Psychology Today online





On Gay Jealousy:

How to explain jealousy in same-sex couples?



Jesse Bering recently wrote a typically insightful and entertaining blog piece in which he explores the possible evolutionary origins of sexual jealousy. He begins by asserting that, "Heartbreak is every bit as much a psychological adaptation as is the compulsion to have sex with those other than our partners, and it throws a monster of a monkey wrench into the evolutionists' otherwise practical polyamory."



He goes on to dramatically buttress his case that our evolved capacity for empathy, a signature feature of our species, makes us very sensitive to the suffering our sexual indiscretions may cause our primary partner:



"We may not be a sexually exclusive species, but we do form deep romantic attachments, and the emotional scaffolding on which these attachments are built is extraordinarily sensitive to our partners' sexual indiscretions. I also say this as a gay man who, according to mainstream evolutionary thinking, shouldn't be terribly concerned about his partner having sex with strangers. After all, it isn't as though he's going to get pregnant and cuckold me into raising another man's offspring. But if you'd explained that to me as I was screaming invectives at one of my partners following my discovery that he was cheating on me, curled up in the fetal position in the corner of my kitchen and rocking myself into self-pitying oblivion, or as I was vomiting my guts out over the toilet for much of the next two weeks, I would have nodded in rational Darwinian assention while still trembling like a wounded animal.



...Bering argues that while this emotional/psychological response may have originally been related to biological concerns (paternity assurance for men, resource flow for women), its ubiquity among homosexuals shows that the response is now deeply embedded in the human psyche, concluding that, "sexual jealousy in gay men can only be explained by some sort of pseudo-heterosexuality mindset simulating straight men's hypervigilance to being cuckolded by their female partners."



I'm not buying that.



Where's the proof that sexual jealousy (experienced as heartbreak) is an unavoidable response to a partner's extra-pair sexual activity? If it were a genetically encoded behavioral response, there would be very few, if any exceptions to this pattern. Yet every major city (and plenty of small towns) have sex clubs where couples have sex with extra-pair partners with no discernible emotional consequences at all — at least not negative ones.... Most surveys of these so-called "swingers" indicate that they are more satisfied with their marriages than couples in more conventional arrangements. Add to this the large number of men who actually find the notion of being cuckholded very appealing (described by fellow PT blogger, David Ley in his fascinating book, Insatiable Wives). Then add the societies we describe in Sex at Dawn in which a party without extra-pair sex is like breakfast without coffee, and the genetic argument starts looking very wobbly indeed.



Let's consider the possibility that much, if not all, of this heartbreak is a learned response.



The separation anxiety Bering describes bears striking similarities to that experienced by a baby who feels abandoned by its mother. We live in a society that greatly amplifies that innate fear of abandonment by ignoring the baby's need for 24/7 maternal contact in the first few years of life.... The association between mother-love and lover-love is enhanced through a constant media onslaught ("Oooh baby, baby") and a freakishly childish understanding of mature sexual love.



...Loss is loss, regardless of sexual orientation. We all fear rejection and abandonment. It's a harsh and lonely world out there, and we're a tender, vulnerable species. So it's not surprising that gay men cherish their deepest connections and fear losing them just as much as anyone else does. It's not really about sex at all, at the deepest levels. It's about intimacy and love [when these are scarce –ed.]. We just find this fear often expressed in the sexual arena because that's where we've relegated so much of our intimacy in our fractured, conflicted world.





If we've been shaped by the fact that our ancestors evolved in polyamorous mate-sharing tribes for hundreds of thousands of years — as argued in the hot new book Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality — then why do humans the world over seem to have come out of those hundreds of thousands of years hardwired for jealousy?The conventional answers are simple. Men who carry the trait of driving other men away from their women are more likely to spread their own genes — including that trait. And, women and infants were more likely to survive and reproduce if a woman stopped her man from giving scarce resources to someone else; this selected for the jealousy trait in females.But those two answers are built on an unspoken assumption that theauthors callthe assumption that our stone-age ancestors lived in compartmentalized monogamous families like the Flintstones, "the modern stone-age fam-il-eee." In reality (anthropological findings indicate), people in isolated, stone-age hunter-gatherer tribes interbreed so thoroughly that they perpetuate very similar genes no matter who they mate with inside the tribe. And secondly, child-rearing is such a communal activity that the identity of the birth father hardly matters and is often not even known.Sex at DawnDropping the Flintstones assumption explains another age-old question: why wasn'tquickly bred out of humans ages ago, since gays tend to not pass on their genes at all? Yet homosexuality continues to exist all around the world, and as far back as is known.A poly-tribe explanation for this is clear. Females in the tribe had abundant mates; semen-scarcity was not the limiting factor for successful reproduction. The limiting scarcities were things like food, resources, defense against predators, and other things that depend on cooperation and loyalty within the tribe — for which gay bonding works as well as the straight kind. Darwinian selection happens at all levels  groups as well as individuals.But what about jealousy? In particular, what about jealousy among gays and lesbians? Why does gay jealousy persist when it has nothing to do with breeding?Jesse Bering, a blogger forchallengedco-author Christopher Ryan about this last month in a much-quoted essay on why jealousy and heartbreak exist. He challenged the "polyamory chic" thatand its like are creating, and argued that the powerful human traits of jealousy and heartbreak torpedo Ryan's thesis.Last week he and Ryan met in person (and shared a dinner of octopus). Following their no-doubt animated (and tentacular?) discussion, Ryan posted his rebuttal on hisblogsite. In short: jealousy as we know it is not really about sex. Symptoms of mate-jealousy in modern society, where available mates tend to beare remarkably like childrens' fear of abandonment where there is a scarcity of invested parents. Writes Ryan:Read the whole article The anthropological studies behind this stuff, by the way, aren't just about mating and relationships. Just out from the University of Notre Dame: Research Shows Child-Rearing Practices of Distant Ancestors Foster Morality, Compassion in Kids

Labels: anthropology, gay, gay/bi