The question of why people are attracted to spouses who are bad for them is one that I’ve wondered about for a long time. It was made obvious to me at a fairly young age that girls were attracted to the “bad boys,” and I wasn’t one of them. Somehow, even armed with this knowledge, I was unable, or unwilling, to adjust.
But to this picture was added a more puzzling data point: a friend of a friend telling me about her friend who was in an abusive relationship with an alcoholic. The truly weird thing about it, to me at the time, was that her father was also an alcoholic. You would think that of all people, she would be most wary of getting into such a relationship, as they say: once bitten, twice shy.
In the years since then, I’ve come to understand the psychological mechanisms at work. I tried to describe it allegorically a while back. Put more bluntly: we try to recreate with our spouse the relationship that we had with our parents, in order to relive it, and hopefully fix it. By fixing our relationship with our spouse, we fix our relationship with our parents, and thus our whole life. Clearly, however, this is problematic when the child/parent relationship is dysfunctional to an extreme.
That is the psychological explanation, and it works. But what is the evolutionary explanation? For a characteristic to persist, it must contribute, somehow, to fitness. Razib, at Gene Expression implicitly asks this question. After thinking about it a little, I came up with the following: It helps to preserve culture. It drives human beings to marry people like their parents.
Posted by David Boxenhorn at October 25, 2004 12:08 AMEvolutionary explanations are fine for helping answer questions like "why does my appendix hurt?" or "howcome I can't see red berries on this bush?"
>For a characteristic to persist, it must contribute to fitness.
No way! This may be true of animals, but not us. Humans are knowledge-bearing machines. We may have some innate "theories" which govern our behaviour when very small, but these are quickly superseded as we learn new ideas.
An alternative explanation for why people marry people like their parents: they are attracted to people with similar values. Abusive parents (with some bad values) can pass on misery to their children through the operation of powerful *memes*.
>The question of why people are attracted to spouses who are bad for them is one that I’ve wondered about for a long time.
Evolutionary explanation? How about "strong men propagate." Bad people usually think only of themselves and as such, strive more than others for self-preservation. This may sound offensive to many (it even does to me!) but if you look to the purpose of life as the preservation of oneself vis-a-vis offspring, morals and ethics that get in the way should be tossed aside. The same can be said about culture.
Social Darwinism also explains (justifies?) why the vast majority of American Indians are all dead and why the Western Hemisphere is thoroughly Europeanized. Nobody wants to admit it, but nobody can deny it either.
But hey--I don't even beleive in Evolution.
Posted by: Ingemar at October 25, 2004 08:53 AM PermalinkTom: I don't see any difference between your "alternative explanation" and mine. Preserving culture and passing on memes are the same thing.
Ingemar: You are right that this could explain some things, I see it as a conflict between the fitness of the individual and the fitness of the tribe. But it doesn't explain the woman who marries an alcoholic: there's nothing fit about that!
Posted by: David Boxenhorn at October 25, 2004 09:03 AM PermalinkDavid, I think a lot of it is about competition-- the cad is percieved as having so many opportunties that he afford to throw them away.
Umm, and think about how harems probably preserved cad values from the EEA. :)
jinnderella: I think that your idea does have some explanatory value, similar to what I was thinking here, but I don't think it's enough. I've seen too many variations of the alcoholic story: some other factor must be at work.
Posted by: David Boxenhorn at October 25, 2004 01:40 PM PermalinkDavid, yes, preserving culture and passing on memes are the same thing.
However, this doesn't have to contribute to biological fitness.