The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy Is as Necessary as Love and Sex
David M. Buss
Language: English
Pages: 227
ISBN: 0965013472
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Why do men and women cheat on each other? How do men really feel when their partners have sex with other men? What worries women more -- men who turn to other women for love or men who simply want sexual variety in their lives? Can the jealousy husbands and wives experience over real or imagined infidelities be cured? Should it be? In this surprising and engaging exploration of men's and women's darker passions, David Buss, acclaimed author of The Evolution of Desire, reveals that both men and women are actually designed for jealousy. Drawing on experiments, surveys, and interviews conducted in thirty-seven countries on six continents, as well as insights from recent discoveries in biology, anthropology, and psychology, Buss discovers that the evolutionary origins of our sexual desires still shape our passions today.
According to Buss, more men than women want to have sex with multiple partners. Furthermore, women who cheat on their husbands do so when they are most likely to conceive, but have sex with their spouses when they are least likely to conceive. These findings show that evolutionary tendencies to acquire better genes through different partners still lurk beneath modern sexual behavior. To counteract these desires to stray -- and to strengthen the bonds between partners -- jealousy evolved as an early detection system of infidelity in the ancient and mysterious ritual of mating.
Buss takes us on a fascinating journey through many cultures, from pre-historic to the present, to show the profound evolutionary effect jealousy has had on all of us. Only with a healthy balance of jealousy and trust can we be certain of a mate's commitment, devotion, and true love.
he repeated, ‘you did sleep with him’ . . . he knocked her down, grabbed her hair and by it held her to the floor. “ ‘Confess. You slept with him. Confess you slept with him God damn you,’ he cried, ‘or I’ll knife you!’ She could see murder plain on his face . . . Fear overcame her; she capitulated just to end it all. ‘All right then, yes, it’s true. Now let me go.’ After that it was frightful. The admission which he had so savagely extracted was a direct body blow . . . He seized her head and
ovulation when she is most likely to conceive. She emits pheromonal signals, hormone-saturated substances that males find especially attractive, sometimes driving them into a sexual frenzy. Sarah Hrdy of the University of California at Davis notes that males sometimes touch the vagina of the estrous female, gathering her secretions on their fingers to smell or taste. Males use these signals to monitor the female’s reproductive state. A male chimpanzee’s position in the social hierarchy strongly
reproductive success was limited primarily by the number of fertile women they could successfully inseminate. The greater the sexual access to a variety of women, the greater the reproductive success. The insatiable desire for a variety of sex partners evolved as a powerful passion in men, expressing itself in a host of behaviors ranging from patronizing prostitutes to indulging in infidelity. Sexual Fantasies Sexual fantasies provide another psychological window into secret desires. Fantasies
fact round. The universe appears to us to have three dimensions of space and one of time, but astrophysicists tell us that it has as many as 11 dimensions. So it is with the psychological dynamics of marriage. Our folk wisdom sometimes leads us astray, or in the case of unhappiness and infidelity, partially astray. Shirley Glass and Thomas Wright explored the link between marital happiness and extramarital affairs. To their amazement, the level of marital happiness seemed to have no effect on
they had intentionally elicited jealousy in their current romantic partner. Women reported using several key tactics for inducing jealousy. By far the most common was discussing their attraction to other men, with 51 percent of women reporting this tactic; actually dating others came in second at 24 percent; lying about being attracted to someone else was the third favored technique at 14 percent; and talking about former partners was reported by 11 percent. In our study of newlyweds, we found