L❤VE (Or What Might Stand in its Way)

Feb 15, 2020
9 min read

Updated: May 7, 2020

First of all, I want you to know, that I’ve really tried to find a scientific article that explains love, what it is and why it exists in an interesting and informative but still at least somewhat romantic way. Basically an ode to love in its purest form.

Unfortunately, all I could find is that love exists for evolutionary purposes - meaning attracting a mate, retaining a mate, reproducing with the mate and investing parentally in the resulting offspring. Very romantic, right?

So, I decided to wait for a day and let you all enjoy yesterday’s Day of Love without any research that might take away from that optimism we should all feel!

Now, a day later, I’m ready to present some less romantic, but hopefully still relevant and interesting research on love and one of its main threats - infidelity. I will now dig a bit deeper into these previously mentioned 4 stages of the evolutionary purposes of love, because they still explain human social behavior to a great extent. Of course, socialization has had its impact, but the basics are still deeply engrained in our brains. See for yourself if you agree :)

1. The Courtship Phase

This one is all about attracting a mate. It is closely linked to resource display, which depends on gender constraints to reproduction and is thus different between the genders. Both males and females have evolutionarily been selected to maximize gene replication, and characteristics that lead to a greater gene replication will thus be favoured over characters that do not. But the genders have different limitations imposed on maximizing their reproductive success. While females are constrained by the number of offspring they can produce and the resources available to invest in their offspring, males are constrained primarily by access to reproductively valuable females. Sounds even more romantic, right?

As a consequence of this, in the literature they highlight a male focus on physical attractiveness (because age and health cannot always be directly evaluated) in females and a female focus on the capability and willingness to invest resources in their offspring (at least for long-term bonding) in males.

Female appearance simply covaries more (is more strongly correlated) with reproductive capability than male appearance, but male character traits such as ambition and available resources are more strongly related to it than female traits and possessions. This leads to the assumptions that females will compete with one another more in terms of physical characteristics, while males compete among themselves more for access to the resources that females value.

These assumptions haven’t been empirically tested, though, and can only be connected to anecdotal experiences such as a booming cosmetics industry for women and a higher preference of males to for driving expensive sports cars.

2. The Mating Phase

The next step is to retain a mate - this is called the “mating” phase. Here, love plays a big role in that it acts to promote exclusivity, like fidelity and mate guarding. The purposes of exclusivity are mainly to ensure high confidence in paternity (as maternity is rarely in doubt) and to ensure mutual commitment to the reproducing pair. Each gender has their own investment to protect: female infidelity threatens male confidence in paternity, whereas male infidelity threatens to redirect the resources invested in the partner’s offspring.

Both males and females who fail to ensure the fidelity of their partner will be at a selective disadvantage, even though it is argued that males have more to lose from female infidelity and thus might attribute a higher importance to mate-guarding and fidelity of their partner. Male one-time fidelity might not immediately put the resources for the offspring at risk, while one-time female infidelity directly decreases the partner’s confidence in paternity.

This might explain why females have been shown to be more forgiving of infidelity than males, and why acts of mate-guarding are more frequently displayed by males.

In general, the concept of fidelity is quite interesting to me. I always explained it to myself by a strong drive to please instant sexual desires, a so-called visceral factor on which I will inform you more in one of my next posts. The topic of infidelity has always been interesting to me, and we all associate it with usually negative feelings. We all have friends who have been cheated on in past or current relationships - and I would like to make the bold statement that we also all know people who have cheated - and still call them our friends. Unfortunately, it is a more or less normal - because often occurring - social phenomenon, but it is for the most cases still regarded as “not okay” and is to be prevented (from both parties).

Interestingly, by now there have been quite some scientific research endeavours to predict infidelity in humans. To quickly define it: infidelity describes a behavior that is indicative of (mostly secret) romantic activity with a secondary partner, while in an exclusive relationship such as marriage. It is commonly also labelled as unfaithfulness, affairs, cheating, and it can range in its emotional involvement (romantic feelings can but do not have to be developed), frequency (anything from once to over multiple years), diversity of secondary partners (aka the same of different secondary partners) and intensity (anything from online chatting over a kiss to actually having sex). Infidelity actually shows a seasonal pattern with a peak in the summer months - this might be due to lighter outfits or more travelling associated with being away from the primary partner, or some other factor (let me know if you have an idea!).

Some numbers:

Conservative estimates (meaning they could easily be higher) suggest that infidelity occurs in 20-25% of all marriages. Of course, the action of cheating is not just present in marriages. People who are in dating relationships, and those living together as non-married couples report even higher rates of infidelity. National surveys from the US for example show that between 1991 and 2006 there has been an increase unfaithfulness rates across all ages. The most dramatic rise was observed in the oldest group of men (ages 65–90). Here, the increase by 200-300% can probably be attributed to the introduction of easily accessible treatments for erectile dysfunction, though. Meaning now they’re actually able to, they cheat. Great prospects, right?

I don’t need to tell you that infidelity is reliably associated with poorer mental health and relationship dissolution or divorce - this is intuitive. Maybe not quite so intuitive: across 160 countries, discovered cheating is the single most common cause of marital dissolution! Infidelity is also a significant public health problem, as it increases the (probabilities of the) spread of sexually transmitted diseases. Probably not to a small amount do we owe the attempts to predict infidelity to this fact - being able to foresee who is most likely to be affected might help with prevention.

Multiple factors have been looked at to figure out a potential predictive quality for infidelity, more specifically, sexual infidelity (not just chatting online or developing feelings for someone else without acting on them).

Here are some of the factors that have indeed been shown to have a significant effect on the propensity to cheat:

Demographics

Gender has been found to predict infidelity in multiple studies, with men found to be more likely to cheat in exclusive relationships than women. The findings from multiple studies support the evolutionary perspective explained in parts above, according to which infidelity simply increases reproduction chances for men. It is also in line with other research that finds men to better be able to separate love from sexual activity and to have greater desire and willingness to cheat on their primary partner.

But - there is also contradicting evidence: a study from 2001 reported similar rates of wives and husbands in their thirties or younger, and a study from 2007 even found a greater predictability of cheating for females, under the condition that they felt unhappy in the relationship with the primary partner.

Multiple other demographic variables have been looked at to determine a potential impact on the likelihood to cheat, and some of the studies have found evidence for higher rates of infidelity in African Americans compared to their white counterparts. Furthermore, education, age, and income have also been investigated, but without any consistent findings across studies.

Individual characteristics

Many individual characteristics were shown to be significantly correlated with infidelity. These characteristics range from personality traits such as neuroticism, psychological distress and an insecure attachment style to the one’s prior history of infidelity (once a cheater, always a cheater?), number of sex partners before marriage (once a player, always a player?), psychological distress, and an insecure attachment orientation. Furthermore, problematic alcohol and drug consumption is also related to acts of cheating. And, those with a history of parental infidelity have twice as high of a chance to engage in this behavior themselves.

Characteristics regarding the relationship one is in are actually better predictors of infidelity, though.

Relationship aspects

Especially a decreased satisfaction with the exclusive relationship with the primary partner is consistently correlated to infidelity in marriage - as both a consequence and a cause of marital distress. Because we have this bidirectional causality, it can only partly be used as a predictor. Living together before marriage is also related to increased infidelity, but both having a partner of the same religion and of similar education are related to staying loyal.

Context

The closing gender gap perceived in studies on gender differences in infidelity is attributed to the increased presence of women in the workforce, as this means they now have greater financial means and opportunities for cheating than before. Financial means and opportunities through work are thus also causes of infidelity. The number of days an individual is travelling for work is for example directly linked to infidelity. Not surprisingly, jobs that involve contact with potential sex partners (aka other people of the gender one is interested in) are also correlated. Related to this is the finding that at least for men, a larger percentage of female colleagues is also associated with higher rates of infidelity. When both partners were employed, significantly less cheating was observed than with one stay-at-home spouse.

Attendance of religious services has also been linked to lower unfaithfulness - with an emphasis on attendance, because the pure self-reported belief provided mixed evidence regarding its impact on fidelity. Religion has also found to have interactive effects with marital dissatisfaction on infidelity.

And, guess what else plays a role - the internet, of course.

Aside from the fact that there are sites explicitly established to promote extra-marital sexual engagements, it was found that 20–33% of all Internet users go online for sexual purposes.

Of those who purposely look for sex online, 65% had sexual intercourse with their internet partner offline - less than half without using a condom.

So, where does that leave us?

No internet for our partner, and you better make sure (s)he has no (fe)male colleagues, and you decide to have your partner take an attachment style test to see if it is the insecure one? Maybe you should just have a non-exclusive relationship with your girl- (or boy-)friend, because then infidelity is not a thing anymore anyways?

No*! *(unless you both want that, of course!)

This was really just an informative essay, because I was looking at love and found its most serious threat. And, don’t worry too much about the numbers - given some limitations of the studies, and the general secretive nature of the investigated behavior, these statistics need to be looked at with caution at least. It always depends on how different people define “cheating” or even “sex”. And, after all, they’re just stats (don’t tell my Stats Professor I said that).

The rates of discovered sexual infidelity vary dramatically for example across data collection methods - where face-to-face interviews found a cheating rate around 1%, self-interviews on a computer, without direct contact to a real person estimated around 6%. And, many of the studies used clinical or small, and therefore unrepresentative samples. This is one of the main takeaways from my Stats class, actually - small sample size will stand in the way of real-life significance, even if statistical significance is shown.

4. Parental Investment Phase

Once children have been produced, the real work begins: they must be fed, nurtured, protected, taught, and loved. Parental love, together with romantic love, is probably the most intense and profound (as it should be).

Parental love leads to many different behaviors and love acts, such as affection, commitment of resources and time, self-sacrifice and of course associated negative ones like expectations, pressure and the manipulative holding back of all the things they could offer. From an evolutionary standpoint, the goal of successful parenting is achieved when the offspring is raised to mature to an appropriate age to find and reproduce with a mate, and to make sure that their offspring will do the same.

You almost forgot about the four stages of love acts in evolution we were talking about, isn't that right? Well, then you maybe also didn't notice that I skipped the third one - or, let's say, I kept the best for last:

3. Reproduction Phase

This part is about what reproduction is, why it is important for reproductive purposes and what changes when love is involved ... It is also the one practical component, meaning I will leave it up to each one of you to discover the answers for yourself ;-)