How do we choose partners for casual sex? One night stands, hookups. And how do we choose partners? For dyads in a couple? For long-term arrangements such as cohabitation or establishing a family or procreation.
Are these two processes of mate selection identical? Are they motivated the same way? Is the psychological background of choosing someone to spend a single night with the same as the psychological background for choosing someone to spend a lifetime with?
Evidently not.
But it seems that there is an inexorable and fascinating transition taking place.
Whereas in the past, mate selection was largely socially determined, today it has become an individual activity.
And we are reverting to the animal kingdom. We are choosing mates nowadays the way animals do.
Is that a good thing? Is that a bad thing? There's no value judgment here. It's just an observation.
And I will spend the rest of this video trying to convince you of the veracity of this pretty shocking statement. We are becoming animals.
And apropos animals.
My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, and Narcissism Revisited. I'm also a professor of clinical psychology. And my focus is on personality disorders, but of course, sexuality is a major part in mental health pathologies and disturbances. And so I ended up gravitating towards that field as well.
Mate selection is affected nowadays, contemporary mate selection is affected by the type of personality of both people involved and by the attachment style of the participants.
Mate selection criteria are not easy to change, but possible.
Until more or less a hundred years ago, or even 200 years ago, mate selection was a socially determined activity. Society interfered and intervened in mate selection.
There were specialized professionals known as matchmakers. They sought to reconcile compatibilities between two potential partners, to leverage and augment economic interests and benefits and to create a long-term stable arrangement within which children can be reared as heirs to the cumulative wealth of the couple.
In other words, mate selection via matchmaking was actually a transaction. It was a type of economic activity.
The considerations which went into mate selection had very little to do with the personality of the individuals, their autobiographies or personal histories, their emotions.
The background of the family mattered. And of course, as long as the two individuals were more or less normal and healthy, the overriding concern was if the two partners were to pull their resources, to put their heads and everything else they have together, would they be able to create a relatively functional family going forward, pass on their genes and their cumulative wealth, in a way that would be incontestable and socially acceptable?
This was the process of mate selection.
With the rise of romanticism in the 18th century and especially towards the middle and the end of the 19th century, love entered the equation. Love marriages gradually became the norm, especially after the 1950s, with the sexual revolution.
And today, the main concerns in mate selection are emotional compatibility, especially the triggering of infatuation and limerence in the initial phases of the interaction.
Number two, companionship. Can the two partners be friends in the long term?
Number three, economic, mutual economic support. Can the two partners by pulling their resources together enhance the standard of living and look forward to life of relative prosperity?
Down the list of considerations we find the question of children. Children are becoming less and less desirable in most couples and dyads. Childbirth is postponed to the mid 30s in the case of women and sometimes the early 40s in the case of men.
And so children are no longer a major consideration.
And the whole thing looks like a combination of emotional stability coupled with economic stability.
The emphasis is on safety. The emphasis is on companionship. The emphasis is on mutual entertainment. The emphasis is on gliding through life unscathed and untouched by the vicissitudes and exigencies of harsh reality.
In other words, what I'm trying to say verbosely is that modern dyads, modern couples and modern mate selection has a lot to do with fantasy, creating bubbles, creating virtual realities within which the couple can subsist.
And so, mate selection nowadays resembles a lot more processes that take place in the animal kingdom because it is denuded of its social veneer or social layer.
When two partners in a couple meet each other, when they detect compatibilities, when they fall in love, when they form a dyad or a couple, it usually has nothing to do with social expectations, social mores, social norms, or let alone social demands or social dictates.
Sexual scripts are obsolete. Every couple negotiate a completely new and unique idiosyncratic agreement.
There's no social contract. There are only billions of individual contracts.
This is very reminiscent of some arrangements among animals, which I will discuss a bit later.
But to do so, we need to go back a few million years to the inception of what became much later Homo sapiens.
We need to discuss Charles Darwin. Charles Darwin came up with the idea of sexual selection.
Sexual selection is a theory. It's a proposed mechanism for the evolution of anatomical and behavioral differences between males and females.
Pay attention. I'm not using the words men and women. Men and women are gender roles. Gender roles are performative. They are social constructs. They don't necessarily correlate one-on-one with biological realities.
But sex is a biological entity. So male and female are biologically determined. And they have many features and many behaviors.
According to Charles Darwin in 1871, he said that sexual selection, the emergence of these male-specific and female-specific features and behaviors, is determined 100% by mate selection.
And so he was the one to introduce the phrase and the concept of mate selection.
Mate selection in evolution theory is the choice of mate selection. Mate selection in evolution theory is the choice of an appropriate partner for reproduction.
Now immediately we see the limitations of this idea of mate selection.
Today we choose partners not in order to reproduce, but in order to have a good life together. Economically, emotionally, behaviorally, companionship is perhaps much more important than bringing children to the world together.
Indeed, many couples end up being childless and there are many divorces in childless couples which leads to other childless couples. So childlessness is fast becoming normative.
We therefore have to redefine the concept of mate selection. It doesn't necessarily have to do with reproduction. It has to do with the appropriateness of the partner based on highly individual, highly idiosyncratic expectations.
Everyone has a list. It's like a menu. Everyone has a list. They go around looking for someone to match the list. The emphasis is on compatibility, on the present, not on the future.
According to Darwin and later evolution experts and scholars, in species where female parental investment is high, females are more careful in their mate selection than males.
In other words, when it is the female who has to breastfeed and raise the child, nurture the child to adulthood, the female is much more careful and much more selective in her mate selection.
The question in the female's mind is, is this male a good partner, a reliable partner? Someone I can trust as a provider and someone I can relegate to and delegate to several functions of child rearing.
So according to classical evolutionary theory, women are much more choosy when it comes to mate selection.
Because they bear the brunt and the burden of raising children, whereas males are happy-go-lucky. They are carefree. They spread their seeds around nonchalantly because they don't pay the price of pregnancy, childbirth and child rearing the way a female does.
In species where parental contribution to the survival of the offspring is more equal, mate selection is more selective, more choosy. Both males and females kind of vet the possible partners much more cautiously, much more thoroughly, much more deliberately.
Mate selection is based on behavioral traits for example the ability to protect, to defend territory, to provide, to be dominant over others, exaggerated signals of quality.
So in animals we have a bright tail plumage or a warbling, a song or whatever.
In the human species we have a flashy car or a penthouse apartment or a lot of money in the bank or a good job.
These are all quality signals and they are known as exaggerated quality signals. They are kind of status symbols.
And most importantly, there is a period of mutual evaluation. This period is known as courtship. I will discuss courtship a bit later.
In species where the females are smaller than the males, females actually mate with several males and then selectively keep the sperm of only one or two of these lucky males.
They evaluate the dominance of the males and they keep the sperm of the lucky males. They evaluate the dominance of the males, and they keep the sperm of the dominant male. They mate with the dominant male closest to the time of possible conception.
I would discuss all this a bit later when I dwell on the issue of cryptic female choice and yes, cryptic it is.
Here is the point, here's the time to introduce a question.
Short-term mating.
Human females engage in one-night stands, they have casual sex.
The choice of a mate for a single sexual encounter is motivated very differently.
The emphasis is on the physique of the male in some cases, in the submissiveness of the male that is emerging as a new trend. Women prefer submissive males. Or on the male's ability to spend money on the female.
These are the considerations which are only tangentially related to the consideration of long-term mating.
Because here there are no issues of reproduction, of companionship, of sharing, of pooling of economic resources and so on so forth. This is especially true in the age of contraceptives where the risk of pregnancy is literally almost eliminated.
Back to the original conceptions of mating in early evolutionary theories.
There was the idea of a mating system, the organization of typical mating patterns within a species.
So we have, for example, monogamy, when two individuals mate exclusively with each other. We have polygyny, where a malemates with multiple females. We have polyandry in which a female mates with multiple males. We have polygyandry, where both sexes mate with multiple partners.
The kind of polyamorous relationship.
So there are numerous arrangements, numerous types of arrangements.
Among the monosphere, they keep using the word hypergamy, which is of course the wrong word. What they're trying to say is hypergene.
It's also a type of arrangement where women seek superior males, dominant males, to mate with.
It's not hypergamy. It's hypergony. You heard it here.
But within this baffling array of possible mating strategies and mating systems, there are two guiding principles, random mating and assortative mating.
Random mating is a mating behavior without mate selection.
In other words, first come, first serve.
The participants in random mating, mate, as the name implies, randomly.
Many of them have zero information about the partner.
This is very common in casual sex and in one night stands because in at least 20% of the cases, according to studies, the participants don't even know each other's names.
And the amount of information exchanged prior to the actual act, actual sexual act, copulation and so on, very minimal the average time between a first encounter first drink and the mating is about hour hour and a half
Many early behavioral ecology theories were based on the idea of random mating.
But today we recognize that most animals do not mate randomly at all. They choose highly specific mates. And so most animals engage in assortative mating.
However, casual sex does occur in nature, in numerous species. And some species, like Bonobo apes and others, are promiscuous to the point that there is no mate selection at all. Chimpanzees are equally promiscuous.
Assortative mating is a mating behavior in which the mates are chosen on the basis of a particular treat or group of traits. It could be attractiveness, could be similarity of body size, could be economic resources. This is known as assortive mating.
So majority of animals, including the human animals, use assortative mating for long-term relationships and what is unique to the human species is that casual sex is very very common while in the animal kingdom it's an aberration it's very rare human species, it's extremely common.
There's an initial stage, even in short-term mating. The initial stage is known as courtship.
Courtship is basically the gathering of information on the other, on the potential partner. A comparing of relative advantages and disadvantages. The triggering of basic primordial primitive emotions such as repulsion or attraction and exchange of chemicals, by the way, close to 100 chemicals.
So courtship is a crucial process of surveillance and the construction of a database regarding the partner. But it also involves attracting a partner as part of a type of sexual behavior.
It's a period that is critical to reproductive success because this information informs the parties whether they are likely to serve as good parents or even whether they are likely to reproduce at all.
Animal courtship involves such activities as identifying and evaluating a potential mate, locating and defending appropriate size for nests or for dens. It's a very territorial activity, synchronizing hormones involved in reproduction, engaging in other physiological preparations, forming or strengthening what later becomes known as a pair bond.
Bonding starts with courtship, even in a bar, even within the first few minutes. Hormones such as oxytocin are immediately released.
Human courtship enables the couples to develop mutual commitment. And ultimately, this is supposed to converge on some kind of long-term arrangement, marriage being one such arrangement.
And so there is a goal. Courtship is goal-oriented in the animal kingdom as well as among individuals.
Hitherto we see no difference between human beings and all other animals.
And this is precisely the issue.
Until very recently, until about 100 years ago, there was another layer superimposed on these animalistic instincts and behaviors. And there was a layer of society, the layer of history, the layer of the future and the past, so the temporal layer.
Civilization imposed on mate selection, on courtship, on sexual attraction, and on sexual activities, civilization imposed on all these as a rigid set of scripts, norms, rules, and laws.
People obeyed these edicts. So people were not acting naturally. They were acting socially.
People did not follow their own drives and urges, as Sigmund Freud had observed. And rather than act the way animals do, people obsequiously obeyed and observed the expectations and demands of society.
And so this led to highly unnatural behaviors such as celibacy and even monogamy.
What is happening nowadays in the past hundred years is that individuals are unshackling themselves. They overthrow social and civilizational expectations. The veneer is cracked.
And today people behave much more the way animals do. Their considerations, their thoughts, their preparations, their behaviors, their cognitions, their emotions are not influenced by society at all.
In other words, mate selection has been individualized and privatized exactly the way it is in nature.
Now, in nature we believe that mate selection is pre-programmed. That is a kind of coding in the machine of the animal. That the animal has no choice in the matter. That the animal follows rigid procedures and rules that are embedded in the biology of the animal, maybe not socially, but biologically.
This is completely wrong.
Animals have individual personalities. And advanced animals definitely have elaborate societies, social norms and mores that they follow and obey and observe. In this sense, animals are much closer to human beings than human beings care to admit.
So in the past, the norms of society, the mores, the narratives of society, what is known in clinical sexology as the scripts, dictated human behavior.
In some societies, bodily contact between courting couples was forbidden, for example, so courting couples never touched. In other societies, bodily contact is encouraged and accepted. Margaret Mead described it in her work.
So in these societies, pre-marital sex is very common and an integral part of evaluating the partner, how good the partner is in bed or on the leaves or on the ground, which is a lot more rational, by the way.
It makes a lot of sense to test the partner sexually before making any commitment.
But it all depended on society. It was not an individual choice. It didn't emanate from some kind of rational, utilitarian philosophy. It was the way society wanted it. Society told you what to do, how to behave and how to not behave.
And there were sanctions in place. If you misbehaved sexually, if you misbehaved emotionally, your reputation suffered. There was a reputational cost and the reputational cost disabled, inhibited you, did not allow you, for example, to find alternative mates having misbehaved in the past.
In certain societies, men were required to obtain the parents' permission before asking a woman to marry. In other societies, a man should pay all the expenses. In some societies, people go Dutch. Both parties split the expenses.
All these are not individually determined. All these are social practices.
What has happened in the last hundred years, society lost its control. Society is not in control of the mating process. Everything is negotiated between the partners, every single detail, sexual preferences, emotions, cognition, behaviors, the sharing of resources. Everything is negotiated, time and again, by the way.
These contracts are malleable and they are temporary. And so modern couples negotiate all the time. The main activity of modern couples is actually compromise, consensus building and negotiations.
Now in nature we have something known as the cryptic female choice. It's a practice in which females mate with several males, but then choose which one's sperm will fertilize their eggs. And the females conceal these decisions from the males. They lie to the males. They deceive them.
And this practice allows females more choice in mate selection.
In studies demonstrating cryptic female choice, it is the sperm that is genetically most compatible that fertilizes the female's eggs, rather than sperm from the most attractive male.
Now this is exactly what's happening in modern society.
This has not been the case at any time in human history. Never, especially not in Victorian society in the 19th century.
But ever since the sexual revolution in the 1960s, what is happening nowadays is that females, human females, mate with multiple males, and then select which of these males will afford them the sperm they would use to fertilize their eggs, which is exactly what happens in nature.
And this is known in nature as the cryptic female choice.
And anyone who has dealt with a human female will tell you how cryptic they are indeed.
All this mess leads to what is known as pair bond or pair bonding.
Now bonding is a word which we use a lot in a variety of contexts. There's for example trauma bonding and all kinds of other bonding.
But bonding is a highly biological process because it involves hormonal cascades and highly specific hormones and neurotransmitters and neuromodulators. There's no bonding without a biological background.
A pair bond is a relationship between two individuals characterized by close affiliative behavior, emotional reaction to separation or loss, and increase social responsiveness to a reunion.
There's a very famous experiment, first conducted and designed by Mary Ainsworth. Mary Ainsworth studied attachment styles and contributed heavily to modern attachment theory.
And this strange experiment, a child was separated from her, from his parents and then reunited with her. And children reacted differently to both experiences, the separation and the reunion.
And these combinations of reactions gave rise to what today we call attachment styles.
Bonding is exactly the same. Bonding implies a high strong, very strong emotional reaction to separation and loss and increased social responsiveness to a reunion.
These are major tests of bonding.
If you don't react emotionally when your partner is away or has dumped you, abandoned you, then you were never bonded to start with. If you don't react with euphoria, overriding joy when you are reunited with your loved one, then you were never bonded to start with.
Pair bonds are important in species with bi-parental care when both parents take care of the child.
And because pair bonding provides the female with increased likelihood of male presence, male provision, and male cooperation in the care of the young, and it provides the male with increased certainty of paternity.
And yet, pair bonding is failing in modern society, in modern civilization.
Whereas throughout the animal kingdom, pair bonding is the basic unit, basic organizational between individuals, in human society it's falling apart.
More than 50% of marriages end in divorce. A typical female in modern human society has had nine relationships by the age of 30.
And most relationships, starting with the most basic one, like cohabitation, and then transitioning to committed relationships and friendships and marriages, most relationships disintegrate within a brief period of time by the way.
And so it seems that pair bonding in human society is under a lot of pressure and a pressure that it cannot withstand, that it fails to withstand.
What is happening? Why is that?
The reason is very simple. Feminism.
As women become more financially independent, as women gain access to structures of power, as women emerge in certain professions as the dominant force, as women become way more educated than men, which is a situation today in industrialized, developed societies.
There's no need for men.
The reason for peer bonding in the animal kingdom is economic. It's not emotional. It's economic.
The members of the couple in the animal kingdom must pool their resources together. The male is there to build the nest and bring food. Mother is there to bring food.
They work together, they collaborate, they cooperate, because they can't manage on their own.
This is not the situation in human society.
The vast majority of humans in developed industrialized societies, in rich societies, the vast majority of humans in developed industrialized society, in rich societies, the vast majority of human beings are self-sufficient, self-contained. They don't need anyone.
So a female doesn't need a male. She doesn't need a male even to reproduce. She can reproduce via IVF. She can use sperm from a sperm bank. About 3 to 5% of females do that nowadays.
So with the economic foundation of pair bonding gone, so did pair bonding.
And now new organizational principles are emerging.
Whereas in the animal kingdom, pair bonding is the only organization on the individual level, among human beings there are other organizational options that have emerged and are emerging newly by the day and they are displacing and replacing pair bonding.
Yet, the disappearance of pair bonding leaves a few questions unsettled and unanswered.
Pair bonding was a great way to raise children, and pair bonding guarantees that the male is the real father. It provides a certainty of paternity, as we call it.
In the absence of pair bonding, both these are lacking. There's no certainty of paternity.
For example, certainty of paternity is a degree to which a putative parent, usually the male, can be certain that he is the parent of the offspring, because the internal fertilization and gestation are such that mammal females, including the human female, are certain of maternity the child grows inside them so they know they're the mother, the mothers.
But a male can't be a hundred percent certain of his paternity.
In certain species, like certain species of birds, there is brood parasitism, as it is known. And it tricks parents of both sexes into caring for chicks unrelated to either parent.
So parental investment is a crucial question here.
If your partner has had numerous sexual partners before you, and her promiscuity is a trait, is a quality, and a pattern of behavior that could reemerge at any minute.
If infidelity is very common, about 40% of men and at least 20% of women cheat every single year.
And if sexual scripts and sexual mores are absent because society has withdrawn from the mating game, then how can you be certain that you are the father?
And if you are not certain that you are the father, what about parental investment?
Parental investment is the amount of energy that a parent expends in parental care.
So female mammals, including the human female, go through gestation and then lactation. And it is assumed that they have greater parental investment than males.
Because they're the ones who carry the baby for nine months, and then they have to feed the baby, breastfeed the baby or whatever. So it's like females invest much more than males.
But that's a bit misleading. There is considerable male parental investment in what is known as cooperative breeding species.
So in these species, the male can lose up to 10% of body weight during the period when the offspring must be carried constantly. The male is in charge of provision.
That is still largely true in human societies, societies by the way, 60% of all families the male, the men is the provider. Male parental investment is also high in species where males defend the young from predators or attacks from other members of the same species or males protect territory and so on so forth.
So males are involved. There is parental investment.
And a male needs to know that this parent investment is not misplaced in the offspring of other males.
And so this is a major problem and could be one of the reasons that childlessness is metastasizing and spreading like wildfire.
Men simply don't trust women nowadays. They perceive women as promiscuous and they can't be sure about the paternity of their progeny.
So they withdraw parental investment.
One of the solutions that are emerging is what is known as alloparenting.
Alloparenting is the care of infants by individuals who are not the parents.
So we see grandmothers and grandfathers actually raising children.
And so in cooperative breeding species, for example, the human species, alloparents are becoming more and more common. They are known as helpers or helpers at the nest. And they provide essential services for offspring survival.
I think what is happening is childbearing is becoming more rare. When the few children are born, their raising of children is outsourced to institutions such as daycare or to allot parents such as grandmothers and grandfathers.
Parental investment is becoming minimal, partly because of growing promiscuity. And promiscuity is becoming a dominant mode of sexual interaction, casual sex, because society is no longer involved. There's no inhibition, there are no social scripts, there are no social norms, everything is individual, everything is negotiated on the spot, there are no expectations and demands.
So this disintegration of external control on behavior of inhibitions leads to promiscuity. Promiscuity leads to infidelity, lack of loyalty. Lack of loyalty leads to paranoid ideation, to suspicion. Is it really my child?
This leads to a diminishment in parental investment and also to the collapse of pair bonding in multiple settings and the outsourcing of any offspring, any possible reproductive outcomes, the outsourcing to society at large, or to other parents.
Where is all this going?
Well, it's going to a childless society, of course. A hundred years from now, no one will have children. I doubt if anyone will have sex the way we do it today.
Promiscuity will be normalized and become normative. Pair bonding would become obsolete. Coupling and couples and dyads and so and so forth will be antiquated notions, old-fashioned. Traditional values will be gone. Sexual scripts and social scripts and relationships, traits that governed our behavior for almost 10, 000 years have already gone the way of the dodo.
And we will all be atomized individuals floating in space, bumping into each other sexually overnight from time to time, preferring to travel, to entertain ourselves, and avoiding human contact to the best of our ability, a totally atomized society empowered and sustained by technologies that encourage individuals to avoid intimacy, to isolate themselves, and above all, to consume, to use attention, their eyeballs, their presence as a coin to monetize themselves one way or another.
I think the overarching conclusion is that we need each other less and less. We need each other less and less to the point that we no longer need each other at all.
At that point, the very concept of society, which is a relatively new concept, will evaporate. And human beings will no longer live in societies. They will live in agglomeration or conglomeration of residential units.
Cities will become merely administrative entities. Communities will be long forgotten memories.
And individuals will spend 99% of the time, if not 100% of the time, in the same residential unit, emerging only abashedly and rarely, perhaps, to travel abroad as tourists.
But life as such will be spent in solitary confinement, engaging in solitary activities, and solitude will be a new organizing principle, with sex perceived as yet another service.
And people will use each other, will consume each other, will convert each other into mere service providers.
And if this sounds familiar, it's because this is exactly what narcissists do.
And what I've just described is a society which has accepted narcissism as its new religion, new organizing principle, new hermeneutic principle, a way to make sense of life itself and to imbue it with meaning.
Narcissism is upon us.