If you think the whole point of life is to gaze into your lover’s eyes all day until you die—well, then, I wouldn’t want your life.
Was he quoting James Van Der Beek in Varsity Blues at the end there? Odd choice. Other than that, though, Haidt’s analysis made a lot of sense to me. Passionate love is a drug that makes you feel amazing. A plan to just repeat that feeling over and over sounds nice in theory but in practice would be kind of dumb. Ecstasy makes you feel amazing too. But if I told you that my life plan was to make enough money to just do ecstasy all the time for twenty years, you’d think I was a lunatic.
Also, it’s nice to imagine that graph being nothing but a series of high peaks with little valleys below, but as anyone who’s been single for an extended period knows, the graph would probably be much weirder:
MONOGAMY, MONOGAMISH
There are many great things about being in a committed relationship. You have a bond full of love, trust, and stability. It’s beautiful. But the excitement and novelty of a totally unexpected romantic encounter? That part of your life is dead.
For many people we interviewed, this creates a conflict that isn’t easily resolved. No matter what their dating situation, people are torn between the benefits of a faithful, monogamous relationship and the novelty and excitement of single life.
Some people, including many prominent evolutionary psychologists and biological anthropologists, say that men and women aren’t even wired to be monogamous.
I spoke at length about this with the biological anthropologist Helen Fisher. Fisher contends that our cave-dwelling ancestors, compelled to spread their genetic material, had many sexual partners simultaneously, and after thousands of years of promiscuity, human brains are still wired to mate with multiple people.
The current norms of faithfulness and sexual exclusivity are actually relatively new even in modern times. According to the marriage historian Stephanie Coontz, in the eighteenth century American men were quite open about their extramarital escapades. She found letters in which husbands described their mistresses to their wives’ brothers and recounted how they contracted sexually transmitted diseases from prostitutes. I wasn’t able to find one of those letters, but I imagine it was something like this:
My Dearest Charles,
I hope this letter finds you in the halest and heartiest of conditions. I’m sure it will, as your constitution, as I recall, was always most impressive for its resilience and fortitude.
What do you make of this so-called “Revolution”? I fear that, win or lose, we shall be feeling its reverberations for decades to come.
In other news, in addition to your sister, I am fucking Tina, this woman I met at the bar last week. I also caught syphilis from a prostitute I met in Boston.
Fondly, your brother-in-law,
Henry
Men, Coontz explains, believed sexual adventure was their birthright, and women basically accepted this as a facet of the relationship. “For thousands of years it was expected of men they would have affairs and flings,” Coontz told the New York Times. “That would be unthinkable today.”5
So what changed?
I spoke with the journalist and sex columnist Dan Savage, who has written at length about the age-old conflict between being faithful and having sexual adventure outside of a committed relationship. Savage contends that the women’s movement during the twentieth century fundamentally changed our approach to the problem. Women, he explains, rightly contested the presumption that men could fool around while they had no outside sexual options. But the decisive shift came when, rather than extending to women the leeway men had always enjoyed to have extramarital sexual escapades, society took the opposite approach.
Men could have said, “Okay, let’s both mess around.” But instead men got preemptively jealous of their wives messing around and said, “What? No, I don’t want you boning other dudes! Let’s just both not mess around.” This, Savage says, is when the monogamous expectation was placed on men and women, and it’s an expectation that neither sex is wired to meet.
“You’re told in the culture that if you want to fuck somebody else you need to do the right thing and end this relationship before you fuck somebody else or you’re a bad guy or you’re a bad girl,” he said. “I think that that’s bullshit. There’s higher loyalty. There’s a greater good. A relationship is more than just not touching anybody else with your penis ever again.”