The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy Is as Necessary as Love and Sex (7 page)

I disagree with all of these experts who take a dim view of the
dark side of human emotion. In my view, these “negative” emotions are
exquisitely tailored adaptive mechanisms that served the interests of our
ancestors well and likely continue to serve our interests today. Specifically,
the theory proposes that these emotions are designed to cope with what I call
“strategic interference.” Strategic interference occurs whenever something or
someone impedes, thwarts, or blocks a strategic set of actions. Consider the
relatively simple case of encountering a poisonous snake on a path as you walk
through the woods. The snake coils, rattles his tail, and hisses at you
suddenly, threatening your goal of survival. Because snakes have been a
recurrent hostile force of nature for us humans, we have evolved a special
proclivity to develop a fear of snakes.

This fear serves several related functions. It focuses our
attention laserlike on the source of the threat, simultaneously screening out
irrelevant sources of stimuli. It prompts storage of the relevant information
in memory, so that future travel through this location can be avoided or
traversed with greater caution. It also prompts immediate beneficial actions
such as freezing or fleeing. Given the prevalence of snake fears among humans
and our closest genetic relatives, chimpanzees, it is reasonable to believe
that those who were indifferent to dangerous snakes were more likely to die and
less likely to become our ancestors.

The most common human fears fall heavily in a small number of
categories: snakes, spiders, heights, darkness, and strangers. Charles Darwin
expressed the key insight: “May we not suspect that the . . . fears of
children, which are quite independent of experience, are the inherited effects
of real dangers . . . during ancient savage time?” We are far more likely to
develop fears of dangers that were present in our ancestral environment than to
those in our current environment. Snakes, for example, are hardly a problem in
Los Angeles or New York City, but automobiles are. Fears of cars or electrical
outlets are virtually unknown, since these are evolutionarily novel hazards,
too recent for natural selection to have fashioned specific fears. The fact
that more city dwellers go to psychiatrists with phobias of snakes and
strangers than fears of cars and electrical outlets provides a window into the
hazards of our ancestral environment.

The specific array of human fears emerges in development
precisely at the time when infants first encounter particular dangers. Fear of
heights and strangers, for example, emerges in infants around six months of
age, which coincides with the time when they start to crawl away from their
mother. In one study, 80 percent of infants who had been crawling for 41 days
or more avoided crossing over a “visual cliff,” an apparent vertical drop that
was in fact covered with a transparent but sturdy glass, to get to their
mother. Crawling increases the risk of dangerous falls and encounters with
strangers without the protective mother in close proximity, and so the
emergence of the fear of heights and strangers at this time coincides with the
onset of these dangers. Fear of strangers in human infants has been documented
in a variety of different cultures, including the Guatemalans, Zambians, !Kung
Bushmen, and Hopi Indians. In fact, the risk of infants being killed by
strangers appears to be a common “hostile force of nature” in nonhuman primates
as well as in humans.

As the Harvard psychologist Jerome Kagan has documented, separation
anxiety is another kind of fear for which there is widespread cross-cultural
documentation, peaking between 9 and 13 months. In one cross-cultural study,
Kagan recorded the percentage of infants who cried following the departure of
their mother from the room. At the peak age of separation anxiety, 62 percent
of Guatemalan Indians, 60 percent of Israelis, 82 percent of Antigua
Guatemalans, and 100 percent of African Bushmen infants exhibited this overt
display of separation anxiety. Animal fears, in contrast, do not emerge until
around age two, as the child more expansively explores the environment.
Adaptations need not show up at birth. The onset of specific fears, like the
onset of puberty, is a developmentally timed psychological emergence.

The conclusion from all of this evidence is clear: far from
being an “irrational” or “negative” emotion, fear is patterned in highly
adaptive ways that aided the survival of our ancestors. Fears are like physical
pain. Although they feel unpleasant, they help us to avoid the events that
interfere with our strategies of survival.

Now consider a different type of strategic interference, the
blocking of a preferred mating strategy. Abundant evidence documents what any
grandmother could have told you—that most women look for long-term love,
seeking a committed partner who will be there for the long run. Men also pursue
a strategy of committed mating some of the time, but they have another strategy
that also looms large in their repertoire, a strategy of casual sex. When a man
seeks casual sex from a woman who seeks commitment, the man interferes with the
woman’s preferred long-term mating strategy. But a woman who refuses to have
sex prior to signs of commitment is simultaneously interfering with a man’s
short-term mating strategy.

My research has consistently shown that the patterns of men’s
and women’s anger correspond precisely to their respective sources of strategic
interference. Women, far more than men, become angry and upset by those who
seek sex sooner, more frequently, and more persistently than they want. Men,
far more than women, become angry and upset by those who delay sex or thwart
their sexual advances.

In each of these examples, the anger serves a specific set of
adaptive purposes, just as the patterns of fear serve specific purposes. First,
anger alerts the person to the source of strategic interference, drawing
attention to the interfering events and screening out less relevant
information. Second, anger singles out these events for storage in memory. Third,
it motivates action directed toward reducing the strategic interference. A
woman’s anger at a man’s persistent and unwanted sexual advances, for example,
functions to stop the man in his tracks and alert others to the man’s sexual
impropriety. Finally, anger motivates action designed to reduce future episodes
of strategic interference. Expressing anger at the man’s advances can deter
future unwanted advances, as well as cultivating a woman’s reputation as
someone who is not “easy” or “loose.”

These particular examples of fear and anger as emotions designed
to solve adaptive problems are relatively straightforward and illustrate the
logic of strategic interference theory. Jealousy, however, is a more
complicated adaptation, imbued with a complex collage of emotions. Paul Mullen,
a psychiatrist at the University of Otago in New Zealand, discovered that men
and women experience these emotions when jealous: pain, distress, self-blame,
oppression, anxiety, loss, sadness, apprehension, anger, restless distress, humiliation,
shame, agitation, sexual arousal toward partner, fear, depression, and
betrayal.

Don Sharpsteen, a professor of psychology at the University of
Missouri at Rolla, asked 100 people to list all the characteristics of romantic
jealousy, including what people who experience jealousy think, feel, and do.
This study yielded 86 distinct characteristics. Subsequently, a second group of
25 men and 25 women rated each of the 86 features on its “centrality” or
“prototypicality” to the jealous experience. Among the emotions that emerged as
highly prototypical were hurt, threatened, broken-hearted, upset, insecure,
feeling betrayed, feeling rejected, angry, possessive, envious, unhappy,
confused, frustrated, lonely, depressed, resentful, scared, and paranoid.

Despite this complex emotional tapestry, the logic of strategic
interference theory applies with equal force to jealousy. Like anger and fear,
jealousy serves as a signal that alerts a person to the source of strategic
interference, causes the interfering events to be burned into the brain,
prompts action designed to eliminate or reduce the source of strategic
interference, and motivates behavior designed to avoid similar kinds of
interference in the future.

The complexity of emotional reactions subsumed by jealousy
mirrors the complexity of threats that must be handled. Since jealousy is
triggered by signals of a partner’s infidelity, the loss of the partner is one
obvious threat. But consider a subtler threat, the loss of status and
reputation. The psychiatrist Mary Seeman, a professor at the University of
Toronto, examined five women referred to her for extreme jealousy. In all five
cases, the woman displayed an obsession for the circumstances of the husband’s
infidelity, imagined the husband ridiculing her in front of the rival
(humiliation), became preoccupied with the fact that others might know about
the infidelity and feel sorry for her (shame), and imagined her loss of status
and reputation in the eyes of others. All of these women showed more concern
for the circumstances surrounding the husband’s infidelity and the subsequent
damage to their reputations than for the details of the sexual activity itself.

Damage to reputation is merely the beginning of the problems
posed by a partner’s infidelity. Others include a questioning of one’s own
desirability as a mate, the loss of trust in the partner, threats to the
welfare of the children, the loss of a partner’s investment, potential severing
of family ties that had been built up gradually over the years, and many more.
Jealousy is such a complex emotion because the corresponding problems involve
so many distinct components.

The main conclusion is that jealousy is a negative emotion only
in the sense that it causes psychological pain. But it is an exquisitely useful
coping device when we understand that it is designed to deal with real
relationship threats.

Mechanisms such as jealousy have three essential ingredients:
input, information processing procedures, and output. Consider as an analogy
the defense mechanism humans have evolved to guard against damage from repeated
friction to the skin. Repeated friction is a “hostile force of nature,” since
it threatens to harm the protective layer of the skin and the bodily mechanisms
the skin protects. Humans have evolved an ingenious solution to this problem:
calluses. When you walk around on bare feet, for example, your soles and heels
grow calluses, which enable you to continue walking around without your skin
getting worn down to the bone. Although this seems obvious to us, in a sense we
should be amazed, because this phenomenon appears to defy the laws of physics.
When you drive around in your car, for example, your tires do not grow thicker
as a consequence of the repeated friction. Tires wear down, just like all other
objects exposed to these physical forces. Humans, however, possess an
adaptation to defend against these hostile forces of physics.

Callus-producing adaptations have three components. The first
consists of “input,” repeated friction, which signals a threat and activates a
suite of physiological procedures. The physiological responses set into motion
a chain of events designed to produce new skin cells at precisely the locations
that have experienced repeated friction. The “outputs” are the new skin cells,
the calluses that then afford protection from further repeated friction. This
trio of components—input, procedures, and output—describe at an abstract level
the nature of the body’s evolved defense against this hostile force of nature.

Threats to romantic relationships pose different sorts of
adaptive problems, but the evolved defenses can be thought of in much the same
way. First, there are inputs that tell a person that he or she is facing the
threat. These inputs can include strange scents you detect on your partner,
sudden changes in sexual desire, the introduction of a new sexual technique,
mysterious hang-up phone calls, prolonged eye contact between your partner and
an attractive member of the opposite sex, and a host of others. Gregory White
and Paul Mullen noted a different constellation of cues: “The divining of a
changed attitude, a subtle alteration in sexual responsiveness, an unexplained
absence, a suspicious hair on the lover’s clothing—all these are examples of
events that may provide the context for the suspicions.” All these “inputs,”
explored later in greater detail, alert a person to a possible danger.

The next step requires complex information processing and
evaluation. Has an infidelity already occurred, or do these signs signal an
impending infidelity? Is the rival more or less attractive, more or less
successful, more or less charming than you are? As you search your memory, have
there been other signals in the past? Or are you just being silly to suspect
your partner, who after all vowed never to stray?

Inferences about a mate’s infidelity require an array of
information processing devices: paying attention to certain classes of cues,
making inferences based on them, and linking them with other circumstantial
information. This information processing, however, is not cold, rational, and
dispassionately calculated. Many emotions accompany jealousy, including rage,
humiliation, panic, fear, anxiety, and depression, and they must be understood,
for they are essential to the design of this defense mechanism.

Combating a threat requires output or action. Adaptive solutions
cannot stop with merely recognizing that a threat exists. As we will see in
chapter 8, the coping that comes from jealousy is as complex and varied as the
signals it responds to. It ranges from heightened vigilance, the first line of
defense, to explosive violence, the last line of defense. It ranges from
self-recrimination to a brutal attack on a rival. It ranges from attempts at
suicide to attempts to kill a partner.