The Evolution of Coupling

A “cult,” as the term is commonly used, denotes a set of unorthodox or spurious beliefs and the people who adhere to them. DePaulo and Morris (this issue) propose that the cult of the couple leads members of society in general and social scientists in particular to view the conjugal pair as the single most important social relationship, encompassing the roles of sexual partner, best friend, primary social partner, fundamental kin relation, and economic partner. One outcome of this cultish view is singlism: singles are cast a suspicious gaze and they experience discrimination ranging from social ostracism to economic taxation in a world of 2-for-1 specials and family-size portions. Why is being coupled so crucial, seeming to outweigh other markers of social value? DePaulo and Morris (this issue) place some of the blame on scientific theories, stating, “The evolutionary perspective, attachment theory, and the cult of the couple all seem to share the assumption that the best outcomes occur when the most important roles or functions are all invested in just one person.” We were puzzled by this claim about evolutionary psychology. As we explain later, it is certainly true that sex and mating are central in the evolution of species like humans, but we see nothing in evolutionary theory leading to the prediction that the reproductive pairbond is the only relationship of importance, or even the primary one. In this article, we review the evolutionary psychology of coupling and discuss why we should expect mateship status to be important to the self and why people seem to have an obsessive interest in the mateship status of others. Our perspective suggests that these social foci spring from universal human motivations with a deep evolutionary history, and therefore it is misleading to think of them as elements of a modern ideology as the cult view suggests.