Cheating Is Natural? Sure, So Is Marriage

Evolution has designed men and women to cheat — we all know this because every month one publication or another makes it their cover story. But it is more complicated than that. If we really were designed to be a species of philanderers, why has every culture in the world designed their societies around marriage?

Jesse Bering, a research psychologist who recently has his heart broken, explored the issue in his column. He says that along with cheating, jealousy and heart-break are also natural, and work to reign in our more promiscuous ways.

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…

And because we’re designed by nature to be not only moderately promiscuous but also to become selfish when that natural promiscuity rears its head—again, naturally—in our partners, “reasonable people” are far from immune to getting hurt by their partner’s open and agreed-upon sex with other parties. Monogamy may not be natural, but neither is indifference to our partners’ sex lives or tolerance for polyamory.

His reasoning, as befits an evolutionary psychologist, is that men don’t want to be cuckolded into raising another man’s child and women don’t want the fathers of their children to run off with another woman, leaving the family without resources/protection. Then he theorizes that it is this impulse which makes gay and lesbian couples jealous, it is just that their genes don’t understand that biological babies can’t be involved.

As a mere journalist I didn’t have the chops to say what he has said, which is why I was so happy to stumble across his article. Despite glaring biological clues, I just never bought the idea that people are primed to fuck whoever they can. The happiest people I have come across in my life are always in stable monogamous relationships. People who cheat are the unhappy saps — exuding pity instead of bravado.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not knocking the life of a bachelor. Bill Maher is famously a very happy one and Kylie Minogue has said that she will never marry (and not for lack of options).

But it is never a good idea to base important life decisions around recent scientific theories. Despite what evolution might prime us for, what they say is true — cheaters never prosper.