Humans evolved to be serial monogamists.
It’s a bold claim and one that I’m personally quite skeptical of, but it was the conclusion reached by anthropologist Helen Fisher after teasing through divorce data from a whopping 58 different human societies across the globe.
Throughout the 1980s, the now-famous researcher was cutting her teeth in the field of anthropology and digging through robust data sets to come to her conclusion.
Whether she knew it or not, she was getting to the bottom of a question that’s plagued us for millennia: is there any truth to the so-called “seven-year itch.”
You may have heard of it. It’s an old urban legend that says that most couples split after seven years. Leading up to that point, all is well. Then, their eyes begin to wander, and they start looking for romance and excitement elsewhere.
Eventually, their primary relationship fizzles out.
The truth is, the seven-year itch is more like a four-year itch. Across cultures, most people get divorced around year four of their marriage. From this, Fisher extrapolated the fact that the four-year mark fits perfectly with the timeline of when most children are weaned off of breastfeeding and begin taking in solid food.
Most kids who survive to age four will likely survive well into adulthood, barring war, disaster, disease, or extreme famine. It’s possible that what we experience as deep, powerful, earth-shattering romantic love is nature’s way of bringing two people together just long enough for them to reproduce and ensure that any children born survive until the magical four-year mark, a time of fruition.
It’s not an insane hypothesis.
But I’m skeptical of the “serial monogamist” conclusion, as many societies have concurrent romantic relationships rather than purely successive ones.
The truth is probably an ambiguous mixture of polyamory and serial monogamy, depending on culture, custom, time, and resources. Life is rarely black and white.
Semantics and details aside, one thing that’s certainly true is that humans did not evolve to be a monogamous species. If we did, it would’ve spelled disaster in our early years as many people died from nature’s indifference.
In our ancestral history, our loved ones were far more likely to die than they are today. It makes sense, then, that we would evolve to fall in love with more than one person, even if not at the same exact time.
Like birds, we’re (mostly) socially monogamous but sexually polyamorous. When it comes to committed relationships, even in polyamorous societies, we tend to find most couples sticking to one primary partner with side excursions, just like birds.
But the idea that humans are designed to find one and only one romantic partner that they’re attracted to for life is something straight out of fiction. Relationships are hard. Long-term, even lifelong relationships are especially hard.
And by accepting monogamy as the de facto relationship type and enshrining severe social penalties for stepping outside of the bounds of socially-enforced monogamy, we’ve placed an incredible amount of unnecessary hardship on ourselves.
With all of this in mind, it’s not that crazy to wonder if rebound sex is good for you. Some research explicitly says it is, in fact, good for you.
But first, let’s talk about Brian.