24 February 2000, 808 words
These are the five reasons a man and a woman become a couple: (1) companionship, (2) lust/children, (3) social norms, (4) security, and (5) love. In that order.
For most people, love is a consequence of the first four reasons. True, many people would insist that love is the first - indeed, only - reason for their attraction to their partners. But most people are very good at deceiving themselves.
The fact is, in order for love to be the only reason one person is attracted to another, that person would have to be perfectly content alone, free of lust, completely self-assured, and entirely indifferent to social mores. Of course, such a person would also be a complete sociopath.
Save perhaps for religion, then, there's no topic where the distance between reality and belief is so vast. "The heart has its reasons, which reason knows not," wrote Blaise Pascal, and every lover would insist that he expressed the deepest of truths. Yet most of us invariably fall in love with people of our own age, class, race, ethnicity, educational level, even neighbourhood. Still we insist that love is so bright a flame that it needs no fuel but its own passion.
Well, a powerful force love certainly is, but the heart's reasons nonetheless have a very clear logic. That logic is rooted in the paradigm called evolutionary psychology, which was developed by anthropologist John Tooby and psychologist Leda Cosmides. The paradigm works by reverse-engineering the human mind - i.e. by analyzing our prevalent attitudes on the assumption that those attitudes helped us survive in the prehistoric environment. It draws on data from anthropology, psychology, comparative ethnography, linguistics, neurology, and animal biology. And, when it comes to love, evolutionary psychology provides a fundamental explanation as to why this emotion is so significant to our hearts.
Let us first examine what it is that attracts men and women to one another. Psychologist David Buss designed a questionnaire asking about the importance of 18 qualities in a mate and sent it to over 10,000 people in 37 countries on six continents and five islands - monogamous, polygamous, traditional and liberal, communist and capitalist. While the figures differed somewhat, the pattern was the same in every country.
Buss's survey showed that women value earning capacity, status, ambition and industriousness in a mate more than men do. In most countries, women also value dependability and stability more than men do. In every country, men value youth and looks more than women do. However, both men and women everywhere place the highest value on intelligence, kindness and understanding.
These results match exactly the predictions made by evolutionary psychology. If our psychology is shaped by biological imperatives - basically, the programming of our genes to replicate themselves - then <I>homo sapiens sapiens<I> should have developed strategies which best fulfill that programming.
Because of biological differences, those strategies differ for men and women. (Bear in mind that people are not <I>conscious<I> of these strategies - they are an inherent part of our wiring.) Simply put, in order to pass on his genes, the most effective strategy for the male is to try and impregnate as many women as possible. But the best strategy for a female is to allow herself to be impregnated only by a man who has the power, and the commitment, to protect and provide for her and their offspring.
That is why men place greater value on youth and looks (and also why men are more likely to be unfaithful) and why women place greater value on resources and dependability (and so often judge a man by his wallet). And it is also why both sexes place the highest value on intelligence and caring, because those qualities are needed from both parents to maximise the chances of the offspring's survival.
Where, then, does love come in? Well, part of the strategy of courtship is ensuring that the other person cares for you deeply. There is no point in investing time, emotion, money, child-rearing, and foregone opportunities in a relationship if your mate will abandon you as soon as someone with more attractive qualities comes along. And what better guarantee can we give than a feeling so powerful that it takes complete control of our very psyches? True love is only true when we cannot help feeling it. Moreover, we do not fall in love with a person's qualities: we fall in love with <I>them<I>. That is another guarantee that we will not leave for a better candidate. (Of course, in life there are no guarantees.)
Finally, in case you're wondering, yes, I have been in love, though only once. But, for me, love heads the list I began this column with. Which, I suppose, makes me a bit of a sociopath, and may explain why I'm still single.
Copyright ©2000 Kevin Baldeosingh