Anatomy of Love: A Natural History of Mating, Marriage, and Why We Stray

476 Pages·2016·2.42 MB·English

by  Helen Fisher

Anatomy
of
Love
A Natural History of Mating,
Marriage, and Why We Stray
COMPLETELY REVISED AND UPDATED
Helen Fisher, PhD
W. W. Norton & Company
Independent Publishers Since 1923
New York • London
FOR LOVERS EVERYWHERE
And in memory of Ray Carroll
CONTENTS
Prologue
Here’s to Love!
1. Games People Play
Courting
2. Why Him? Why Her?
The Drive to Love and Who We Choose
3. Is Monogamy Natural?
Of Human Bonding . . . and Cheating
4. Why Adultery?
The Nature of Philandering
5. Blueprint for Divorce
The Three-to Four-Year Itch
6. “When Wild in Woods the Noble Savage Ran”
Life in the Trees
7. Out of Eden
On the Origin of Monogamy and Desertion
8. The Tyranny of Love
Evolution of Attachment and Love Addictions
9. Dressed to Impress
Nature’s Lures for Seduction
10. Men and Women Are Like Two Feet: They Need Each Other to Get Ahead
Gender Differences in Mind
11. Women, Men, and Power
The Nature of Sexual Politics
12. Almost Human
Genesis of Kinship and the Teenager
13. The First Affluent Society
“That Short but Imperious Word, ‘Ought’ ”
14. Fickle Passion
Romance in Yesteryears
15. “Till Death Us Do Part”
Birth of Sexual Double Standards
16. Future Sex
Slow Love and Forward to the Past
Appendices
Appendix A
Appendix B
Appendix C
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
PROLOGUE
Here’s to Love!
Journalist: Why do you only write about relationships?
Nora Ephron:Is there something else?
I
was recently traveling in the highlands of New Guinea in the back of a pickup
truck, talking with a man who had three wives. I asked him how many wives he
would like to have. There was a pause as he rubbed his chin. I wondered: Would
he say five? Ten? Twenty-five wives? He leaned toward me and whispered:
None.
We are a pair-bonding species. Some 85% of cultures permit a man to have
several wives, but few men actually build a harem. A man has to have a lot of
goats, cows, land, money, or other impressive resources to get several women to
share his wedding bed. Even then, having more than one wife can be a
toothache. Co-wives fight; sometimes they even poison one another’s children.
We are built to rear our babies as a team of two—with a lot of helpers near the
nest.
This book is the story of that monumental human passion: to love. As well as
all of the spinoffs of our basic human reproductive strategy: how we court; who
we choose; how we bond; why some are adulterous and some divorce; how the
drive to love evolved; why we have teenagers and vast networks of kin to rear
our young; why a man can’t be more like a woman and vice versa; how sex and
romance drastically altered with the invention of the plow; and, in the last
chapter, a new look at future sex.
When W. W. Norton invited me to do a second edition of this book, I gaily
said yes, thinking this was a privilege and an easy job. The first version had
taken me ten years to write; I thought this revision might take ten days. Then I
read the book—and swiftly realized that I had to update almost all of it.
read the book—and swiftly realized that I had to update almost all of it.
So I have now added a great deal of data and ideas, including data on all of
our brain-scanning experiments on romantic love, rejection in love, and long-
term love; my new data on the biology of personality and why you fall in love
with one person rather than another; new information on adultery, love
addiction, sexual selection, and mate choice; the newest statistics on worldwide
patterns of divorce; my theory on the development of morality across the life
course; my hypothesis about our modern dating habits—what I call “slow love,”;
and a wealth of new data on future sex, collected in collaboration with
1
Match.com. I also added references for my additions (and retained most of the
original references) and two of my questionnaires as additional appendices.
Journalist David Gergen once called me “America’s last optimist.” There is
much to cry about, but there is also much to celebrate—including our
inexhaustible human drive to love. Technology is changing how we court. But it
can’t change love. Romantic love and attachment emanate from the most
primitive regions of the brain, near those that orchestrate thirst and hunger. And
as Plato aptly wrote in The Symposium: “The God of love lives in a state of
need.” Love is a need, a craving, a drive to seek life’s greatest prize: a mating
partner. We are born to love. Indeed, if we survive as a species, we will still fall
in love and form pair-bonds a million years from now.
This book traces the trajectory of this indestructible human passion. And it
ends on a high note. I firmly believe that if there ever was a time in human
evolution when we have the opportunity to make happy partnerships, that time is
now.
Here’s to love,
Helen Fisher
ANATOMY OF LOVE
1
Games People Play
Courting
Moved by the force of love,
fragments of the world seek out one another
so that a world may be.
—PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN
I
n an apocryphal story, a colleague once turned to the great British geneticist J.
B. S. Haldane and said, “Tell me, Mr. Haldane, knowing what you do about
nature, what can you tell me about God?” Haldane replied, “He has an inordinate
fondness for beetles.” Indeed, the world contains over 300,000 species of
beetles.
I would add that “God” loves the human mating game, for no other aspect of
our behavior is so complex, so subtle, or so pervasive. And although these sexual
strategies differ from one individual to the next, the essential choreography of
human courtship, romance, love, and marriage has myriad designs that seem
etched into the human psyche, the product of time, selection, and evolution.
They begin the moment men and women get within courting range—with the
way we flirt.
Body Talk
1
Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, a German ethologist, noticed a curious pattern to
women’s flirting behavior. Eibl-Eibesfeldt had used a camera with a secret lens
so that when he directed the camera straight ahead, he was actually taking
pictures to the side. This way he could focus on local sights and catch on film
the unstaged facial expressions of people near him. In his travels to Samoa,
Papua, France, Japan, Africa, and Amazonia, he recorded numerous flirting
sequences. Then, back in his laboratory at the Max Planck Institute for
Behavioral Physiology, near Munich, Germany, he carefully examined each
courting episode, frame by frame.
A universal pattern of female flirting emerged. Women from places as
different as the jungles of Amazonia, the salons of Paris, and the highlands of
New Guinea apparently flirt with the same sequence of expressions.
First, the woman smiles at her admirer and lifts her eyebrows in a swift, jerky
motion as she opens her eyes wide to gaze at him. Then she drops her eyelids,
tilts her head down and to the side, and looks away. Frequently she also covers
her face with her hands, giggling nervously as she retreats behind her palms.
This sequential flirting gesture is so distinctive that Eibl-Eibesfeldt is convinced
it is innate, a human female courtship ploy that evolved eons ago to signal sexual
and/or romantic interest.
Other gambits people use may also come from our primeval past. The coy
look is a gesture in which a woman cocks her head and looks up shyly at her
suitor. A female possum does this too, turning toward her suitor, cocking her
snouty jaw, and looking straight into his eyes. Animals frequently toss their
heads in order to solicit attention. Courting women do it regularly; they raise
their shoulders, arch their backs, and toss their locks in a single sweeping
motion. Albatrosses toss their heads and snap their bills between bouts of
nodding, bowing, and rubbing bills together. Mud turtles extend and retract their
heads, almost touching noses. Women are not the only creatures who use their
2
heads to flirt.
Men also employ courting tactics similar to those seen in other species. Have
you ever walked into the boss’s office and seen him leaning back in his chair,
hands clasped behind his head, elbows high, and chest thrust out? Perhaps he has
come from behind his desk, walked up to you, smiled, arched his back, and
thrust his upper body in your direction? If so, watch out. He may be
subconsciously announcing his dominance over you. If you are a woman, he
may be courting you instead.