The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy Is as Necessary as Love and Sex (6 page)

Although jealousy has been largely neglected by social scientists,
it has not been entirely ignored. Several authors have proposed theories to
explain the origins and existence of jealousy. According to psychologist Ralph
Hupka of California State University at Long Beach, jealousy is a social
construction: “It is unlikely . . . that human beings come ‘prewired,’ so to
speak, into the world to be emotional about anything other than the
requirements for their immediate survival . . . the desire to control the
sexual behavior of mates is the consequence of the social construction of the
gender system. Social construction refers in this context to the arbitrary
assignment of activities and qualities to each gender (e.g., the desire for
honor, beauty, masculinity, femininity, etc.).” According to this argument,
society or culture assigns men and women roles and activities, and presumably
assigns men the role of controlling the sexuality of their partners. Since
social constructions are arbitrary, they should vary widely from culture to
culture. We should find cultures where men are jealous but women are not.
Others where women are jealous and men are not. And in cultures that do not
make these arbitrary assignments, there should be a total absence of jealousy.

The psychiatrist Dinesh Bhugra at the Institute of Psychiatry in
London argues that jealousy is a result of “capitalist society.” According to
this argument, capitalist societies place a premium on personal possessions and
property, which extend to possessing other people. Capitalist society
encourages “treating the love object in a literal object manner, taking the
partner to be the individual’s personal possession or property.” If this theory
is correct, then several implications follow. First, men and women living in
capitalist societies should be equally jealous and jealous about the same
things. Second, men and women living in socialist, anarchist, or dictatorship
societies should be entirely free of jealousy. Third, since “motives for
jealousy are a product of the culture,” then there should be wide variability across
cultures in motives for jealousy.

Another explanation of jealousy invokes low self-esteem,
immaturity, or character defects. According to this line of thinking, adults
who enjoy high self-esteem, maturity, and psychological soundness should not
experience jealousy. If personality defects create jealousy, then curing those
defects should eliminate it.

The fourth type of explanation proposes that jealousy is a form
of pathology. The core assumption behind this explanation is that extreme
jealousy results from a major malfunction of the human mind, so curing the
malfunction should eliminate jealousy. Normal people, according to this
account, simply do not experience extreme or intense jealousy.

Some of these explanations contain grains of truth. Sometimes jealousy
is indeed pathological, a product of brain injury from boxing or warfare.
Expressions of jealousy do vary somewhat from culture to culture. Among the
Ache of Paraguay, jealous rivals settle disputes through ritual club fights,
whereas among the Kipsigis in Kenya, the offended husband might demand a refund
on the bride-price he paid for his wife.

None of these explanations, however, squares with all the known
facts about jealousy. Even among the Ammassalik Eskimos in Greenland, sometimes
held up as a culture lacking jealousy, it is not unusual for a husband to kill
an interloper who sleeps with his wife. And contrary to Margaret Mead’s
assertion that Samoans are entirely lacking in jealousy and “laugh
incredulously at tales of passionate jealousy,” jealousy on Samoa is a
prominent cause of violence against rivals and mates; they even have a word for
it,
fua.
To cite one example, “after Mata, the wife of Tavita, had
accused his older brother, Tule, of making sexual approaches to her during his
absence, Tavita attacked his brother, stabbing him five times in the back and
neck.” Samoan women also succumb to fits of jealousy. In one case the husband
of a 29-year-old woman named Mele left her for another woman, so Mele sought
them out and “attacked them with a bush knife while they were sleeping
together.” Cultures in tropical paradises that are entirely free of jealousy
exist only in the romantic minds of optimistic anthropologists, and in fact
have never been found.

Women labeled as suffering from “pathological jealousy”
sometimes turn out to have husbands who have been romancing other women for
years. To understand jealousy, we must peer deep into our evolutionary past to
a time before computers, before capitalism, and even before the advent of
agriculture.

The process of evolution is extraordinarily simple at heart, but
unraveling its implications yields subtle and profound insights into human
nature. Evolution refers to change over time in organic design. Characteristics,
or “design features,” that help an organism to survive and reproduce, relative
to other organisms with different design features, get represented in future
generations more than characteristics that are neutral or that impede survival
and reproduction. At any one slice in time, organisms can be viewed as
collections of characteristics that owe their existence to this process of
evolution by selection, operating repeatedly over thousands or millions of
years. All modern humans come from a long and literally unbroken line of
ancestors who succeeded in the tasks needed to survive and reproduce. As their
descendants, we have inherited collections of characteristics that led to their
success. These characteristics are called adaptations.

The evolutionary process is inherently competitive. If there is
not enough food to feed all members of a group, for example, then some survive
while others perish. If two women desire the same man, to take another example,
one woman’s success in attracting him is the other woman’s loss. If a rival
tries to lure a man’s mate, then the two men collide in conflicting interests.
In an important sense, therefore, all men and all women are in competition with
one another to contribute to the ancestry of future generations. The evolutionary
contest is a zero-sum game, with the victors winning at the expense of losers.
The conclusion is obvious but profound: Each person’s primary competitors are
members of the same sex within the same species.

This evolutionary logic raises an intriguing puzzle. If our
primary competitors are members of our own sex, why would men and women ever
get into conflict with one another? In fact, since men and women need each
other, and can’t reproduce without each other, shouldn’t we expect true cooperation
between men and women? On one level, the answer must be yes. Men cannot
reproduce without women, nor can women reproduce without men. Furthermore, the
children of these unions represent the “shared vehicles” by which both the
mother’s and father’s genes get transported to future generations. A mother and
father are fundamentally united in their interest in the well-being of their
mutually produced children. The emotion of love has evolved partly for this
purpose, for there can be no greater alliance producer than a child that melds
the genetic fates of two individuals. A spouse is the one person on a planet of
billions who has as much interest in the fate of the children as the mate does.
If that were all there is to say on this issue, there would be no justification
for this book. But as anyone who has ever experienced a committed romantic
relationship knows, there are sometimes snakes in the garden of love.

Battles between the sexes can occur in an astonishing variety of
forms. When I started to conduct my research, I asked several hundred people to
write down anything a member of the opposite sex had done that had irritated,
angered, annoyed, or upset them. People were very articulate on the subject,
and I was able to identify 149 distinct sources of conflict between the sexes,
ranging from seemingly small irritations such as leaving the toilet seat up to
more traumatic events like emotional abuse and physical violence. Some of these
I explored in my previous book,
The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human
Mating.
For predictable evolutionary reasons, women get far more upset
than men by acts of sexual aggression, such as uninvited touching, unwanted
sexual advances, and forced acts of sex. Sexual aggression interferes with a
woman’s free choice of when she wants sex and with whom she wants sex,
jeopardizing her valuable reproductive resources. Also for predictable
evolutionary reasons, men tend to get far more upset than women when someone
they seek withholds sex. A withholding woman deprives a man of access to the
reproductive resources that he has devoted so much effort to attaining. Some
men feel “led on” by a woman who subsequently changes her mind.

The sources of conflict that concern us here, however, are those
that occur within relationships. The union of a man and a woman can be fragile;
evolutionary logic reveals why. Consider the movie
It Could Happen to You,
featuring a policeman played by Nicholas Cage, his wife played by Rosie Perez,
and a waitress played by Bridget Fonda. In the movie, when Cage goes to pay for
his breakfast at a cafe, he realizes that he does not have any cash to leave a
tip. Instead, he offers Bridget Fonda half of his lottery ticket as the tip, in
the unlikely event that he wins. But win he does, and being an honorable man, Cage
lives up to his promise and gives half of the multimillion-dollar jackpot to
Fonda. Cage’s wife, however, is furious, for she wants to keep the entire sum.
Their conflict over the jackpot leads to their divorce, and by the end of the
movie, Nicholas Cage and Bridget Fonda have fallen in love. This movie points
out a pervasive source of strife between husband and wife: conflict over the
use of jointly held resources. In real-life situations, such conflicts abound,
and from an evolutionary perspective, spending decisions that are good for one
partner might not be good for the other. This is especially true if there are
genetic kin on the scene, where joint resources funneled to the woman’s family
take away from those spent on the man’s family.

Conflict over the apportionment of resources, however, is merely
the beginning. A deeper danger comes from threats to monogamy. A sexual
infidelity by the man can undermine his loyalties to his mate and his children.
If a woman fails to guard against her husband’s infidelity, she risks losing
his energy, commitment, investment, time, and attention—resources that get
diverted away from her and her children toward a rival woman and her children.

If a man fails to prevent his wife’s infidelity, this lapse can
literally threaten his DNA. Consider what happens if his wife gets pregnant
with another man’s child without his awareness. The reproductive costs are
multiple. First, he loses out on the chance to reproduce himself. Second, his
wife’s motherly love ends up going to the interloper’s children. And third, he
might devote all of his parenting efforts to the other man’s children in the
mistaken belief that they are his. It’s unlikely that fatherly love could have
evolved unless men were successful in guarding against threats of their wife’s
infidelity, or at least were able to reduce the likelihood of being cuckolded.

Infidelity represents the partial diversion of evolutionarily
valuable resources. Desertion, abandonment, and defection from the relationship
represent the entire loss of those assets. Breaking up can inflict many costs
on the partners, children, and the entire collection of kin. The abandoned
partner may be stuck raising children without the aid of the other parent.
Divorced status and the existence of children lower a person’s desirability to
others in the mating market. The children suffer, since it is known that the
rates of stepchild physical and sexual abuse are at least 40 times greater than
when the children reside with both genetic parents. The alliance of the two
sides of the family, brought together by the marriage, may be torn asunder. On
nearly all counts, divorce, desertion, or abandonment can be catastrophically
costly for all involved. Given these circumstances, it would be spectacularly
unlikely that evolution would have failed to fashion defense mechanisms
designed to lower the odds of a partner defecting.

The most dramatic threats to the fragile unions between men and
women, in short, are the dual specters of infidelity and abandonment. These dangers
constituted threats so extreme that, unless they could be successfully
combated, or at least partially subdued, long-term romantic bonds of love and
marriage could not have emerged at all.

A central argument of this book is that the complex emotion we
call jealousy did not arise from capitalism, patriarchy, culture,
socialization, media, character defects, or neurosis. Although jealousy
sometimes can reach pathological or deadly extremes, the vast majority of
jealous episodes are useful expressions of effective coping strategies that are
designed to deal with real threats to relationships. To understand how jealousy
is an adaptation, not a pathology, we must examine the role of emotions in
human psychology.

The study of emotions in psychology has a curious history. Many
researchers contrast “emotionality” with “rationality.” According to this view,
rationality causes humans to make sensible decisions. When faced with a
problem, we use reason, logic, and deduction to figure out a judicious
solution. Emotions, according to this view, only get in the way—anger addles
the brain; fear distorts reason; jealousy clouds the mind. Emotions are
presumed to be carryovers from our ancestral past, unfortunate relics of an
ancient time when human ancestors acted more from instinct than logic.
Psychologists have labeled anger, fear, distress, and jealousy the “negative”
emotions, which need to be controlled, reigned in, and subdued so that they do
not impede rational solutions.