The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy Is as Necessary as Love and Sex (3 page)

A male chimpanzee’s position in the social hierarchy strongly
determines his sexual access to estrous females. Among the chimpanzees at a
large zoo colony in Arnham, the Netherlands, for example, the dominant male
achieves as many as 75 percent of the matings with estrous females. The
relationships between male and female chimps are complex and can extend over
time, but chimps do not form the long-term committed relationships that most
humans desire.

Men and women have always depended on each other for survival
and reproduction. Love was not invented a few hundred years ago by European
poets, contrary to conventional wisdom in this century. Love is a human
universal, occurring in societies ranging from the !Kung San of Botswana to the
Ache of Paraguay. In my study of 10,041 individuals from 37 different cultures,
men and women rated love as the single most important quality in selecting a
spouse. Across the globe, people sing love songs and pine for lost lovers. They
elope with loved ones against the wishes of parents. They recount personal
tales of anguish, longing, and unrequited love. And they narrate great love
stories of romantic entanglements down through the generations. The German
writer Herman Hesse summed it up best: Life is “the struggle for position and
the search for love.” Love is the universal human emotion that bonds the sexes,
the evolutionary meeting ground where men and women lay down their arms.

The universal existence of love, however, poses a puzzle. From
an evolutionary perspective, no single decision is more important than the
choice of a mate. That single fork in the road determines one’s ultimate
reproductive fate. More than in any other domain, therefore, we expect
evolution to produce supremely rational mechanisms of mate choice, rational in
the sense that they lead to wise decisions rather than impetuous mistakes. How
could a blind passion like love—a form of dementia that consumes the mind,
crowds out all other thoughts, creates emotional dependency, and produces a
delusional idealization of a partner—possibly evolve to solve a problem that
might be better solved by cool rationality?

To penetrate this mystery, we must start with the scientific
evidence for mate preferences. Worldwide, from the coastal dwelling Australians
to the South African Zulu, women desire qualities such as ambition,
industriousness, intelligence, dependability, creativity, exciting personality,
and sense of humor—characteristics that augur well for a man’s success in
acquiring resources and achieving status. Given the tremendous investment women
undertake to produce a single child, the nine months of costly internal
fertilization and gestation, it is perfectly reasonable for women to want men
who can invest in return. A woman’s children will survive and thrive better if
she selects a resourceful man. Children suffer when their mothers choose
“slackers.” Men, in contrast, place a greater premium on qualities linked with
fertility, such as a woman’s youth, health, and physical appearance—clear skin,
smooth skin, bright eyes, full lips, symmetrical features, and a slim waist.
These preferences are also perfectly sensible. We descended from ancestral
mothers and fathers who chose fertile and resourceful partners. Those who
failed to choose on these bases risked reproductive oblivion.

Although these rational desires set minimum thresholds on who
qualifies as an acceptable mate, rationality profoundly fails to predict the
final choice of a mate. As the psychologist Steven Pinker of the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology observes, “Murmuring that your lover’s looks, earning
power, and IQ meet your minimal standards would probably kill the romantic
mood, even if statistically true. The way to a person’s heart is to declare the
opposite—that you’re in love because you can’t help it.”

One key to the mystery of love is found in the psychology of
commitment. If a partner chooses you for rational reasons, he or she might
leave you for the same rational reasons: finding someone slightly more
desirable on all of the “rational” criteria. But if the person is blinded by an
uncontrollable love that cannot be helped and cannot be chosen, a love for only
you and no other, then commitment will not waver when you are in sickness
rather than in health, when you are poorer rather than richer. Love overrides
rationality. It’s the emotion that ensures that you won’t leave when someone
slightly more desirable comes along or when a perfect “10” moves in next door.
It ensures that a partner will stick by you through the struggles of survival
and the hazards of childbirth.

Love, however, has a tragic side. The stories of great lovers of
the past, in fiction and in history, are often marked by disaster. Juliet died
of poison. Romeo chose to kill himself rather than live without her. Love
suicides have pervaded Japanese culture for centuries, a final vindication of
the intensity of a person’s commitment. When parents and society conspire to
keep lovers apart, lovers sometimes tie themselves together and jump off a
cliff or hurl themselves into a well. The most perilous side of love, however,
comes not from a
folie à deux,
but from a
folie à un
—the
demonic possession that consumes a person when love is not reciprocated.
Unrequited love is the foundation for fatal attraction.

Consider the case of John W. Hinckley, Jr., who scrawled a final
letter to the actress Jodie Foster on March 30, 1981, shortly before attempting
to assassinate President Ronald Reagan:

Dear Jodie:

There is a definite possibility that I will be killed in my
attempt to get Reagan. It is for this very reason I am writing you this letter
now.

As you well know by now I love you very much. Over the past
seven months I’ve left you dozens of poems, letters and love messages in the
faint hope that you could develop an interest in me . . . I know the many
messages left at your door and in your mailbox were a nuisance, but I felt that
it was the most painless way for me to express my love for you . . .

Jodie, I would abandon this idea of getting Reagan in a second
if I could only win your heart and live out the rest of my life with you . . .
I will admit to you that the reason I’m going ahead with this attempt now is because
I just cannot wait any longer to impress you. I’ve got to do something now to
make you understand, in no uncertain terms, that I am doing this for your sake!
By sacrificing my freedom and possibly my life, I hope to change your mind
about me. This letter is being written only an hour before I leave for the
Hilton Hotel. Jodie, I’m asking you to please look into your heart and at least
give me the chance, with this historic deed, to gain your respect and love.

I love you forever.

   John Hinckley

Cases as extreme as John Hinckley are rare, but the experience
of unrequited love is quite common. In one recent survey, 95 percent of men and
women indicated that, by the age of 25, they had experienced unrequited love at
least once, either as a would-be lover whose passions were rejected or as the
object of someone’s unwanted desires. Only one person in 20 has never
experienced unrequited love of any kind.

Although unrequited love is a perilous passion, producing fatal
attractions and unwanted stalking, the dogged persistence it produces sometimes
pays off. One of the great love stories in history is that of Nicholas and
Alexandra. Nicholas inherited the Russian throne at the end of the 19th
century. During his adolescence his parents started looking for a suitable mate
for him. At age 16, contrary to his parent’s wishes, he became obsessed with
Alexandra, a beautiful princess then living in England with her grandmother,
Queen Victoria. Despite parental objections, cultural chasms, and a separation
spanning thousands of miles, Nicholas was determined to capture Alexandra’s
love. Alexandra, however, found him a bit dull and did not relish the thought
of moving to the harsh climate of Moscow. She spurned his advances. In 1892,
Nicholas turned 24 and, having loved Alexandra for nearly eight years, resolved
to make one final effort to win her heart. Given this state of mind, he was
devastated when she wrote saying that she had definitely decided not to wed
him. She asked him not to contact her again. All seemed lost.

Nicholas left his beloved Moscow immediately. He traveled across
Europe, suffering rough terrain and treacherous weather in the journey to
London. Although exhausted from travel, Nicholas immediately began to persue
Alexandra with great passion. After two months, she finally relented and agreed
to marry him. The young couple thus became man and wife, rulers of the Russian
empire.

Although Nicholas’s love was initially unrequited, their
marriage proved a joyful one. Diary entries from each revealed sublime happiness,
the great joy of their union, and the depth of their love for each other. They
produced five children. Nicholas so enjoyed spending time with Alexandra and
their children that the Russian empire apparently suffered from his neglect.
When forced to be apart, they pined for each other, wrote often, and endured
great psychological pain until their reunions. Their mutual love lasted
throughout their lives, until the Russian Revolution brought down the czarist
rule and they were executed. They died on the same day, their lifelong love
never having diminished. Had Nicholas given up when initially spurned, their
great love would have been lost forever.

The same passion that led John Hinckley to pursue Jodie Foster
with desperate measures led Nicholas to succeed in turning an unrequited
obsession into lifelong love. In retrospect, one seems irrational and
unbalanced, the other logical and normal. One we call pathological, the other a
love story. But what if Hinckley had succeeded in winning Jodie Foster’s love
and Nicholas had failed in his quest for Alexandra? Love is a dangerous passion
that cuts both ways. There’s a rationality to the irrationality.

Once humans evolved love, the bonds they created required
protection. It would be extraordinarily unlikely that evolution would fail to
defend these fragile and fruitful unions against interlopers. In the insect
world, there is a species known as the “lovebug.” Male lovebugs venture out in
a swarm of other males each morning in search of a chance to mate with a
female. When one succeeds, the couple departs from the swarm and glides to the
ground to copulate. Because other males sometimes attempt to copulate with her,
even after the pair has begun mating, the couple maintains a continuous
copulatory embrace for as long as three days, hence the nickname “the lovebug.”
This strategy guards the union against outside intruders.

In humans, guarding a bond must last more than days, months, or
even years because love can last a lifetime. The dangerous emotion of jealousy
evolved to fill this void. Love and jealousy are intertwined passions. They
depend on each other and feed on each other. But just as the prolonged embrace
of the lovebug tells us that their bonds can be threatened, the power of
jealousy reveals the ever-present possibility that our love bonds can be
broken. The centrality of jealousy in human love reveals a hidden side of our
desires, one that we typically go to great lengths to conceal—a passion for
other partners.

One Sunday morning William burst into the living room and said,
“Dad! Mom! I have some great news for you! I’m getting married to the most
beautiful girl in town. She lives a block away and her name is Susan.” After
dinner, William’s dad took him aside. “Son, I have to talk with you. Your
mother and I have been married 30 years. She’s a wonderful wife, but has never
offered much excitement in the bedroom, so I used to fool around with women a
lot. Susan is actually your half-sister, and I’m afraid you can’t marry her.”

William was heartbroken. After eight months he eventually
started dating again. A year later he came home and proudly announced, “Dianne
said yes! We’re getting married in June.” Again, his father insisted on a
private conversation and broke the sad news. “Dianne is your half-sister too,
William. I’m awfully sorry about this.”

William was furious. He finally decided to go to his mother
with the news. “Dad has done so much harm. I guess I’m never going to get
married,” he complained. “Every time I fall in love, Dad tells me the girl is
my half-sister.”

His mother just shook her head. “Don’t pay any attention to
what he says, dear. He’s not really your father.”

We find this story funny not simply because the ending carries a
surprise. It’s amusing because the mother ultimately gets payback for the
“father’s” philandering. Cuckolds are universal objects of laughter and
derision, and a constant source of engaging tales from the tragedy of William
Shakespeare’s
Othello
to the middle-class marital dramas portrayed in
the novels of John Updike.

To understand the origins of sexual passion we must introduce a
disturbing difference between the sexes. Everyday observation tells us that men
are more promiscuously inclined than women. “Men found to desire more sex
partners than women desire” would be no more likely to make the headlines than
“Dog bites man.” But scientific verification is always useful, since common
sense, which tells us that the earth is flat, sometimes turns out to be wrong.
Science, in this case, has verified the everyday knowledge that men do display
a greater passion for playing around. In one of our recent studies of more than
1,000 men and women, men reported desiring eight sex partners over the next
three years, whereas women reported desiring only one or two. In another study,
men were four times more likely than women to say that they have imagined
having sex with 1,000 or more partners.

Observing that men and women differ, however, is not the same as
explaining
why
they differ. There are compelling evolutionary reasons
for the fact that this difference in desire for sexual variety is universal,
found not just in cultures saturated with media images of seductive models, not
just among Hugh Hefner’s generation of
Playboy
readers, and not just
in studies conducted by male scientists. To explain this desire, we must
introduce another key fact about human reproductive biology.