The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy Is as Necessary as Love and Sex (9 page)

How would you respond to the following questions, rating them on
a 7-point scale from
strongly disagree
(1) to
strongly agree
(7)?

Bram Buunk, a professor at the University of Groningen in the
Netherlands, and his collaborators posed these questions to 2,079 people in
Hungary, Ireland, Mexico, the Netherlands, the former Soviet Union, the United
States, and Yugoslavia. Yugoslavians expressed the greatest distress at a lover
flirting with someone else, whereas Hungarians showed the least distress about
flirting. In sharp contrast, Hungarians topped the scale in being upset about a
lover kissing someone else, whereas Yugoslavians expressed little distress over
a few stolen kisses.

The most important finding, however, was that men and women
across all seven nations reported virtually identical levels of jealousy. Dutch
men and women, like Russian men and women, scored almost exactly alike in their
jealousy over a partner flirting with someone else. Jealousy responses to more
extreme forms of infidelity, such as a partner frequently having satisfying
sexual relations with someone else, also revealed that the sexes are virtually
identical in all cultures.

Other studies on American samples verify the lack of sex
differences on global measures of jealousy. In response to the question, “How
upset would you get if your boyfriend or girlfriend fantasized about having sex
just once with a very attractive person they saw in a magazine?” men judged it
to be 3.42 on a 7-point scale and women 3.70, both moderately upsetting and not
significantly different. Dozens of other studies verify the conclusion that
overall, men and women are equally jealous.

Clinical cases of extreme jealousy are populated with both
sexes, contrary to the stereotype that extreme jealousy afflicts only men. Here
are two cases, one from each sex. Case 1: “Enid, convinced that her husband was
carrying on in his office, paid him a surprise visit intending to catch him ‘in
the act.’ She found the office empty but completely rearranged. There were
photographs and paintings on the wall that she did not recognize. She immediately
concluded that the lover had redecorated the office. Only later did she realize
that she was in fact in someone else’s office—an office that was very different
in size and shape from her husband’s.” Case 2: “A middle-aged man began to
worry about his wife’s infidelity. As he approached the house, he would turn
off the car engine and headlights and coast into the driveway. Then he would
burst into the house precipitously. One night he went to the back of the house,
climbed up the steps on tiptoe and dramatically flung open the rear door, fully
expecting to surprise his wife in the arms of another man. His wife was simply
standing by the stove . . . cooking dinner and looked at him with considerable
curiosity.”

The conclusion is clear: women and men alike can be plagued by
jealousy, both in its everyday manifestations and in its more florid clinical
expressions. If that were all to the story, we could conclude the chapter at
this point. It was not until evolutionary psychologists posed a different set
of questions, driven by a powerful theory, that sex differences in the
psychological components of jealousy began to emerge.

Men’s and women’s mating strategies differ profoundly. Women
place a premium on commitment and all of the cues to commitment, most centrally
emotional involvement and love. Men have evolved a greater desire for sexual
variety, which produces tremendous conflict between the sexes, for it violates
women’s desire for intimate involvement. Because youth and beauty are so strongly
correlated with fertility in women, men have evolved a strong desire for women
who embody these qualities. Finally, men value sexual fidelity in a partner,
for any infidelity on a woman’s part puts her mate’s paternity at risk. Men’s
and women’s sexual strategies provide the foundation for the psychological
design of jealousy.

To understand the implications, recall the concept of strategic
interference, which occurs when someone blocks or impedes the strategies and
goals of another person. The so-called negative emotions such as anger, fear,
and jealousy are tracking devices, alerting us to strategic interference. Since
men and women have evolved different sexual strategies, they should get
jealous, angry, and upset about different events. A woman’s desire for
emotional involvement, for example, will be violated when a potential partner
treats her as a one-night stand. A man’s desire for a partner’s sexual fidelity
will be violated when his partner has sex with another man.

In the following sections, we explore the research that tests
these ideas. We start with the most fundamental sex difference in the
psychology of jealousy, a difference centering on the importance of emotional
and sexual involvement with rivals.

Compromises in paternity certainty come at a substantial cost to
men. In evolutionary currencies, men risk wasting all the mating effort they
expended, including the time, energy, and gifts they have invested while
courting a woman. The man also incurs what economists call “opportunity costs,”
the missed opportunities with other women as a result of devoting all their
effort to one woman. A cuckolded man also loses the woman’s parental effort,
which becomes channeled to a rival’s genetic children. He risks parenting a rival’s
genetic children in the mistaken belief that they are his own. Finally, the man
risks damage to his reputation, since cuckolds are universally ridiculed in the
eyes of others.

In Greece, for example, a man’s reputation is threatened when
“the wife’s infidelity . . . brings disgrace to the husband who is then a
Keratas—the worst insult for a Greek man—a shameful epithet with connotations
of weakness and inadequacy. . . . While for the wife it is socially acceptable
to tolerate her unfaithful husband, it is not socially acceptable for a man to
tolerate his unfaithful wife and if he does, he is ridiculed as behaving in an
unmanly manner.”

Given these potentially catastrophic costs, we expect that
evolution would have forged powerful defenses to prevent incurring them.
Jealousy is the best candidate. The specific nature of the risk should have
left deep grooves on the psychological record that defines male sexual
jealousy. Jealousy in men should pivot heavily around the
sexual
aspects of a partner’s infidelity. A sexual infidelity by the woman, more than
any other form of infidelity, imposed the greatest costs on ancestral men. This
may seem obvious, perhaps, but the same logic does not apply to women.

No woman ever risked maternity uncertainty as a result of a
partner’s infidelity. Human reproductive biology guarantees a woman certainty
that she is the genetic mother of her children. Certainty in maternity,
however, does not exempt women from the costs of a partner’s philandering.
Ancestral women would have risked the loss of a man’s time, energy, resources,
and commitment, all of which could get diverted to a rival woman and her
children.

In human evolutionary history, there have been at least three
situations in which a woman was in danger of losing a man’s investment. First,
in a monogamous marriage, a woman risked having her mate invest in an
alternative woman with whom he was having an affair. This represents a partial
loss of the man’s investment. Second, in a monogamous marriage, a woman chanced
losing her husband to another woman, a large or total loss of his investment.
Third, in a polygynous marriage, a woman risked having her husband invest more
in other wives and their children at the expense of her and her children.

The most reliable indicator that a man would divert his
investment was not in having sex with another woman per se, but rather in
becoming
emotionally involved
with another woman. The ability to gauge
a man’s emotional involvement becomes paramount in gauging commitment. How
would you respond these two statements, using a 7-point scale ranging from
strongly
disagree
(1)
to strongly agree
(7): “Sex without commitment is
very unsatisfying” and “I would find it hard to have sex with someone I was not
in love with.” If you are like most women, you would tend to agree with these
statements, rating them over 5.00. If you are like most men, however, you tend
to disagree, rating them around 3.00. People from the United States and Germany
give roughly equivalent responses, revealing a large sex difference in the
desire for love to accompany sex—a desire that transcends cultures.

What happens when you have sex anyway, without any emotional
involvement from your partner? The anthropologist John Marshal Townsend of
Syracuse University explored this issue in detail. He interviewed a sample of
50 college students, selected for being highly sexually active. These students
were preselected based on their scores on the Sociosexual Orientation
Inventory, an instrument that evaluates a person’s proclivity toward many
short-term sexual encounters versus a preference for one long-term committed
partner. The women selected for Townsend’s study defied the normal stereotype
of women by their unusually high levels of sexual activity with a variety of
men. Do these sexually active women respond like sexually active men in their
emotional reactions to casual sex?

Townsend asked participants: “Have you ever continued to have
sex on a regular basis with someone you did not want to get emotionally
involved with?” Only a third of the women (37 percent) answered yes to this
question, compared with more than three-fourths (76 percent) of the men. Of
those who answered yes, the follow-up question was: “If you answered yes, did
you find it difficult to keep from getting emotionally involved with this
person?” Again, a large sex difference emerged, with 74 percent of the men, but
only 22 percent of the women, saying that they found it easy to keep from
getting emotionally involved. Other questions revealed similar sex differences.
To the statement, “I feel I should be emotionally involved with a woman/man
before having sex with him/her,” 72 percent of the men disagreed, whereas only
32 percent of the women disagreed.

Women who have sex without emotional involvement tend to feel
vulnerable afterward, expressing the view that they feel used, degraded, and
cheapened by the experience. Here is what one woman reported: “I consider
myself a very sexual woman. I love sex, but I don’t just want sex. I want to
make love. Making love is very different. It implies you have a relationship.
And you have some control. So about two weeks ago I was really, really sad. I
just hated myself for giving in to men as easily as I’ve done . . . I have been
to bed with 24 guys. That’s how old I am: 24. Twenty-four guys within the last
five years. I think that’s sick because not one of them meant anything to me.
Or, let’s put it this way: I didn’t really mean anything to them. This made me
feel really cheap.” As Townsend concludes from his studies on women, “attempts
to continue regular coitus when they desired more investment than their
partners were willing to give produced feelings of distress, degradation, and
exploitation despite acceptance of liberal sexual morality.”

Men and women, in short, differ in their attitudes about the
role of emotional involvement in sex. Most women, even those who end up having
a number of casual sexual encounters, want some kind of emotional involvement.
Most men, in contrast, have less difficulty having sex without any emotional
involvement. For such casual flings, men devote neither much time nor many
resources. If a man became emotionally involved with an affair partner,
however, it would signal a longer-term threat; increasingly large diversions of
resources follow. For these reasons, we predicted that women’s jealousy will
focus less on the sex act per se, and more on a man’s emotional involvement
with other women. When a man is emotionally involved with another woman, it’s a
telltale sign that he might commit to her over the long run. When a woman’s
regular partner becomes involved with someone else, both sexually and
emotionally, it is the emotional involvement that should provoke the strongest
feelings of jealousy.

Our theory of sex differences in jealousy, of course, does not
imply that women will be indifferent to a mate’s sexual infidelity, nor that
men will be indifferent to a woman’s emotional involvement with other men. To
the contrary, both forms of infidelity are extremely upsetting to both sexes.
On a 7-point scale, where 7 is
extremely upsetting,
both sexes score
between six and seven when asked to judge how upsetting either form of
infidelity would be, when each is evaluated individually.

What happens when you are forced to choose which is more
upsetting, a partner’s sexual infidelity or a partner’s emotional infidelity?
The two are correlated in nature, of course, since people tend to become
emotionally involved with those they have sex with and sexually involved with
those they are emotionally close to. But not always. Sex can occur without
emotional involvement, as in a one-night stand or a spring break fling in
Cancun. And people can get emotionally involved without any sex, as occurs in
some close opposite-sex friendships.