pairbonding

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Sapiosexuality & Our Behavioral Complexity

“You know, animals have sex. It’s biology, it’s natural instinct. We are the only ones who have an erotic life, which means that it’s sexuality transformed by the human imagination.”  — Esther Perel

“One of the reasons some cultural elitists – political pundits, novelists, intellectuals – tend to be so unsettled by the Internet is that it has revealed how oceanically broad are the interests of the public in general. Before the Internet, with no way of observing the obsessions of the masses, it was a lot easier to pretend that these obsessions simply didn’t exist; that the nation was “united” around caring about the same small number of movies, weekly magazines, novels, political issues, or personalities. This was probably always a self-flattering illusion for the folks who ran things. The Internet destroyed it. When you gaze …upon the Pacific of strangeness online, you confront the astonishing diversity of human passion.”  — Clive Thompson (2013) Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better

Kissing, by Alex Grey.

Kissing, by Alex Grey. (alexgrey.com)

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Please bear with me as I try to connect two not very obviously connected ideas: romantic love and our species’ behavioral flexibility. I don’t have it all worked out. Perhaps I’m going down the wrong path altogether.

I started thinking about these things after several friends on social media shared this Mandy Len Catron essay: “To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This”. Catron describes a time that she and a male acquaintance intentionally tried to induce feelings of romantic love. To do this, they followed two steps, borrowed from a study done by the psychologist Arthur Aron. First, they asked each other a series of 36 increasingly intimate questions. Next, they stared into each other’s eyes for four uninterrupted minutes.

My first reaction when I went through the questions was that I can see how they could elicit feelings of intimacy under the right circumstances and with the right person. To work through all 36 of them would take some time, as they are not typical of everyday conversation. Time itself is could be a factor in bonding. To answer each question would require some thought, as they do not have prepared, canned responses. Some examples from Aron’s list:

  • Name three things you and your partner appear to have in common.
  • Take four minutes and tell your partner your life story in as much detail as possible.
  • Is there something that you’ve dreamed of doing for a long time? Why haven’t you done it?
  • What is your most treasured memory? Continue reading →
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Did Pairbonds Evolve to Be Asymmetrical?

“I know you belong to somebody new, but tonight you belong to me.” Rose and David 

“I wanted love, I needed love. Most of all, most of all.” Auerbach and Carney (1)

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Several researchers have attempted to reconstruct the very difficult problem of why pairbonding may have evolved in humans (I wrote about this here, but a decent guess is that this began around 2 million years ago. Maybe). Those reconstructions often come with an addendum, which predict that pair-bonds would not be completely symmetrical. Instead, either males or females would have more of an incentive to initiate or maintain a long-term bond, and this would depend on the reasons that pairbonding evolved in the first place.

For example, here is David Buss, explaining why males are more likely to fall in love first:

“Because love is an emotion tethered to long-term mating; because fecundity and reproductive value is so critical to men in selecting a long-term mate; and because physical appearance provides an abundance of cues to a woman’s fecundity and reproductive value, we can predict that men will experience “love at first sight” more often than women. The empirical evidence supports this prediction.” (Buss, 2006: 69)

Australopithecus afarensis ("Lucy"), out with her date. Source.

Australopithecus afarensis (“Lucy”), out with her date around 3.6 mya. This portrayal of an early pairbond is speculative, but it ‘s probably not accurate. Source: AMNH.

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