High Infidelity
Birds do it, bees do it - and humans too. Cheat on their partners, that is - despite the terrible consequences. What are there a reason's as to why we're sometimes sexually unfaithful? Researchers believe the answer might lie in our primitive biological instincts.
By Dr Peter Lavelle
Cheating, an emotional game no matter which side you're on. (iStockphoto)
How about this for a plot. Married woman, a queen of Greece, has steamy extramarital affair with a son of the King of Troy. She decides to leave her husband — King Menelaus — for the prince (his name is Paris). "The bitch!" thinks King Menelaus and launches the Trojan war. Much biffo and killing ensues.
It was the world's first novel, by a certain poet called Homer. Since then, infidelity and its terrible consequences have fuelled many a ripping yarn. Think Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, HaW*Horne's The Scarlet Letter, Henry James' The Golden Bowl.
And that's just novels. How about Fatal Attraction? The Postman Only Rings Twice? Eyes Wide Shut? Not to mention Desperate Housewives.
These stories all have one thing in common, apart from the fact they are about infidelity. They all tend to end badly for the people who've been cheating on their partners. The moral of the story is almost always — 'infidelity is an unnatural vice'. The natural state of homo sapiens is monogamy — faithfulness.
Art imitating life?
But is it really? Not according to authors David Barash and Judith Lipton in their book, The Myth of Monogamy: Fidelity and Infidelity. In fact, strict monogamy is highly unusual in animal species — including primates, they say.
They say it is common for mammals and birds to mate for life — but within that arrangement it's also common for mates to seek sexual partners outside of the relationship.
They base these claims on the result of DNA fingerprinting of parents and offspring which show nine out of 10 mammal and bird species that 'mate for life' are sexually unfaithful.
The reason seems to be that males have an innate urge to spread their genes amongst as many females as possible — especially those who are attractive and of childbearing age. And females want the best genes they can get for their offspring and will go in search of males of high status — strong, powerful, at the top of the hierarchy.
It's the same the higher up the evolutionary ladder. Amongst primates, only two monkeys, the marmoset and the tamarin, are truly monogamous. All other primates mate outside their partnerships.
And humans? Genetic studies consistently show that in 10 percent of people the biological father is not the man who is living with the mother at the time of conception.
And according to a 2002 survey from the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Centre, about 15 per cent of women and 22 per cent of men said they'd had sex with someone besides their spouse while married at some time in the past. Roughly two per cent of women and four per cent of men had done so in the past year.
So why bother to stay together at all? The answer might be because of the kids.
Social monogamy
Barash and Lipton distinguish between social monogamy and sexual or genetic monogamy. In socially monogamous relationships, they cohabit - though they may not be sexually monogamous.
Researchers generally believe that the practice of cohabiting — social monogamy — originated among species because it gave the young the best chance of surviving. Mum stayed at home and looked after the kids, while dad went out to get the meat/seed/grubs.
In those species that don't cohabit, where the male leaves, the young are vulnerable to being killed by a predator for food, or by another male who wants to replace the young with his own offspring.
Humans are particularly socially monogamous, because of the long period it takes for a child to grow into adulthood. It's a major cost in time and resources. To make that investment, and protect it, they agree to become socially monogamous. Over time as human societies became more organised, this social monogamy was coded into law and religion as the institution of marriage. Flouting it, openly committing infidelity, became a crime — adultery — punishable by social ostracism, loss of assets and income, imprisonment and even death.
Dangerous Liaisons
Thus began the dilemma of the primitive instincts to copulate outside of the relationship, and the strict tribal taboos against it.
According to Robert White, in his 1994 book The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life, some —usually more primitive — societies tried to overcome the problem by allowing polygamy. White says nearly 1,000 of the 1,154 past or present human societies ever studied — and these include most of the world's "hunter-gatherer" societies — have permitted a man to have more than one wife.
The opposite situation, in which a woman is allowed more than one husband (known as polyandry) is much rarer, though it is found in some primitive tribes in the Himalayan areas of South Asia, and in Africa, Oceania, and in some native American tribes.
According to the Guinness Book of Records, the most prolific human parent in world history was Moulay ("The Bloodthirsty") Ismail, the last Sharifian Emperor of Morocco, who died in 1727. He fathered more than 1,000 children. History doesn't record whether he remembered their birthdays.
But polygamy is an anathema in the modern Judeo-Christian World (with the exception of the Mormon Church in Utah in the 1900s). As is adultery. Even to think about it is taboo. It was Jesus who famously observed that to lust after another is to commit adultery in one's heart. No coincidence that 'infidelity' derives from 'infidel', meaning 'heathen".
Hence the lashings of moral guilt felt by a person who 'cheats' — and the bitter feelings of betrayal on the part of the person 'cheated on'.
Of course, couples can practise both social and sexual monogamy — most do, say Barash, and Judith Lipton. Staying faithful is more likely to preserve a marriage and the benefits that come with it. It's also a good way of distributing males and females equally in a society, rather than Brad Pitt getting 20,000 women, and the rest of the males getting none.
But sexual monogamy is hard work, they say, and some people fail — especially narcissistic personality types searching for conquests — 'womanisers' — and in males and females who enter into commitments too early.
Robert White argues that in our modern Judeo-Christian society we manage to work within the taboos by practicing serial monogamy - marriage followed by divorce followed by marriage followed by divorce. When she gets beyond child rearing age, a man divorces his partner for a younger woman. A women will leave a man she feels is low in status for one who is richer and more powerful.
For those who are low in status and don't have a hope, there's always fiction in which to sublimate their desires.
Desperate Housewives, anyone?
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