Evolutionary traps for limerents

From time to time, the topic of monogamy and human mating strategies comes up in discussions about limerence.

Obviously mating behaviour will have a big bearing on limerence, and I’ve argued before that limerence is a drive to form a powerful pair bond – a sort of all-in, exclusive commitment strategy that’s like a metaphorical peacock’s tail.

While this makes sense as a mechanism for securing fitness interdependence, the emotional storm limerence doesn’t usually last much longer than the time taken to, well, produce a little gene carrier.

That means that long-term pair bonding would not predicted by the course of a typical limerence episode. Once the initial fireworks have burned out, affectional bonding takes over. That leaves us vulnerable to new limerence arriving as a disruptive force.

In other words, serial monogamy would tend to be the pattern of mating behaviour predicted by the features of limerence.

From an evolutionary perspective this isn’t a problem for gene propagation, but it can obviously have emotional costs. This is the point where biology and ethics collide – how do we develop frameworks for behaviour to balance our instinctive drives with social stability? Strict marriage laws around monogamy is one solution, advocating for personal freedom and ethical non-monogamy is another.

Evolutionary psychology seeks to understand mating behaviour from the perspective of how strategies advance reproductive success – they are amoral. Rape and pillage “works”. Committed pair-bonding “works”. There isn’t a single optimal strategy, because there are always alternative strategies, always ways to subvert, always gaps to exploit.

Unfortunately, limerents can get caught in those gaps.

For individual people trying to navigate their way through life, there are a lot of difficulties presented by the strategies that other people are pursuing – consciously or unconsciously.

Let’s look at some of the pitfalls.

Wild oat sowing

For men, impregnating as many women as possible is their best strategy for reproductive success. To achieve this, they need to either be highly desirable as a mate, and/or able to stop other men out-competing them.

Traditionally, this could be called the Genghis Khan approach. Nowadays, it’s that small percentage of male Tinder super users who get a lot of matches.

For a limerent, these people are a risk, because trying to form a mutual bond with them will be confusing and uncertain. They will obviously show interest – sexually if nothing else – and that gives hope that they are romantically attracted to you. But, they will also be evasive and unlikely to commit, as they have access to a lot of alternative mates.

You get limerence-reinforcing intimacy – reward combined with bonding – but then get the run-around if you try to deepen the relationship beyond the physical.

Hope and uncertainty are the killer combo for driving you into limerence limbo.

The “back up” mate

When I was at university, I was limerent for one woman, but close friends with a another. My friend had a boyfriend at a different university, but I was single and pining for LO.

In those days, I was naive about relationships (see this post for evidence about how I tried to impress my LO at the time), but when I finally gave up on LO and started dating a third woman I was amazed by how upset my friend became.

She expressed this in terms of feeling betrayed that I had never shared my feelings about the woman I was dating, and because she had found out about it from a third party (rather than me) she felt foolish.

Even with my impoverished male faculties I could tell that her emotional response was way beyond that. She was properly upset.

I’m sure it wasn’t conscious, I’m sure she had no romantic designs on me, but looking back now I suspect I was a “back up” mate.

The idea here is that some women have men in their lives who are a friend that could maybe be more. A reserve. An insurance option.

To be clear: she was a good friend, and I didn’t feel at all manipulated. I was getting a lot out of the friendship, and remember it fondly.

The only reason I think there was more behind it was that I was genuinely surprised by the strength of her reaction, and I think she was too. I’m pretty sure she had no deliberate plan to string me along, but I do think she was gaining a sense of security in knowing I liked her and cared about her.

If I had been limerent for her, though, it would have been torture.

Trying to stay friends with an LO is like an alcoholic trying to drink socially. If your drinking buddy also has subconsciously slipped you into the “back up mate” category, limerence limbo is your fate.

You will sense that they like you a bit more than a strictly platonic friendship, but a bit less than their primary mate. You’re in a half-bonded state – neither authentic, unadulterated friendship, nor a romantic bond.

A quantum-entangled state of uncertainty.

The “mate switching” hypothesis

The idea of a back up mate is an aspect of a larger idea known as the “mate switching” hypothesis. It’s an attempt to explain the asymmetry in infidelity between men and women.

For men, opportunistic mating with someone outside a primary relationship is almost cost-free. Just sow your wild oats, and leave. A potential bonus child that adds to your genetic legacy without costing much in terms of investment.

For women, the costs are much higher. Opportunistic mating with other attractive men might result in a child to bear, and the additional risk that the primary mate might catch on about the paternity and withdraw support when it’s most needed. Surely, that seems a much riskier prospect? Why would women risk it, even for [insert male heartthrob of choice]?

Well, there is a theory called the dual-mating hypothesis – or the “cad and dad” hypothesis – that women bond with providers, but have opportunistic sex with highly attractive (highly masculine) men. This idea had some support around women’s sexual preferences changing during ovulation towards more masculine traits, but that has turned out to not be very reproducible in larger studies.

In it’s place, the “mate switching” hypothesis has emerged. This is based around the evidence that women typically report greater dissatisfaction with the primary relationship before an affair begins, and a greater propensity for falling in love with the affair partner. (See this paper for a full explanation).

Female affairs, according to this hypothesis, are an attempt to either directly transfer to a better mate, or to leave an unsatisfactory situation and re-enter the mating pool.

Of course, these arguments about mate value and “trading up” also apply to men; it’s just far more common for men to stick with an existing relationship and seek commitment-free extramarital sex.

The big risk for limerents in mate-switching is in mistaking a new limerent object for a better mate. Many limerents subconsciously believe that the strength of their limerence is a measure of the desirability of a mate. Or, the reproductive fitness of a mate.

Limerence is a factor in many affairs, but it doesn’t require the new mate to be “superior” in any meaningful sense. The fireworks of limerence might be spectacular, but they are just empty explosions at the end of the day.

Lots of limerents have wrecked good relationships, good families, by chasing a new limerent object.

And that’s before we even get to the impact on the people left behind.

Mate poaching

Another consequence of mate-switching as a reproductive strategy is that mate-poaching becomes a viable way of securing a new partner.

Some predatory people seek out sexual partners from among the already committed. This might be about ego – as a way of demonstrating superior attractiveness – or it might be taking the target’s coupled status as external validation of their value.

Elizabeth Gilbert provided one of the most compelling recent accounts on mate poaching in her personal essay Confessions of a Seduction Addict. For her, seduction was:

…like a heist, adrenalizing and urgent. I would plan the heist for months, scouting out the target, looking for unguarded entries. Then I would break into his deepest vault, steal all his emotional currency and spend it on myself.

If the man was already involved in a committed relationship, I knew that I didn’t need to be prettier or better than his existing girlfriend; I just needed to be different. (The novel doesn’t always win out over the familiar, mind you, but it often does.) The trick was to study the other woman and to become her opposite, thereby positioning myself to this man as a sparkling alternative to his regular life.

This is the worst case scenario for a limerent in an existing relationship – a predator who will adapt their strategy until they find your limerence triggers and then pull on them again and again, until you are captured. Their specific intent is to poach you from your existing relationship.

It goes without saying that the goal of such poachers is not to secure themselves a committed relationship. Once the heist is complete, the treasure loses it’s appeal.

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It’s a reality of evolution that many different strategies can work to find reproductive success. We are all of us buffeted by these forces – drives and impulses that we don’t really understand but have immense emotional weight, coming into conflict with principles and ideals about how a good life should be lived.

For limerents, there are many snags and pitfalls in the evolutionary undergrowth, that can easily trip us up.

Becoming aware of how evolved drives, personal experience, and ethical principles all interact is your best hope of avoiding them.