counselors, in religious teachings, in political discourse, and in our own mixed-up lives, lust is often mistaken for love. Perhaps even more insidious and damaging in societies insistent on long-term, sexually exclusive monogamy, the negative form of that statement is also true. The absence of lust is misread as indicating an absence of love (we’ll explore this in Part V).
Experts inadvertently encourage us to confuse the two. Helen Fisher’s Anatomy of Love, a book referenced earlier, is far more concerned with shared parental responsibility for a child’s first few years than with the love joining the parents to one another. But we can’t blame Fisher, as the language itself works against clarity. We can “sleep with” someone without ever closing our eyes.1 When we read that the politician “made love” with the prostitute, we know love had little to do with it. When we report how many “lovers” we’ve had, are we claiming to have been “in love” with all of them? Similarly, if we “mate” with someone, does that make us “mates”? Show a guy a photo of a hot-looking woman and ask him if he’d like to “mate with her.” Chances are good he’ll say (or think), “Sure!” But chances are also high that marriage, children, and the prospect of a long future together never entered into his decision-making process.
Everyone knows these are arbitrary expressions for an almost infinite range of situations and relationships—everyone, it appears, but the experts. Many evolutionary psychologists and other researchers seem to think that “love” and “sex” are interchangeable terms. And they throw together “copulating” and “mating” as well. This failure to define terminology often leads to confusion and allows cultural bias to contaminate our thinking about human sexual nature. Let’s try to hack a path through this tangled verbal undergrowth.
Marriage: The “FundamentalCondition” of the Human Species?The intimate male-female relationship ... which zoologists have dubbed a ‘pair bond,’ is bred into our bones. I believe this is what sets us apart from the apes more than anything else.
FRANS DE WAAL2
The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.
HONORe DE BALZAC
The holy grail of evolutionary psychology is the “human universal.” The whole point of the discipline is to tease out intrinsically human patterns of perception, cognition, and behavior from those determined on a cultural or personal level: Do you like baseball because you grew up watching games with Dad or because the sight of small groups of men strategizing and working together on a field connects to a primordial module in your brain? That’s the sort of question evolutionary psychologists love to ask and aspire to answer.
Because evolutionary psychology is all about uncovering and elucidating the so-called psychic unity of humankind—and because of the considerable political and professional pressure to discover traits that conform to specific political agendas—readers need to be cautious about claims concerning such universals. Too often, the claims don’t hold up to scrutiny.
The supposed universality of human marriage—and the linked omnipresence of the nuclear family—is a case in point. A cornerstone of the standard model of human sexual evolution, the claim for this universal human tendency to marry appears to be beyond question or doubt—“unquestioningly correct” in Malinowski’s words. Though the tendency has been assumed since before Darwin, evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers’s now-classic paper Parental Investment and SexualSelection, published in 1972, consolidated the position of marriage as foundational to most theories of human sexual evolution.
Recall that marriage, as defined by these theories, represents the fundamental exchange underlying human sexual evolution. In his BBC television series The Human Animal, Desmond Morris flatly declares, “The pair bond is the fundamental condition of the human species.” Michael Ghiglieri, biologist and protege of Jane Goodall, writes, “Marriage ... is the ultimate human contract. Men and women in all societies marry in nearly the same way. Marriage,” continues Ghiglieri, “is normally a ‘permanent’ mating between a man and a woman . with the woman nurturing the infants, while the man supports and defends them. The institution of marriage,” he concludes, “is older than states, churches, and laws.”4 Oh my. The fundamental condition? The ultimate human contract? Hard to argue with that.
