The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy Is as Necessary as Love and Sex (19 page)

Let’s put aside, for a few moments, our revulsion to partner
battering, to consider the troubling possibility that violence may have served
useful purposes for perpetrators. Does aggression sometimes pay?

Margo Wilson and Martin Daly speculate that the most plausible
adaptive functions of violence against partners are
deterrence
and
control.
Men’s use of violence, or threats of violence, convey an important signal to
the spouse: acts of infidelity come at a steep price. By making the price of
unfaithfulness sufficiently high, men hope to deter their spouses from sleeping
with other men. One clue to the adaptive function of violence is the type of
men most likely to use it. Wilson and Daly argue that the men most likely to
resort to violence are those who lack more positive means of voluntary
compliance at their disposal, such as providing resources. Violence, in this
view, may represent men’s last-ditch effort to hold on to partners who are on
the verge of defecting. Violence, therefore, should be more prevalent when men
lack the economic resources that might fulfill a core desire of women’s initial
mate choice.

Is there any evidence that men’s use of violence actually deters
women from infidelity or defection? Some battered women do remain in violent
relationships, and return to them even after they have sought help at a shelter
or hostel. In a study of 100 women at a shelter for battered women, a
substantial number returned to their husband. Twenty-seven returned after their
husband promised that he would change and refrain from violence, and 17
returned as a direct result of threats of further violence if she did not
return. Another 14 returned home because they had no alternative place to go,
and 13 returned because of their children. Eight women returned to their
husband because they were still in love with him or felt sorry for him. A
majority of the women who had been battered, many severely, returned to their
partners after a stay in the shelter.

Some women respond to a man’s violence by cutting off their
contacts with male friends, wearing less revealing clothing, becoming more
solicitous of their partner’s needs and wants, and generally reducing signs of
straying. Aggression, unfortunately, sometimes works if a wife is frightened
enough to choose compliance over death. Recently I received a letter from a
colleague who had been lecturing in an undergraduate class about the possible
functions of violence. He related this story: “I had been discussing the roots
of wife battering in mate guarding (sexual jealousy and proprietariness, etc.),
and a student put up her hand, obviously anxious to make a point. She said that
this could not be true. She had been working for some time at a shelter in
Northhampton for abused and battered women, and had become familiar with many
of them. When the subject of the reasons why they were abused came up, they
said that getting involved with another man was the ‘furthest thing from their
minds.’ In response, another student put his hand up and said, ‘Well, I guess
the abuse works.’ ”

Men are most likely to use violence when they discover an
infidelity or suspect an infidelity. One study interviewed a sample of battered
women and divided them into two groups: one group had been both raped and
beaten by their husbands and one group had been beaten but not raped. These two
groups were then compared with a control group of non-victimized women. The
women were asked whether they had “ever had sex” with a man other than their
husband while living with their husband. Ten percent of the non-victimized
women reported having had an affair; 23 percent of the battered women reported
having had an affair; and 47 percent of those who were battered and raped
confessed to committing adultery. These statistics reveal that infidelity by a
woman predicts battering behavior in men.

In short, we can draw two tentative conclusions from the
available evidence. First, men’s violence against their partners does seem to
serve the function of deterrence and control. By using violence, men maintain a
credible threat, lowering the odds that their partner will commit infidelity or
defect from the relationship. Men’s violence seems most likely to rear its
monstrous head when there is an increased likelihood that women will consort
with another man. Second, although men’s violence may sometimes represent a
last ditch effort to keep a mate, and may sometimes backfire and cause a woman
to leave, violence may actually deter defections. Even women who have been
battered severely enough to go to a shelter sometimes return to their partners
because of the threat of further violence.

The idea that spousal violence serves a deterrence function is
undoubtedly disturbing. But it should not be construed as condoning or
justifying these detestable and repugnant acts. Nor should this explanation be
used to excuse or exonerate the cowardly men who commit them. Spousal violence
is wrong according to most moral and legal systems. Only by understanding the
causes of violence, however, can we hope to reduce its occurrence.

In the movie
Fatal Attraction,
a married man played by
Michael Douglas has a brief sexual fling with a professional colleague played
by Glenn Glose. Although Douglas finds the sexual encounter exciting and
intensely erotic, he breaks it off, not wanting to endanger his marriage. Glenn
Close refuses to accept rejection. She begins stalking him, appearing suddenly
after work at his parking garage, leaving tape recorded messages in his car,
and spying on him as he enjoys a quiet evening with his family. She insists
that he really loves her and refuses to be denied. All his attempts to convince
her otherwise fail. Things come to a head after she boils his family’s pet
rabbit in a soup pot, kidnaps his daughter, and finally breaks into his house
one evening brandishing a large kitchen knife. It was said that after
Fatal
Attraction
came out, there was a temporary drop in the rates of male
infidelity.

Stalking is a frightening behavior that has received national
attention, and now all 50 U.S. states have passed anti-stalking legislation.
Victims of stalking suffer greatly. A third of stalking victims seek some form
of psychological treatment and a fifth lose time from their work. Stalking
imprisons the victim both physically and psychologically. Victims report
restricting their activities, become fearful of venturing out of familiar
territory, and feel frightened even in well-frequented environments. They
become anxious about answering the door, opening the mailbox, or picking up the
phone. The fear stems from the barrage of harassment stalkers inflict,
including repeatedly phoning the victims at home and work, ringing the
doorbell, inundating the victims with letters and flowers, jumping out of the
bushes unexpectedly, bombarding them with verbal insults or entreaties, and
generally following them everywhere. Many stalkers spy on their victims (75
percent), make explicit threats (45 percent), vandalize property (30 percent),
and sometimes threaten to kill them or their pets (10 percent). In some cases,
stalkers assault their victims, and become especially violent when she or he
becomes involved with a new romantic relationship.

I’ve interviewed many women who have suffered at the hands of a
stalker, and the patterns are frighteningly similar. In one case, an
attractive, well-educated, professional woman named Deirdre, age 28, became
romantically involved with a man for about three months. She broke it off after
he started to become unusually jealous and possessive. Over a period of six
months he barraged Deirdre with hundreds of letters and thousands of phone
calls. He repeatedly broke into her apartment when she was not there, leaving
messages scrawled on her desk and bathroom mirror entreating her to take him
back. Even a police restraining order failed to stop this stalker (80 percent
of all restraining orders are violated by stalkers). Eventually, he was
convicted of assaulting her and sentenced to three years in jail. In order to
protect herself when her former lover was freed, she was forced to quit her
job, change her name, and move to a different city. Fortunately, the story has
a happy ending—Deirdre is now happily married to a man her professional and
intellectual equal, and although the former stalking caused psychological scars
and several years of misery, she has finally managed to put the horror behind
her.

Stalking is best viewed as a continuum of activities. When the
definition is broadened to include “the persistent use of psychological or
physical abuse in an attempt to begin or continue dating someone else after
they have clearly indicated a desire to terminate a relationship,” a full 56
percent of college women report that they have been romantically harassed in
this way.

How can we explain these bizarre, repugnant, criminal, and
violent acts? Although some are clearly pathological, their frequency and
patterning reveal that they are often extreme manifestations of men’s psychology
of jealousy and possessiveness—desperate measures designed to get someone back
into the relationship or restore a love that was lost.

The first clue comes from the relationship between stalkers and
their victims. Stalkers, of course, come in several types. Some stalk
celebrities, as in the case of John Hinckley stalking the actress Jodie Foster
or the bizarre case of the woman who kept breaking into talk show host David
Letterman’s house, insisting that she was really his wife. Some stalk total
strangers or casual acquaintances. But by far the majority of stalkers have
been romantically involved with their victims—as a current spouse, a former
spouse, a previous lover, or a past dating partner. In roughly 60 percent of
the cases, stalking by an intimate partner started before the relationship
officially ended. This suggests that stalking is a violent manifestation of
mating psychology, representing a frantic tactic designed to keep a partner or
to coerce a partner back.

The second clue to the psychology of stalking comes from the sex
of the victim. Although men and women both can be victims of stalking, studies
reveal that women are four times more likely than men to be stalked. According
to a research review by the National Institute of Justice, 8 percent of women
and 2 percent of men say that they have been stalked. Across America, this
yields the estimate that 8.2 million women will be victimized by a stalker at
some point in their lives. Another survey estimates that more than a million
American women have been stalked in the past year.

A third clue comes from the ages of the victims. In a study of
628 women victims of stalkers, 87 percent were under the age of 40. The
overwhelming majority of these women were between 18 and 29, with the average
around 28, suggesting that women of high fertility are most at risk of being
stalked—a pattern strikingly similar to that found with victims of spousal
battering.

Many male stalkers have a history of physically abusing their
partners while in the relationship, and stalking, like domestic violence,
represents a desperate attempt to regain control over a woman and coerce her
back into the relationship. Most women stalking victims report that their
assailants stalked them in order to keep them in the relationship, force a
reconciliation, or seek vengeance against them for leaving.

Stalking, like domestic violence, is cowardly, morally
repugnant, and illegal. The suggestion that it reflects an evolved male
psychology of jealousy and possessiveness designed to keep or control a woman
should in no way be used as an excuse for forgiving it or failing to punish its
perpetrators. To the contrary, we may need stricter laws and more severe
punishments to counteract these base manifestations of male nature.

If violence and stalking, abhorrent as they are, are motivated
by men desperate to keep their partners, the same cannot be said for outright
killing. The killing of a partner, in sharp contrast to nonlethal beating or
stalking, seems genuinely puzzling, since killers lose their mates forever. Can
we shed any light on the seemingly bizarre and apparently maladaptive
phenomenon of wife killing?

In approaching the unsettling topic of mate murder, let’s first
examine some actual findings. The most extensive study of mate homicides
consisted of 1,333 women and 416 men murdered by their intimate partners in
Canada between 1974 and 1990. These included both officially married couples as
well as common-law marriages in which partners lived together without an
official marriage license. Women were more than three times as likely to be
killed by an intimate partner as they were to be killed by a stranger. When
this comparison is restricted to women legally married, women were more than
nine times more likely to be killed by an intimate partner than by a stranger.

In a study of 25 spousal homicides, sociologist Peter Chimbos
found sexual jealousy to be a prominent motive. Consider the following five
accounts by husbands who were trying to explain why they killed their wives.

“She often called me a ‘damned mute,’ just running me down like
that. Many times she would call my mother and tell her about me being ‘mute’
and no good. She also had refused sexual relationships with me and went out
with other men.”

“Her infidelity really bothered me. She had gone out with other
men. It was about two weeks before the incident [killing] when she said to me:
‘I want you to leave.’ Then I said to her: ‘What do you mean?’ She replied:
‘Don’t you know that you are not wanted?’ Then I bought a rifle to commit
suicide but I never did.”

“She would humiliate me in front of others on purpose. She knew
I wouldn’t argue in front of others and she said nasty things to me. At times
she tried to belittle me about my sexual performance. She did not enjoy sex
with me, but I never had any complaints from other women. I started to believe
that I was impotent. I tried to talk with her about our problem but she would
ignore me.”