Some Basic Background 9
residents—fell steadily from 10.5 in 1980 to 9.0 in 1993. Similarly,
the divorce rate—the number of divorces for every thousand res-
idents—has fallen, from 5.2 in 1980 to 4.6 in 1993.
Evolutionary obstacles to monogamy. In her book Anatomy of Love,
author Helen Fisher studied patterns of love, coupling, dissolu-
tion, and divorce in sixty-two cultures around the globe. She
made the sobering discovery that adultery occurred in virtually
all of these societies—even where it was punishable by death.
She also found that in most of these cultures divorce rates peak
around the fourth year of marriage. An interesting argument can
in fact be made that nature apparently meant passions to sputter
out in about four years. Dr. Fisher calls it as she sees it: “Primitive
pairs stayed together just long enough to rear one child through
infancy before moving on to another mate. Add another three
years to rear a second child and you have the Seven Year Itch.”
Perhaps we humans are swimming upstream against nature’s
design when we attempt to wrestle a human pattern of mon-
ogamy into place. Fewer than 5 percent of all mammals form
monogamous lifelong pairs, which might seem to indicate that
in the natural scheme of things, romantic love is not designed to
be either eternal or exclusive.
Many anthropologists argue that the whole concept of roman-
tic love is something of an unnatural invention of Western culture
to begin with. From a biological and evolutionary standpoint, it’s
to a man’s advantage to sow his seeds far and wide. Women in
turn seek mates with the best genes and the most to invest in off-
spring. These built-in conflicts in each gender’s preprogramming
can put the sexes in conflict and undermine love. Anthropology
offers further evidence. Nearly 1,000 of the 1,154 past or present
human societies ever studied have permitted a man to have more
than one wife.
There is no dispute among evolutionary psychologists over the
basic source of this male open-mindedness. A woman, regardless
of how many sex partners she has, can generally have only one
offspring a year. For a man, each new mate offers a real chance for
propagating his genes into the future. Perhaps it was not all that
surprising when Charles Darwin tactfully noted that, in virtually
all species, the female is “less eager than the male”; or when