part of an interesting article i came accross today:
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Marriage is a divorce waiting to happen
Love is, literally, a drug, and a highly addictive one at that. And like all addictions there is a law of diminishing returns. The positive effects wear off after a certain period of time. After the initial intense period, your brain starts to pump out endorphins - brain opiates that are more like morphine than speed, serving to calm the mind, kill pain and reduce anxiety. Why do we appear to be preprogrammed eventually to lose interest in a sexual partner? The evolutionary psychologist Helen Fisher [Ref : Audio "Primitive Streaks" {Love}; H.Fisher Loving &Loathing.rtf] suggests that humans pursue a similar strategy to animals such as foxes. Foxes are serially monogamous: they pair up for just one breeding season and stay together long enough to help raise their young before splitting up. Fisher argues that humans, too, are designed to be monogamous only for the time it takes to raise a single child through infancy - about four years. In the UK, between 40 and 50 per cent of marriages end in divorce. After conducting research in nearly 60 countries, Fisher has backed up her claims by showing that divorce rates peak at around four years into marriage. According to this theory, every marriage is a divorce waiting to happen. Some understanding of the reasons for this may be found by studying the habits of contemporary hunter-gatherer societies - the closest modern-day comparisons to ancient human life on the savannah. In traditional societies such as the Australian Aborigines and the Nersilik Eskimos, there is a much longer period of
breast-feeding than in the West - until the child is around three or four years old. After this four year period the mother gives birth to another child. The whole point of monogamy is, to be harshly utilitarian, that a partnership provides protection and resources for is own biological children. There's one huge stumbling block for men, though. How do they ever know for certain that the children are their own? Homo sapiens is an unusual species in that the female's monthly period of fertility is hidden -unlike species such as baboons or bonobos, who are not shy about broadcasting their fertile condition to the entire troop: during their period of "oestrus", their entire genital area swells and turns a bright shade of pink. Human females do no such thing. They themselves often tend to be unaware when they are ovulating. Concealed ovulation is a clever ruse. It goes hand in hand with internal fertilisation. Just possibly, both concealed ovulation and internal fertilisation evolved as mechanisms to ensure that a woman's mate was attentive all month long. They reduce the risk of desertion by the male, which itself reduces the risk of the male forging relationships with other women. Were these, perhaps, the very beginnings of a trend towards monogamy in human culture? I once came across an extraordinary clinical situation at my infertility Clinic at Hammersmith Hospital, London. Margaret B came for investigation of her infertility in her early thirties. Exhaustive tests failed to find the slightest thing wrong. I could even find sperm in her uterus on examination many hours after intercourse. Her husband too,seemed in good health, with an apparently excellent sperm count. One day, some years after she had first come to me, I said that perhaps the problem could be with her husband. She looked at me for a long time started crying and said, "No, it must be me." Eventually, her story poured out. She had been sleeping regularly with her husband, but for the past six years she had been having regular intercourse, sometimes on the same day and even when she was being treated by me, with her long-standing lover. "And he has three children, so I know he's fertile," she told me. Three months later, Margaret came to my clinic to tell me that she and her lover had taken a momentous decision. She had just seen him off at London airport - he had decided to emigrate. Only five weeks after her final farewell at the airport, she phoned to say that she had just missed her period and the pregnancy test was positive. And this time there was only one possible father. At the University of Manchester, Robin Baker and Mark Bellis have argued that human spermatozoa come in different shapes and sizes precisely because they may face a baffle against a competing. male's. According to their studies, the most common sperm are the standard-issue "egg-getter", with conical heads and long tails, designed to swim for their lives. But a different type of sperm is also ejaculated: these have coiled tails, so swimming certainly isn't their forte; instead they act as kamikaze sperm, wrapping themselves around the foreign egg-getters and hampering their progress. These researchers are convinced that sperm competition has been the main force to shape the genetic programme that drives human sexuality. I believe their views are fanciful - most of the unusual-looking sperm in human ejaculates are simply abnormal. But whatever the truth of all this, it is possible that adultery is an evolutionary adaptation that has grown up alongside monogamy and long-term commitment. Some estimates suggest that around 50 per cent of British married men and women are having extra-marital affairs. We already know some of the genetic reasons why men want to have affairs. They're programmed to spread their genes. If a man has a chance of impregnating another female - especially one who is already married and would not have to be provided for -then he may well have stumbled across the ultimate evolutionary bargain: all the benefits of of continuing his genetic legacy with none of the work involved in bringing up a child. What for a woman is evolutionary advantage of taking on a lover? We now know that women in all societies regularly have affairs. Indeed, genetic studies in rural parts of the UK suggest that up to 15 per cent of children are not the offspring of their "official" father. One way of explaining female infidelity is that it's a woman's way of hedging her bets. The security of knowing there is more than one "provider" for you and your children cannot be taken lightly. In addition, a lover provides an extra insurance policy: if your husband dies or is killed, there is someone else to help you take care of the children. Adultery, for a woman, is also about dipping into the genetic pool. Your current husband may be infertile, or may simply carry poor genes. Taking a lover is one way of introducing different DNA into the litter without destroying the stability of the family structure. A man's libido has a darker side, too, especially when sex is accompanied by physical coercion. Sociologists have traditionally viewed r**** as a pathological form of behaviour, a crime committed by dysfunctional individuals. It is difficult to conceive of r**** being described as "useful" from the point of view of human evolution, yet that, controversially, is what some researchers have recently suggested. While making it very clear that their theory does not provide any moral justification for r****, they argue that, historically, it is possible that it could have been in a man's interest to force a woman to have sex. r****, a useful male strategy? No normal man wants to know he may instinctively harbour a desire to r**** women. But there are some studies which bizarrely indicate that, for some unknown reason, the chances of a woman conceiving from a single act of r**** are more than twice those of a woman who engages in a single act of consensual sex. Some scientists have suggested that r**** increases secretion of stress hormones in the body and that these may, if the r**** takes place somewhere near the middle of the menstrual cycle, trigger ovulation. Is this some throwback to the time of the caveman? Certainly, if true, this statistic provides a possible evolutionary reason for r**** - and suggests that certain feminists might not have been so wrong when they said every man is a (potential) rapist. My own research has come up with some very different results. I wondered whether sex that the female partner found pleasurable improved the chances of her having a successful conception We asked several hundred infertile women about their regular sexual experiences. Two hundred women with a known cause for infertility (about half of them had blocked Fallopian tubes) were compared with a group of 200 women who had no known cause for being infertile. In all cases their partners had sperm counts within the normal fertile range. We found that women who were infertile with no apparent cause reached orgasm less regularly or reported experiencing less pleasurable sex. The control group, with a clear cause for infertility, generally reported more sexual satisfaction. One possible explanation for this is that female orgasm assists the transport of sperm through the uterus and into the Fallopian tubes. More work needs to be done, but this study raises interesting questions. If sex that is pleasurable to the woman does improve the chances of conception, it must be in the man's interest to ensure that his partner reaches orgasm. This may explain why most men seem to enjoy sex more when their partners do too. Men of all cultures tend to find younger women more sexually attractive. A woman who is young and healthy has a better chance of bearing a number of children, who in turn will be successful and go on to reproduce. For some men the combination of the loss of sexual interest often found in a long-term monogamous relationship, combined with the ageing of their partner, prompts a so-called ''mid-life crisis". A small minority of men who are sufficiently attractive, or who have high-status jobs, end up marrying a younger woman; in some cases, a succession of younger women. Men who marry these women are catching them in their fertile prime; on an unconscious, biological level they may be striving to maximise their genetic legacy. In fact, they are practising a kind of polygamy: even though they don't keep more than one wife at a time, they're marrying women in their prime and then discarding them, so the principle holds. Polygamy, monogamy, marriage, children - all these relationships are inextricably, bound up in our genetic heritage. Shadows of the savannah will always be present, cast over modern mores and ways of life. Slowly, we are starting to grasp the very basic truths about human relationships, and not all of them are easy to accept."
according to this it's in our nature to cheat.
so if anybody here is still in a relationship for more than 4 years then good on ya
by SM on Sat Dec 15, 2007 9:33 pm 
sorry. x