The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy Is as Necessary as Love and Sex (21 page)

In the state of Texas until 1974, the laws were lenient for
killing a wife who strayed. According to the Texas penal code, such murders
went unpunished “when committed by the husband upon the person of anyone taken
in the act of adultery with the wife, provided the killing takes place before
the parties to the act of adultery have separated.” Simply put, it was not a
crime to kill the lovers if you did so before they got out of bed. In New
Mexico and Utah until the 1970s, a husband who found his wife naked in bed with
another man and killed them was acquitted, since in the eyes of the court, no
crime had been committed.

Historical English law reveals similar provisions. The killing
of an adulterous wife used to be exempt from the usual charge of murder, and
instead the charge was reduced to the lowest form of manslaughter on the
grounds that “there could not be a greater provocation.” This is apparently
still the law throughout much of the English-speaking world, which relies on
the “reasonable man” standard. As one legal scholar described this notion: “the
judges have gone a considerable way towards establishing—so far as the law of
provocation is concerned—a standard portrayal of the make-up and reactions of
the reasonable man. They say he is not impotent and he is not normally drunk.
He does not lose his self-control on hearing a mere confession of adultery, but
he becomes unbalanced at the sight of adultery provided, of course, that he is
married to the adulteress.”

In the United States today, killing a wife or her lover is
considered a criminal act, but the actual penalties levied against such killers
tend to be more lenient than for other types of killings. Juries usually
display sympathy for husbands who have killed when discovering their wife in a
naked embrace with another man. Some prosecutors decide not to pursue such
cases in light of the likely sentiments of the juries.

Lawmakers and everyday jurors apparently believe that stumbling
upon carnal evidence of adultery is a provocation so severe that many
“rational” men would resort to extreme violence. The legal system seems
implicitly to acknowledge the deep roots of men’s homicidal nature.

Not all women are equally vulnerable to getting killed. Women who
are young, who have substantially older husbands, or who have children from
former mateships are especially at risk.

When mate killing occurs in specific circumstances, it provides
clues to the design of murderers’ minds. One circumstance is the age of the
partner. Young women tend to be more fertile than older women, and we know that
youth figures prominently in men’s mating desires. Young women are more
attractive to a man’s rivals, who are therefore more likely to flirt, charm, or
try to lure them away from their existing partners. Men mated to young women
are more often surrounded by encroaching competitors, which trips the jealousy
switch.

Young women, because they tend to be desirable, are in the best
positions in their lives to secure a desirable mate. At no other time in a
woman’s life does she have more options. Attempts to switch mates—to find a
better mate to replace her current mate—may be most effective during this
stage. Their husbands seem to be aware that they may be expendable.

In Daly and Wilson’s study of spousal homicides in Canada from
1974 to 1983, women under the age of 20 were two and a half times more likely
to be killed than women between the ages of 20 and 49. After the age of 50,
when most women are postmenopausal, the spousal homicide rate drops again in
half. These findings do not indicate that men view young women as lacking in
worth—quite the opposite. It’s precisely because a man values his young bride
so much that he becomes fanatical in attempting to control and keep her.

When a man is substantially older than his partner, he may be
especially vulnerable to being cuckolded and abandoned for two reasons. First,
women usually want men who are only a few years older than they are, not men
substantially older. Women married to much older men may therefore have a
desire that remains unfulfilled. Second, a young wife is likely to elicit more
interest from other men, opening up more frequent opportunities to switch
mates. If men married to women considerably younger have a more tenuous hold,
and their mates are in fact more prone to defection, then spousal homicide
should show a frequency spike in May-December marriages.

Among the spousal homicides in Miami in 1980, 29 percent of the
killings occurred in marriages where the age discrepancy was 10 years or more.
Similar statistics were reported of spousal homicides in Houston (25 percent),
Chicago (23 percent), Detroit (23 percent), Britain (18 percent), Scotland (15
percent), and New South Wales, Australia (19 percent). The largest sample of
spousal homicides, a total of 1,749, revealed that 20 percent occurred in
marriages with an age discrepancy of 10 years or more.

Not all of the May-December homicides can be explained by the theory
that men might have an evolved mate-killing module. Some spouse killings are
motivated by greed, some catalyzed by pathology. Some may even be accidental,
as Daly and Wilson claim. But the fact remains that most young women married to
older men have lots of mating options, are likely to be sexually attracted to
the man’s rivals, and may be tempted to leave the relationship—circumstances
that our Evolved Homicide Module Theory predicts will render women more
vulnerable to lethal violence.

From a man’s perspective, women with children from a previous
partner have a portion of their resources tied up. In reproductive currencies,
this creates conflict between the woman and her new partner. It detracts from
the resources that she has to invest in him and his children. A disturbing
statistic attests to this conflict: young stepchildren are 40 to 100 times more
likely to be killed than children residing with two biological parents. Does
this conflict also spill over into the marital relationship itself, making the
woman with children from a previous partner more at risk?

Daly and his colleagues explored this issue in Hamilton,
Ontario. Mothers with children fathered by a former partner were 12.7 times
more likely to be killed by their new partner than women with children fathered
only by their current partner. Many of these murders occurred when the woman
had left the relationship, or was in the process of leaving. Here are a few of
these cases: “One woman was slain 4 days after moving out, and another was
killed while walking to work from a shelter to which she had moved 5 days
previously. Another couple shared the marital home while divorcing; the
homicide occurred 11 days after the divorce was finalized while the victim was
packing her belongings. Three more women were killed while retrieving
belongings from the marital home after having moved out within the previous
month . . . two were in possession of restraining orders against their husbands
because of prior threats and assaults, and [another] was killed by a husband
already awaiting trial for a prior assault against her . . . One wife was shot
while sleeping a week after demanding a divorce. A second was allegedly
planning to leave, or so her killer believed, when he drowned [the stepson] in
the bath while she was at work and stabbed her to death on her return home . .
. another was killed after making an appointment with a lawyer to discuss the
logistics of marital separation.” The presence of stepchildren from previous
partners puts women at special risk, especially when they are defecting from
the relationship.

A final source of evidence on this disturbing theory of spousal
homicide comes from research Joshua Duntley and I have been conducting on
homicidal thoughts. We find that most people have had the thought of killing
someone else at one point or another in their lives. Fortunately, most people
do not act on these thoughts. Homicidal thoughts are thousands of times more
common than actual killings. Nonetheless, homicidal thoughts almost invariably
precede actual homicides. Potential killers work out the fantasy in their
minds, envision the weapons of destruction, the step-by-step scenario of
carrying it out, and often establish an alibi. If O. J. Simpson killed his
estranged wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, he may have rehearsed it in his mind
dozens of times, as revealed by circumstantial evidence. Prior to the killing,
he had arranged a plane flight to Chicago, which he boarded shortly after the
killing. By the time the body was discovered, he could declare that he had been
hundreds of miles away and so could not possibly have killed her. If humans
have evolved a psychology of killing, then premeditations are surely part of
that psychology.

If Duntley and I are correct, then thoughts of murdering a
partner should be triggered by two critical events: the discovery of sexual
infidelity by a mate and the actual permanent departure of a mate. Our research
reveals that men’s mate-killing fantasies are triggered precisely by these two
events, which vastly overshadow all other mate-killing catalysts. Here are a
few samples of what men in our study reported:

Man: Age 24. Victim: Girlfriend. Reason: “Well, we got into a
fight about her cheating on me. This made me think that if I can’t have her all
to myself, then no one will. I thought about taking a gun and shooting her in
the face. I didn’t just want to kill her; I wanted to destroy her beauty.”

Man: Age 33. Victim: Girlfriend. Reason: “She admitted to cheating
on me. We didn’t talk for a week. Then we went to a bar, had a few drinks, and
made up. We started sleeping together again. The next month, she came home at
three in the morning smelling like sex. I thought that a good way for her to
die would be in a fiery car crash, so I would cut her brake line. I also
thought that it would be nice to get a syringe filled with the HIV virus and
inject it into her.”

Neither of these men, as far as we know, acted on their
homicidal thoughts. But our studies of homicidal thoughts among thousands of
men show conclusively that a lot of men start thinking of killing when they
catch their partner cheating or when they get unceremoniously dumped.

What can we conclude from this evidence? It would certainly be
premature to conclude that we know with certainty that men have evolved a
situationally triggered mate-killing psychology. Perhaps Daly and Wilson are
correct in their slip-up theory. But we know that men’s homicidal thoughts
occur in specific predictable circumstances. We know that the fantasies involve
killing, not merely hurting or deterring. We know that the thoughts occur with
some frequency and take up a significant amount of men’s attention that could
be devoted to other problems. If men do have an evolved mate-killing mind, then
we must face this disturbing evil of human nature unflinchingly. We need to
know the minds of the killers among us in order to prevent them from acting on
their fantasies. Only by understanding the hidden roots of mate murders can we
hope to reduce their occurrence.

We must now move to another spiral in the co-evolution of men
and women and explore the events that lead to jealousy, the passions that lead
a partner to stray.

Secrets and Lies

I think a man can have two, maybe three affairs while he is
married. But three is the absolute maximum. After that, you are cheating.

—Yves Montand

I
N THE PREVIOUS CHAPTERS,
we explored the psychology of jealousy and its more destructive manifestations,
including the treacherous abuse of spouses and the horrifying killing of
partners. But our jealous nature cannot be fully appreciated without a deep
understanding of why jealousy evolved to begin with—the nature of the threats
it evolved to defend against. This chapter explores the nature of infidelity.

On February 28, 1997, Monica Lewinsky entered the Oval Office
for her final sexual encounter with the President, Bill Clinton. The President
gave her a few gifts, and then . . . according to Lewinsky’s testimony:

“We went back over by the bathroom in the hallway, and we
kissed. We were kissing and he unbuttoned my dress and fondled my breasts with
my bra on, and then he took them out of my bra and was kissing them and
touching them with his hands and with his mouth. And then I think I was touching
him in his genital area through his pants, and I think I unbuttoned his shirt
and was kissing his chest. And then . . . I wanted to perform oral sex on him .
. . so I did . . . And . . . then he pushed me away, kind of as he always did
before he came, and then I stood up and I said . . . I care about you so much;
. . . I don’t understand why you won’t let me . . . make you come; it’s
important to me; I mean, it just doesn’t feel complete, it doesn’t seem right.”

They hugged and looked at each other, and the President said,
“I don’t want to disappoint you.” Then, Monica Lewinsky continued to perform
oral sex on the president to completion. Subsequent laboratory tests revealed
that the semen stain on the dress Lewinsky wore that day contained DNA that matched
the President’s, providing incontrovertible evidence of a secret affair that
the two had been carrying on from November 15, 1995, through their final
encounter on February 28, 1997.

What was striking about the Lewinsky-Clinton affair was neither
the salaciousness of the sexual acts, nor the fact that Bill Clinton was
married. Affairs are commonplace and most sex partners engage in oral sex. What
was arresting was the sheer volume of public attention—a feeding frenzy of
unseemly obsession—in what in nearly any other context would be a rather banal
sequence of events. Viewed from an evolutionary perspective, however, few
domains have greater reproductive consequences than the sex lives of others. As
a result, we attend to, and remember most vividly, events with reproductive
repercussions. Americans’ apparent obsession with every lurid detail of the
sexual encounters of President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, and not with every
detail of, say, Clinton’s golf game, reveals this ancient human interest.