist better
possibilities elsewhere. People act on these feelings. In a study of 2,000
people, those who evaluated their partnerships as “balanced,” in the sense of
roughly equal in investments and rewards, had significantly fewer extramarital
affairs than those who saw their relationship as “unbalanced.” The people who
believed that they were superior in some way to their partner felt that they
were “unlucky in marriage,” and consequently felt justified in having affairs
sooner and more frequently than those who felt “lucky” in marriage.

These circumstances trigger jealousy in the less desirable
partner. Simultaneously, the more attractive partner becomes less jealous,
knowing that better opportunities are right around the corner. The less
attractive partner, in contrast, feels lucky to hold on to the current one.