The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy Is as Necessary as Love and Sex (29 page)

Another possible explanation is that some women lack the ability
to hold on to a highly investing man in the long term, and so opt for a
strategy of multiple partners. Which strategy a woman pursues depends on a
variety of circumstances: the time in her life, the assets she can parlay, and
the social setting in which the sexual strategy is implemented.

With all the potential advantages women can gain through affairs,
one puzzle is why more women do not stray more of the time. To understand why
many women decline to go after superior genes, additional resources, mate
insurance, or trading up, we must return to the principle of co-evolution and
identify the costs of infidelity.

Benefits from a woman’s affairs come at a cost to her regular
mate. Men don’t like being cuckolded. Co-evolutionary logic tells us that men
have evolved strategies to prevent reproductive losses by guarding their wives
more diligently and punishing them for signs of straying through verbal abuse,
emotional manipulation, jealous rages, beatings, and sometimes the threat of
death. Men make it costly for women to stray—costs that deter many women at
least some of the time. Women’s infidelity, in turn, has become more cryptic,
enigmatic, and deceptive over evolutionary time to evade these costs. Each
increment in female concealment creates selection pressures on men to be even
more vigilant and inflict even more deterrents. In the current never-ending
co-evolutionary spiral, both sexes are armed with weapons and defenses,
counter-weapons, and counter-defenses.

Each woman’s decision to stay or stray hinges on cost-benefit
calculations based on the quality of her regular partner, the benefits she
could gain through an infidelity, the odds of discovery, and the costs she will
suffer if discovered. Heidi Greiling and I explored 50 of these costs. Only one
occurred regardless of whether the affair was discovered—an increased
probability of contracting a sexually transmitted disease. The other 49
potential costs hinged on whether the infidelity was discovered.

The most obvious toll is the loss of the woman’s regular
partner. A female friend told me that she seriously contemplated an affair
after the boredom from her 10-year marriage set in, but she refrained solely
because she did not want to risk losing her husband, a medical doctor with a
healthy income. As Laura Betzig documented in her massive cross-cultural study,
infidelity more than any other cause impels men to divorce their wives.

Another obvious cost centers on violence at the hands of the
husband, as documented earlier. Unfaithful women risk being beaten or killed.
The actual acts of destruction are as revealing as they are abhorrent. In one
study of 100 battered women, the researchers catalogued women’s injuries and
found that they had been attacked with fists, kicks, and belts, and had
suffered from suffocation, burns, and scalds. Some women had broken noses,
teeth, and ribs, and others had dislocated shoulders and jaws. Nine of the 100
women required hospitalization, and two of these were unconscious at admission.
Two suffered retinal damage, resulting in permanent defective vision; one
sustained an injury that penetrated her skull; and two developed epilepsy as a
result of their head injuries. Our studies confirm that women are acutely aware
of these costs, admitting that being physically abused by a partner when he
found out about the affair was highly likely, and they evaluate it to be 4.9 in
costliness on the 5-point scale.

The damage caused by abuse is also borne by the woman’s
children. If she is injured or dies as a result, she is unable to protect and
provide for them. If her husband abandons her as a consequence of her betrayal,
her children are in jeopardy of greater violence at the hands of others.
Stepchildren suffer a 40 times higher rate of physical abuse compared with
children living with both biological parents, most often by the stepfather, who
typically lacks the deep love for the child that comes naturally to the genetic
parent. Children without an investing father can suffer a 10 percent lower
survival rate.

Even if the man decides to stay, he may continue to punish her
for straying. On top of psychological and physical abuse, some men retaliate
with an affair of their own. Since men typically channel resources to sex
partners, the wife and her children also risk losing those resources.

Women whose affairs are discovered sometimes risk abuse at the
hands of their fathers or brothers as well. In some Mediterranean cultures,
brothers kill their sisters and fathers kill their daughters in order to
salvage the “family honor” when the women are caught betraying their husbands.
In less extreme cases, family members may ostracize the woman, and refuse to
invest in her children. In our study, women judged the item “family stopped
supporting me emotionally when they found out about my affair” as one of the
most costly consequences, giving it a 4.8. Women judged “family stopped
supporting me financially when they found out about the affair” to be nearly as
costly, giving it a 3.9 on the 5-point scale. Loss of investing kin could have
been catastrophic for ancestral women and their children.

In addition to these hardships, women whose affairs are discovered
jeopardize their social reputation. I recall a recent case of a woman who
discovered another woman’s earrings in a crease in the sofa one afternoon while
cleaning. When she confronted her husband, he confessed and revealed the owner
of the earrings, who happened to be the wife’s “best friend,” married, and a
member of a garden club to which both couples belonged. At the next meeting of
the garden club, the aggrieved wife stood up and denounced her friend as a
“slut” and a “whore” for sleeping with her husband. Thereafter, the other
members of the garden club shunned the adulteress, and she was forced to quit
the club.

Our study revealed several facets of reputation damage, all
hovering around 4.0 on the costliness index. Women risk social shunning by
friends, family, work colleagues, church groups, social clubs, and
higher-status peer groups. They also risk losing the respect of their children
when they find out about the affair, which women in our study judged to be 4.9
in costliness.

The final cost centered on a loss to self-esteem, which may seem
paradoxical, since women’s self-esteem is often boosted as a result of an
infidelity. The apparent paradox is resolved when we consider the different
sources of esteem. We often base our evaluations of ourselves on the esteem in
which we are held by others. Women who suffer social shunning, therefore, will
lose self-esteem. The boost in a woman’s self-esteem, in contrast, comes not
from her peers but from the affair partner who finds her intelligent, charming,
and attractive. The end result is that a woman’s infidelity can have two
different, and contrasting, effects on her self-esteem: the boost in
self-esteem comes early in the course of the infidelity, prior to its
discovery; the loss comes later, and only if the infidelity is discovered and
ends in disaster. As Robert Frank of Cornell University observes, “With the
illicit affair, the difficulty is that the rewards occur right away. Its costs,
by contrast, are both uncertain and in the future.”

Although the benefits from straying can be substantial, the
potential damage often offsets these gains. There is a double standard in these
costs. Women caught having an affair, in contrast to men caught having an
affair, suffer a greater risk of physical abuse, more severe damage to their
reputations, a higher risk of being shunned by family and friends, a greater
loss in self-esteem, and a higher vulnerability to abandonment. My study
concerning the psychology of reputation in Zimbabwe, Eritrea, China, Guam, Russia,
Brazil, Poland, Korea, and Transylvania verifies that the double standard is
widespread.

We inhabit a modern social landscape that is forever changed
from the Stone Age world in which our sexual psychology evolved. The anonymity of
large city living creates more opportunities to carry out affairs undiscovered,
compared with the small group living arrangements of our prehistoric ancestors
in which it was hard to conceal a sneeze, much less a torrid affair. By
lowering the risk of discovery, modern conditions lower the odds that women
will suffer the costs of infidelity.

In contrast to the ancestral pattern of small group living with
only a handful of potential partners to choose from, modern urban living
provides thousands. Opportunities for trading up present themselves daily.
Repeated exposure to new potential partners, whose flaws remain concealed on
first encounters, can create dissatisfaction with a current partner whose
charms have worn thin with time.

Modern work conditions also differ from ancestral ones. In
hunter-gatherer societies, division of labor often kept the sexes segregated.
Women brought in economic resources through gathered plants and tubers, cared
for children, prepared meals, and kept the home fires burning. Men hunted large
game, mostly in the company of other men. In the modern sexually integrated
workplace, men and women who share similar interests work side by side for
eight or more hours each day. Repeated workplace flirtations flower into
perilous passions.

Modern women share with their ancestral mothers the strategy of
infidelity within their menu of mating. Our sexual strategies have changed
little, but the social world we now inhabit differs profoundly. These changes
increase the benefits of infidelity and decrease the costs, tilting
cost-benefit calculations toward a greater temptation to stray. In a world of
fast food and fast mating, we must learn to cope.

Coping Strategies

Once habit has dulled the edge of jealousy, a number of men may
drink from a single love chalice without repugnance and without rancor while
the woman knowing that she is desired and being skilled in the art of rendering
happy those who seek her out, proceeds to dispense her caresses and her
affections in just and sapient nature.

—
Paolo Mantegazza,
The Sexual Relations of Mankind, 1935

Big boys don’t cry
.

—
Guerrero and Reiter,
Sex Differences and Similarities
in Communication, 1998

J
ONATHAN USED FIELD GLASSES TO
spy on his wife from afar. After
pretending to leave the house for work, he would secretly reenter the house in
an attempt to trap his wife with her lover. He searched the house repeatedly
for evidence of her infidelity. He accused his children of conspiring to
conceal their mother’s “lechery.” Several times he threatened neighbors with
violence. He developed a “sinister habit” of walking around with a razor in his
pocket. He frequently expressed the wish to keep his wife perpetually pregnant
so that he could keep her “fully occupied.” He kept her up late many nights
attempting to satisfy what he thought was her “insatiable lust” in order to
dissuade her from satisfying it elsewhere. His methods of coping kept his wife
faithful, but at a tremendous cost to himself and his family.

In Barbados, Verity, a 43-year-old woman, worked as a nurse,
pulling down a small but reliable salary. She lived with her husband for three
years before they married. Although most of these early years were marked by
poverty, she felt content as long as her husband loved her. But the love soon
started to wane, and Verity became increasingly unhappy at her husband’s
failures to provide, both emotionally and materially. He frequently asked her
for money, leaving her with bills unpaid and shelves unstocked. Before long,
Verity learned that her husband had been having an affair with a very young
girl. She discovered not only that her husband had been spending
her
money on the other girl but also that they had sometimes had sex in her own
bed. The final straw was Verity’s discovery of two plane tickets for a vacation
for her husband and his lover, tickets purchased with Verity’s hard-earned
money.

To cope with this escalating sequence of betrayals, she sought
the advice of a woman renowned for her wisdom and took the following steps.
Verity first depleted all the money from their joint bank account and went to
another bank to open an account solely in her own name. Next, she traveled to
the city where her rival resided. She sat on her rival’s stairs for hours until
the young woman appeared, then “just grabbed her, and I just take her [inside]
near the cooker and near the pot,” threatening to dunk the young woman’s face
in boiling water if she did not keep her hands off her husband.

Verity did not divorce her husband, since she feared that he
would get the house and all of their possessions, acquired through her own
labors. But she did take a lover. She concealed her own infidelity from her
husband, instead meeting her lover in his car, always away from areas where
they might be known or discovered. Although none of this erased the pain she
felt about her husband’s betrayal, she finally felt a measure of control over
her life, both financially and emotionally.

The strategies used to cope with jealousy and infidelity are
almost as varied as the people involved and the unique circumstances they
confront. So pervasive and ominous has been the threat of infidelity that it
would be surprising if humans had not developed a veritable arsenal of weapons
to combat its occurrence. In this chapter we witness the principle of
co-evolution at work. Coping strategies came into existence to contend with
real and recurrent adaptive problems. Since affairs produce a cascade of
consequences for all players in the eternal triangle, no single coping strategy
will suffice.

Jealousy, of course, lies at the source, leading first to rage,
then to soul-searching, and finally to dramatic action. But the action it
incites is so diverse that it defies singular depiction. Violence and homicide,
covered in detail in chapter 5, represent only the most desperate of coping
mechanisms. This chapter delves into the broader array of coping strategies,
from denial to revenge.