Anatomy Of Love: A Natural History Of Mating Marriage And Why We Stray

Anatomy of Love A Natural History of Mating, Marriage, and Why We Stray COMPLETELY REVISED AND UPDATED Helen Fisher, PhD W. W. Norton & Company Independent Publishers Since 1923 New York • London FOR LOVERS EVERYWHERE And in memory of Ray Carroll CONTENTS Prologue Here’s to Love! 1. Games People Play Courting 2. Why Him? Why Her? The Drive to Love and Who We Choose 3. Is Monogamy Natural? Of Human Bonding . . . and Cheating 4. Why Adultery? The Nature of Philandering 5. Blueprint for Divorce The Three- to Four-Year Itch 6. “When Wild in Woods the Noble Savage Ran” Life in the Trees 7. Out of Eden On the Origin of Monogamy and Desertion 8. The Tyranny of Love Evolution of Attachment and Love Addictions 9. Dressed to Impress Nature’s Lures for Seduction 10. Men and Women Are Like Two Feet: They Need Each Other to Get Ahead Gender Differences in Mind 11. Women, Men, and Power The Nature of Sexual Politics 12. Almost Human Genesis of Kinship and the Teenager 13. The First Affluent Society “That Short but Imperious Word, ‘Ought’ ” 14. Fickle Passion Romance in Yesteryears 15. “Till Death Us Do Part” Birth of Sexual Double Standards 16. Future Sex Slow Love and Forward to the Past Appendices Appendix A Appendix B Appendix C Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index PROLOGUE Here’s to Love! Journalist: Why do you only write about relationships? Nora Ephron:Is there something else? I was recently traveling in the highlands of New Guinea in the back of a pickup truck, talking with a man who had three wives. I asked him how many wives he would like to have. There was a pause as he rubbed his chin. I wondered: Would he say five? Ten? Twenty-five wives? He leaned toward me and whispered: None. We are a pair-bonding species. Some 85% of cultures permit a man to have several wives, but few men actually build a harem. A man has to have a lot of goats, cows, land, money, or other impressive resources to get several women to share his wedding bed. Even then, having more than one wife can be a toothache. Co-wives fight; sometimes they even poison one another’s children. We are built to rear our babies as a team of two—with a lot of helpers near the nest. This book is the story of that monumental human passion: to love. As well as all of the spinoffs of our basic human reproductive strategy: how we court; who we choose; how we bond; why some are adulterous and some divorce; how the drive to love evolved; why we have teenagers and vast networks of kin to rear our young; why a man can’t be more like a woman and vice versa; how sex and romance drastically altered with the invention of the plow; and, in the last chapter, a new look at future sex. When W. W. Norton invited me to do a second edition of this book, I gaily said yes, thinking this was a privilege and an easy job. The first version had taken me ten years to write; I thought this revision might take ten days. Then I read the book—and swiftly realized that I had to update almost all of it. So I have now added a great deal of data and ideas, including data on all of our brain-scanning experiments on romantic love, rejection in love, and long-term love; my new data on the biology of personality and why you fall in love with one person rather than another; new information on adultery, love addiction, sexual selection, and mate choice; the newest statistics on worldwide patterns of divorce; my theory on the development of morality across the life course; my hypothesis about our modern dating habits—what I call “slow love,”; and a wealth of new data on future sex, collected in collaboration with Match.com.1 I also added references for my additions (and retained most