Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - History of Monogamy

Episode Date: May 21, 2024

From the earliest iterations on the plains of Africa, to 21st century reconsiderations of it: are humans meant to be monogamous?Joining Kate today is Helen Fisher, author of ANATOMY OF LOVE: A Natural History Of Mating, Marriage, And Why We Stray, to shed a light on our own relationship with this ancient social status.How successful is it really? And will it survive well into the future?This episode was edited by Tom Delargy. The producer was Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code BETWIXT sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscription/You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely Ben Twigsders, how are you doing? I am doing fine, thank you for asking, but I think you know what has to come your way. That's right, it's the fair do's warning. This is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way, covering a range of adult subjects,

and you should be an adult too. Do you feel safer? Do you feel precious and looked after? I hope that you do, because that's always my intent. Let's get on with the show. Picture the scene betwixt us. It is approximately four million years ago, and we are on the plains of Africa. With an increasing scarcity of trees to forage amongst,

our ancestors are taking their first bold steps on two legs to explore the world around them. For mothers with young babies in their arms, though, this presents a problem. Yes, of course they can multitask, but it is difficult to forage for food with a baby hanging off you and defend against any potential threats. With the innate desire to further the species, men begin sticking to their side to do the very basic thing of helping out, and before you know it, the monogamous relationship was born.

Or at least, this is how the theory goes. But how successful has this relationship model been throughout history? And will society always favour monogamy? Wedding rings at the ready, betwixters. Let's do this. What do you look for a man? money of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning it up and pushing the funny.

Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, I'm beautiful done. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Dary. Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society. With me, Kate Lister. Monogamy might have its origins in necessity, but does it really come naturally towards humans? When divorce rates seem to be rising and traditional relationship models are being increasingly challenged by non-monogamy, polyamory and the like,

will monogamy survive into the future? Joining me today is biological anthropologist Dr. Helen Fisher, author of Anatomy of Love, A Natural History of Monogamy, Adultery and Divorce to help me find out. I am ready to get into it if you are. Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Helen Fisher. How are you doing?

I'm just fine. How about you? Thrilled to be talking to you as the author of Anatomy of Love, Natural History of Monogamy, Adultery, and Divorce. Wow. What made you want to write that history? Because that's huge. It is huge. It took me 10 years to do. But it's apparently an international classic. And it's one of six books that I've written on Romantic Love and Attachment and Adultery and Divorce and Evolution

of everything and the future of everything too. So it's been a life project. And what it really only started in graduate school, I'm an identical twin. And by the time I was six years old, everybody asked an identical twin, whether they like the same food, whether they have the same friends, whether they have the same cavities in their teeth, et cetera, et cetera. So long before I knew there was a nature, nurture controversy, you know, how much of our behaviors learned and how much is biological.

I already knew there was biology. behavior, at least some of it. And when I got into graduate school, everybody was saying, everything is learned, the brain is an empty slate, your culture tells you who you are. And I said, I know this isn't true. And so I thought to myself at the time, if there's anything at all in human behavior that could have a biological origin, it would be love. Because as Darwin would have said, if you have four children and I have no children, you live on and I die out. So there would have and selection over millions of years for brain circuits to fall in love, to feel attached, and to remain together to raise a child at least through infancy.

So that's what started it. Everybody assumes that somebody like me had a terrible relationship in teenage and had to know. I didn't. I mean, nobody gets out of love alive. We always have our troubles. But the bottom line is that wasn't it for me. It was an intellectual thing. And I'm still doing it.

Actually, book number seven is due this month. So do you find that, your professional work bleeds into your personal work with people's perception of you. Like if you're at a party and someone says, what do you do? Do you ever feel the urge to sort of make it up and say, oh, I'm an accountant because you don't want them to suddenly start talking to you. I researched the history of sex. And as soon as you say that, people have got things that they want to tell you about it.

But you're talking about relationships. Nobody's ever asked me that before. And I never did want to make anything up. I've got a short answer and something. But, I mean, I've had conductors on the train sit down next to me. They want to. I mean, people pine for love. They live for love.

They kill for love and they die for love. It's one of the most profoundly basic human experiences everywhere in the world. I mean, you don't kill yourself when you lose your job or when your sister has a car accident. But love. Because, you know, this is our ticket to tomorrow. This is the way we send our DNA into tomorrow. And so the suffering, I mean, I've put a lot of people into a brain scanner. I'm the first in the world to do that and to find the brain circuitry of romantic love

and the brain circuitry of rejection in love and being in love long term. You can remain in love, not just loving, but in love long term. But you've got to pick the right person. So, boy, you step into this pond and I'm sure it's the same with you, Kate. The more you don't know, the more you've got to look up what you need to do next. But has it done it in my own personal life? Well, first of all, I always do talk to people when they ask. I know they're desperate or they're terribly curious, and I have worked on it forever.

And if they keep on asking, I'll spend the weekend at it. After a while, I say, what do you do? And I try to move the conversation into something else. And I try to be helpful and informative. But in my own personal life, after I finish this next book, I'll do an autobiography because I'm well known around the world for love. There's three basic brain systems associated with reproduction. Sex drive being one, that's your world.

Romantic love being the second and feelings of deep attachment being the third. Sex drive gets you out there looking for a whole range of partners. You can have sex with somebody you're not in love with. Romantic love is a very specific brain system and you focus on just one person at a time. And then that third brain system of attachment, this cosmic sense of union with somebody. And so all my life is one of the. the main things I'll say in the autobiography. All my life, I've understood the sex drive. I mean, it's not hard to figure that one out, and I've always enjoyed sex, et cetera. And romantic love,

I've fallen in love many times, et cetera. But you know, I never really figured out attachment. Now, I've written six books on it. I know the biology of it. I know the evolution of it. I know where we're going in the future. But personally, I was never driven to marry. I mean, I've had a lot of opportunities until I was 75. And at 75, I got married. to the finest man in the world, and I finally understand what teenage girls already know. I love that. You just, you took your damn time with that one. You're going to make sure that you got that one, spot on, got it right.

So we're talking about the history of monogamy today, and that is, well, that's right up your alley, but that is such a fascinating topic because there's nothing more than people love to say things like, yeah, but we're not supposed to be monogamous. Humans aren't naturally monogamous. Back in the day when we were cavemen, blah, blah, blah, blah. So what is the natural state of monogamy in the animal world? Are animals monogamous? 97% of the mammals do not form a pair bond to rear their young.

They don't have to. A mouse has very rich milk. She can feed her babies and go out and feed herself and protect herself. She doesn't need a partner. 90% of birds. That's about 8,000. species of birds on the planet, 90% of them do form a pair bond. This is birds, not mammals. And the reason they do it is because somebody's got to sit on those eggs. And that individual

was starved death unless she has a mate to feed her an exchange just sitting on the egg. So pair bonding or monogamy, monogamy means one and gammy means spouse. It does not mean adultery, not in the scientific community. Monogamy has evolved in only those species. where a female could not raise her babies by herself. And human beings are among now. Our closest relatives chimpanzees do not form parabonds. Female comes into estrus every month like we do. She copulates with a whole pile of males.

She may go off on what they call safari and be with a male for a period of time, but she doesn't form a parabon to raise her babies. She doesn't have to. The baby relies on her back. She can walk the way she can regularly. She can climb trees. She can protect herself, et cetera. The trees were disappearing in Africa.

Somebody had to get out. Our ancestors were forced out. Anthropologists think we were already on the ground, walking on two feet instead of four by 4.4 million years ago. And with that, females had to carry their babies in their arms instead of on their back. So if I gave every woman in England or anywhere else in the world, the equivalent of a 20-pound bowling ball. They had to carry with them for the next four years,

they too would begin to look around for somebody to help them out. So bottom line is we went over probably 4.4 million years ago or close to that, what I call the monogamy threshold, where a female began to need a partner to help protect and provide them. Males could not on this very open plains protect a harem of females. So we evolved this brain circuitry for, extended feelings of attraction or romantic love and extended feelings of attachment in the brain. So pair bonding or monogamy is 4 million years old, only 3% of the mammals do it, all the

wild dogs do, some little African antelopes do, beavers do, et cetera, et cetera. But, and here's to the nub of your question, we not only evolved the drive to pair up, but we also retained the drive to philander. I call it a dual human reproductive strategy. Tremendous drive to form a partnership and raise their children as a team. And also the tendency, no, not everybody does it, but it seems to be very prevalent. I've looked at adultery in 42 cultures and you find it everywhere. This is for a Darwinian reason.

If a million years ago, a male and a female fell in love, it's a very old brain system, and formed a partnership and had two babies together, fine. But if occasionally the male slept around and had one female and had two extra children with this extra female, he would have doubled the amount of DNA he set into tomorrow. So now, why would a female a million years ago or today have an extra liaison? Well, today they're not going to think of why, nor did they, but the bottom line is they were payoffs for females also. If their main partner was eaten by a lion or left you today, they would have an alternate person

to step in and help you raise your babies or give you extra support for those babies that you've had. So for millions of years, these dual drives to form a partnership, raise your babies as a team, and also occasionally, or often, a sleep around evolved. And it's left us today with, we've got a big cerebral cortex. You can think about whether you're going to sleep with your colleague on a trip overseas or whether you're going to not do that. I mean, we have some choices, some agency in our lives.

But it's amazing how many people do sleep around, even when they're happily married. It's amazing there was an article. It was years ago, but it's fascinated me. with an article in which they were studying adultery, and they asked, you know, why you're adulterous and this and that, and there's a whole lot of reasons. But 54% of men and 48% of women, or something like that, said that they were also in a very happy marriage. So they were sleeping around when they were in a happy marriage.

So that really sort of confirms from me, okay, an ancient reproductive strategy, sort of to do both. Some people are going to never be adulterous, and others will sleep around until they find the right person, and some people will do it all the time. But basically what I study is romantic love and feelings of attachment. And I'm actually quite optimistic about the future. I'm a chief science advisor to the dating site Match.com. And so I do an annual study for them called Singles in America. And we use a national representative sample of singles based on the U.S. census. We do not poll the match members. We do poll Americans. We've got data now on 75,000 Americans, age 18 to 71, black, white, or Asian, Latino, gay, straight, everything in the middle,

et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And we're married much later now. I call it slow love. In my day, in the 60s, women generally married around age 21, men around age 22 or 23. These days, women marry around age 29, men around 30, 31. So this long period of pre-commitment before you actually marry. And all of my data, I've looked in the demographic yearbooks of the United Nations in 80 cultures from 1947 to 2011. And as it turns out, the longer you court and the later you marry, the more likely you are to remain together. And that's exactly what's happening around the world today. And I think there's a couple other things, too.

I mean, I think we're going to have much more interesting marriages because women are now in the job market. We're moving forward to having double-income families, just the way we did on the grasslands a million years ago. You know, women commuted to work together. Fruits and vegetables, they came home with over 50% of the evening meal, et cetera. So the bottom line is current trends. Now, when we ask, do you want to get married?

far fewer people in America today actually do want to marry. But they do want to have a real partner. They do want to settle down. They're practicing polyamory and sleeping around sexually. I did a study recently of polyamory, and I asked, you know, have you ever had sort of an open relationship? 31% of the 5,000 people for that year said yes. 31% said they had had some sort of polyamory or open sexual relationship.

But 76% said they learned a lot from it, and now they want to have a more traditional relationship. So we're marrying much later. We're getting a lot of our experience before we marry. And I think that by the time people walk down the aisle, they know who they got, they know they want who they got, they think they can keep who they've got. And my guess is that we may be moving towards relative family stability. That's optimistic. I like that. Because it's easy to make the case that, oh, humans aren't monogamous, blah, blah, blah.

But it sounds like we are. We're just monogamous one at a time as opposed to, like, the first person you meet, you fall in love with and stay faithful to them forever and ever and ever. Well, I never thought that mankind was faithful forever and ever and ever. When you look in hunting and gathering societies around the world, they tend to have two or three long-term partnerships in which they are faithful or not during the course of the partnership, but they had two or three long-term partnerships. So I began to look into the divorce.

And of course, this book that you mentioned, Anatomy of Love, says a huge amount about all this. Bottom line is divorce is very natural around the world. It's summed up best by the Mongols of Siberia who actually say, if two people cannot live harmoniously together, they better live apart. That is the world believes about it. But the bottom line is, I wondered, why do we do we do? divorce. A lot of hunter-gatherers do. It's very common around the world where it's allowed. Why do we

divorce? I mean, we've found the right person. We've got a nice house. We've got healthy children, got good jobs. Why do we do this? And there's all sorts of psychological reasons. But from a Darwinian perspective, what would have been adaptive to have this so often? So anyway, I did a whole study of divorce in anti-cultures. And as it turns out, if you're going to divorce around the world, You divorce during reproductive years, that's pretty strange, often with only just one child, and between this third and fourth year of marriage. And I thought, wow, that's the period of time. It would take one man and one woman to raise one child through infancy.

And in hunting and gathering societies, once children are out of infancy, they're really raised in the whole multi-age play group, a lot of people can help them out. So it began to occur to me, wow, maybe it is that. multiple long-term partnerships evolved so that one could have children by more than one partner, creating more genetic variety in their DNA. So I'll make a speech and somebody, a woman, will come up and he said, oh, I was such a failure at love. I said, oh, how come? I said, well, I had three marriages. And I said, well, did you have any children? Yeah, I had two children by the first husband and one by the second. And I said, from a daughter.

Serbian perspective, alas, that's probably adaptive. But the issue is during our long, long evolutionary past, nobody had all this property. Divorce for them was probably equally full of anxiety and fear and anger, et cetera, but they didn't have to fight over the child. The child was part of a certain clan, and I was going to always be part of that clan. He's not going to fight over her digging sticks. She's not going to fight over his bow and arrow. And you can make a new house in a couple hours. So we still have this ancient restlessness in long marriages, but we also have enormous amounts of property and affiliations and things that make it very difficult. If you look at monogamy from a purely evolutionary biologist point of view, there's an argument

to be made that it doesn't make much sense. If you're talking only about spreading your genes far and wide, because you stand a far better job at getting pregnant if you're having sex with multiple partners and you can get more diversity. Yeah, but will they stay with you to help raise your child? That's the thing. For you, that's the key. Does that ever sound bleak to you that what we call love and monogamy is actually about wanting to keep the babies safe?

They don't put that on a Valentine's Day car. People don't think that way. People like me who study love are thinking of the Darwinian payoffs, but no, you can know every ingredient in a piece of chocolate cake and still eat that cake and feel the joy. Or, you know, you can know every single part of an engine in a beautiful car and still get into that car and drive around and feel the joy. So there are different brain systems and I know the evolution of this. I have quite good explanations for it, et cetera, but no, when you fall in love with somebody, it's all about the joy, the sadness, the fear,

whatever it is. You know, there's a whole lot of traits associated with. romantic love. And, you know, when you read poetry around the world and novels around the world and songs around the world and myths and legends around the world, they're all saying the same thing about love. They're not telling you this evolved for adaptive reasons. It's, I just love Jerome, or I love John, or whomever it is. It's called the proximate and the ultimate. The proximate is what you're regularly thinking and your daily thing. The ultimate is the Darwinian payoff. So I'm in the world of trying to figure out, well, I don't know, I'd call it richer level, deeper level, but the joy is same for me. I mean, I'm crazy about my husband, crazy about him.

Nuts. I check my email during the day to see if he's written. Phone rings. I said, I hope he calls because if you find the right person, you can sustain this brain system. My colleagues and I have proven it. We've put people into the brain scanner, fMRI, who were madly in love an average of 21 years. all in their 50s and 60s. They kept coming into the lab and telling me and others that they were still in love with their husband or wife, not just loving, but in love. And we put them in the

brain scanner. We found the basic brain pathways for romantic love remained active in these people who were in love long term. But as I say, got to pick the right person, got to do a few simple things like compromise in a relationship. I'll be back with Helen after this short break. the difference between those people, because as your research and your work has so eloquently shown, is that initial hot and heavy and exciting limerence bits, when you can't get enough of each other, it's not sustainable. It has to give ways to something. And then what so many people experience is, I want to have someone describe it as you kind of friend zone your partner, is you kind of become like the sex and the desire just sort of goes. You become life partners. But what's

the difference between the people in your MRI scanners that are in love and the people that are kind of, they're living together and they love each other, but they don't still have that desire? First of all, I knew Dorothy Tenoff, who created the concept of limerence, and I chose not to use it because basically the traits of limerons are the traits of romantic love. Okay. And the way she treated it was that it was going to disappear, you're going to move into sort of an attachment stage and that it was basically a state of intense anxiety and sorrow, et cetera. I don't believe that. Oh, that's such a relief. Yeah. Thank you. And so I chose not to use that word limerance because I think that it had a short-term feel. As she said, I knew her quite well. I

didn't know her quite well, but I certainly knew her. But everywhere in the world, people seem to believe that romantic love will always die. And we have proven that it does not. If you pick the right person, so we put, I don't know how many 15 or 17 people into the brain scanner who came into the lab and said, I'm still in love with him. I'm still in love with her. So we put them in the machine, and we found not only the same activity for brain circuitry for romantic love, but we also gave them a happiness test.

And we looked at only those in this particular part of the experiment, not only in love with their partner, but wildly happy with them. And we found activity in three brain regions among those people who are very happily in love long term. Now, there's all kinds of psychological reasons that are happier said, whatever, and we could go into all of them, but it's fine. This is what the brain says about happiness long term. And basically, we found activity in these three brain regions, as I said, a brain region is linked with empathy, a brain region link with controlling your own stress and your own drama, emotions. and a third brain regions linked with what is called positive illusions, the ability to overlook what you don't like about somebody

and focus on what you do. Now, my husband cannot turn out a light. He can't do it. I have begged, I've bargained, I'll do this if you do that, I've instructed, I've explained why I want the lights out, etc. not happening. Now, there's something I don't do that he wants me to do. Why do I do it? Lazyness is not about him. It's just it's not practical for me. He wants me to put all of our engagements and everything into an internet system. I am so non-techie. I still have my regular

appointment book. It's so much easier for me to just write something down then to click the thing on figure it up, blah, blah, blah. So the bottom line is he seems to overlook it, although he jests about it all the time. And I don't jest about it, but I don't say anything at all. I've given up. And then I go immediately into, okay, he's so kind. He's so hilariously funny. He's so smart, et cetera, et cetera. So you have to overlook the negative, accentuate the positive, hold out of your own drama, don't let everybody go through all your problems, and be empathetic. And there's other things, too. I mean, the main psychological theories is don't show contempt, don't criticize, don't be defensive, and don't stonewall and just avoid the problems

at all. So we're getting to know more about the brain. And if I were to say what to do to make a long-term, happy, faithful marriage, A, pick the right person. That's what my next book is about. I wrote a book on this called Why Him, Why Her. It was in 2009, so it's over 14 years ago, and I'm writing something that's much more detailed and I think complicated, interesting. But anyway, if you really want to keep a long-term marriage, and I'm not a psychologist, I'm an anthropologist, I study the brain, I would sustain all three of these basic brain systems, the one you know most about sex drive, have sex. It drives up the testosterone system, makes you want more sex, gives you intimacy. Any stimulation of the genitals drives up the dopamine system can trigger and start.

sustained feelings of romantic love. With orgasm, there's a real flood of oxytocin linked with attachment. Sex with the right person is good for you. So I'd say at least three times a week. And to sustain romantic love, do novel things together. Novelty, novelty, you don't have to swing from chandeliers. Just go to a different restaurant. Take a walk in the park instead of riding your bikes or the worst.

Go to a different place in the summer for a vacation. Novelty can sustain romantic love. And in terms of attachment, stay in touch. of the two armchairs when you watch TV and sit on a couch together, hold hands, walk arm and arm, kissing. Kissing drives up the oxytocin system. So I'd sustain all three of those brain systems, sex drive, romantic love, feelings of attachment. I'd say nice things to my partner, apparently saying nice things, not only drives up their immune system and the other things. And last but not least, I would show the empathy, control my drama, and overlook

the negative. I think we now can sustain good relationships, but you do have to pick the right person. If you go out with a court a person one to two years before you marry, you're 20 percent less likely to divorce. And if you go out and court that person,

three or more years before you marry, you're 39% less likely to divorce. So you've got to get to know who this person is. And we're seeing that with this slow love, marrying much later. So it's not magic. You know, when I wrote my first academic article on this about these basically three brain systems

and one of the four peer reviewers wrote back and she said, you can't study love. It's part of the supernatural. And I said, hang on here. I mean, anger's not part of the supernatural. Sex is not part of the supernatural. Fear is not part of the supernatural. Depression is not part of the supernatural. Why would this basic drive?

And it is a drive, by the way. It comes from the lowest parts of the brain associated with drive. why wouldn't this be a basic brain system that evolved millions of years ago to propagate oneself? When we talk about the history of monogamy and when we're looking, I mean, it makes perfect sense to me what you're saying is it's about sharing resources and about child rearing and safety ultimately. But when we're looking for like evidence, archaeological evidence for people being monogamous, is there evidence for that? You're a smart kid. Nobody's ever asked me. I had to spend a lot of time on that myself.

And the data comes back, some data about 4.4 million and other data about 3.5 million. And it's really based on sexual dimorphism, dimening two, morphine two forms. And in other species, when you see a tremendous difference between the male and the female, they tend to be polygynous. Now, for example, gorillas. Gorillas live in harems. One male will have about five females, and males are much bigger than females. They may even be as much as twice as large, but I can't remember that, but they're much bigger than females. So when you look at a lot of species that are harem builders, the male is much bigger than the female.

The reason being that they have to fight other males to get their harem, and so they are very sexually demorphic. and you see less and less sexual dimorphism among our earliest ancestors. But anyway, maybe 3.5 million years ago, we've dug up all bones, not me, but others, and found that there seems to be, and you can find, you've got to have enough pelvices, you can't know whether the bones are male or female. And then you see the limb bones and this and that, and the skull and et cetera, and you can begin to establish that they are beginning to be more monomorphic. Now, there's contention over that.

I remember one time I was at an academic conference with a, I was sitting next to a really big deal at the time. And I said, well, you know, I don't really know when pair bonding could have begun. I'll never forget, you turned around me and said, he said, nobody knows, Helen, make it up. But anyway, I mean, I base it on dimorphic species as species that are more similar. Now, around the world today, men are somewhat larger than women.

but they may be somewhat larger only because we are not only pair-bodied monogamous, but we are also adulterous. And so maybe men did have a group of females that he was sleeping around with on the side. So that could explain the fact that we aren't exactly the same. But basically, my hypothesis is based on this ancient history, prehistory of sexual dimorphism. And certainly by 300,000 years ago, we were almost exactly the way we are now. by a million years ago, homorectus on that,

we have pretty much the same degree of sexual dimorphism that we have today. And when you take a look around the world today, there's not a society on earth where people don't form some kind of pair bonds. Now, 84% of world cultures permit a man to have several wives. Now, anthropologists won't tell you this,

generally, only about 5% to 10% of men actually succeed in having a harem. You've got to have a lot of goals. a lot of sheep, a lot of pear trees or whatever it is, in order to get a group of women to share your bed. We don't do it naturally. In fact, women will try to kill each other's children because built to share. Along with the evolution of pair bonding came the evolution of a lot of emotions among them

jealousy. And we are a jealous animal. Bottom line is in our modern times when people are polyamorous, so they'll have one partnership and then agree to sleep around or agree to have other romances. They spend an inordinate amount of time every week discussing their feelings. Because it's basically not, I admire them. I could not do it. I just could not do it. It's not who I am. I would be offended and hurt and untrusting and all the things that we evolved to be. So, I mean, generally, people who are polyamorous, all it is is transparent adultery.

That's all it is. They're sleeping around with other people, and they're being transparent about it. I admire them. I admire that they can do that, but I can't do it. And most of us can't do it long term because we evolved to be pair-bodied creatures. Have there been studies that show, I mean, apart from the fact that, you know, it's sharing resources and raising children, that there are health benefits to monogamy? Yes, absolutely.

Agreed many of them. People in long-term happy partnerships apparently live five to ten years longer. Wow. Okay. You know, it's a question of, well, why didn't romantic love just die out in the brain once reproductive years are over? Well, first of all, you can fall in love at age 70. It's a brain system that remains. Sex drives begins to go slow down. It doesn't entirely stop. But romantic love remains even in your 70s or 80s even. Why would that be? And I think the reason is that forming a partnership is so healthy for you. I mean, it keeps you optimistic. It keeps you laughing. It keeps you getting out of bed and going doing things together. It's somebody you can feel protected and you can protect or something. So there's incredible payoffs to having a long-term happy partnership. And this is why over and over, you know, people love children with one person.

Go on to have children with another. And I know a man in his 70s right now who's madly in love with a woman. And I was sitting next to a guy a couple nights ago at this thing. And his wife died 10 years ago, and he has just remarried. And I said, well, how old are you? And he said, 83. I suppose for there to be health benefits, it has to be a happy relationship, doesn't it? If it's not happy, then the results are probably not as successful.

Absolutely. I mean, if you are constantly living on cortisol, the stress hormone, and he or she is coming home drunk every day, and, you know, you're running out of money, your children are scared. you know, stress is not good for the body. No. I mean, living long term on the stress hormones and perhaps even worrying about physical danger and isolation also.

I mean, people who are very isolated are likely to die sooner. I mean, people who don't have friends who don't go out who are isolated, die sooner. Apparently, isolation is just as bad as drinking too much, smoking too much, or being way overweight. We evolve to form partnership.

I mean, and today, love is not dead, partnership is not ruined, and sex is not destroying intimacy. Cupid beat COVID for Christ's sakes. Yes. I could talk to you forever and ever about this, but I'm not allowed to do that. But my final question, I suppose it's not really fair because it's a bit of a crystal ball type question, but we are in the middle of seeing some really interesting trends as far as love, divorce, birth rate, sex. all these things, that birth rates seem to be declining, that there's lots of headlines saying that, no, I don't have sex with anyone anymore, and all these things.

What do you think is the future for monogamy as we go forward as a species? Well, first of all, if it bleeds, it leaves. People love to talk about the disasters and not the good thing. True. There's several parts of your question. Foremost children. Everybody's in a panic that we aren't having enough children. In hunting and gathering societies in our past, women tended to have a problem.

about five children or three to five children. Most of them died in infancy or in accidents when they're young, et cetera, leaving basically a replacement level. Men and women generally had ended up with about two children. Today, we're having even fewer. I think it's 1.9 in America and I don't know about it in England, but certainly Italy, it's very low all through Europe. It's very low in Asia.

I mean, the Chinese. And everybody's in a panic about this. I am not. I think with the evolution of all of the AI and mechanical things, the ability to live long term and be productive in society, we're going to have robots making our cars, et cetera, et cetera, giving us more time for intellectual pursuits, for imagination, creativity, and building new things. So I'm not scared about having fewer children. I'm also not surprised about it. I mean, one of the big trends in the modern world is women piling into the gender. job market. And with that, they've spent a lot of time getting an education. They don't want to go

home full time and just raise babies. Oh, there's some people who do perfectly fine. But the bottom line is a lot of them don't feel they've got time to build a huge family, et cetera. So they're having one or two children. As far as I'm concerned, I'm not in a panic about it. Other people are. I think there's a bubble here. I mean, at this point, we have a lot of older people and a few younger people to support them. But the older people will die out. The younger people will have one or two children and will get back to a stability of the relationship between people of different age. So that doesn't worry me. Worry is a lot of other people. They may have good reasons for it, but I don't. That's not what I study regularly. But as I say, we're going back to replacement levels as we did for millions of years

on the grasslands of Africa, giving people, I mean, if you have fewer children, you have more opportunity to educate the ones that you've got to give them the opportunities that they need to get heads up. It just doesn't scare me. In terms of courtship, I study dating sites. These are not dating sites. They are introducing sites. All they do is introduce you. There is nothing new about them.

Instead of meeting at a waterhole a million years ago or being introduced to people, your friends and families are, today we meet on the Internet. As I say, data on 75,000 people because of this thing I do with Match called Singles in America. And as it turns out, if you meet on the Internet, not just Match, but anywhere on the Internet, as opposed to off the Internet, and I did this study myself, people who date on the Internet are more likely to be fully employed, more likely to be higher educated, and more likely to be interested in a long-term commitment. And furthermore, with more and more women moving into the job market, we're moving forward to the past. Many years ago, women, as I said, commuted to work together, their fruits and vegetables, came home with over 50% of the meal. We're moving forward to the double-income family with fewer children and more opportunities for both sexes. Really, what's not to like?

So then we moved on to the farm. And on the farm, you couldn't divorce. What are you going to do? You can't chop the cow in half and move it out of town or take the wheat field and take it on your back. You're stuck. So about 10,000 years ago, we settled down, we moved on to the farm, and we saw the rise of all kinds of beliefs about marriage and monogamy. A woman had to be a virgin at marriage. That's gone.

The man is out of the household. That's gone. Men are much smarter than women. That's going. To death those part, it's gone. We are shedding now the agrarian traditions and moving forward to the kind of lifestyle we had in our hunting and gathering past, the way the brain is actually built. And so today, you know, if you're in a bad relationship, you make a mistake, we all do, you can get out of it. You're not stuck for your whole life.

And you can go on to make the kind of partnership that you want. We also have a very long courtship period in your 20s. You have a very long middle age. We have a much longer old age. We're living a lot longer. All the kind of time to get the partnership that you want. So the future's bright for monogamy. Yeah, I mean, listen, nobody gets out of love alive, as I said.

But the bottom line is romantic love and attachment. They're primordial. They're adaptable. And they are eternal. We will always love. Helen, I've loved talking to you. You have been wonderful. Thank you so much.

And if people want to know more about you and your research, where can they find you? Helenfisher.com. No dots, no dashes, no C.NFisher, Helenfisher.com. The Anatomyoflove.com. I did some years ago with my brain scanning partner, Lucy Brown. I think I'm all over the internet. I don't know. That's what I'm told.

So it's not hard to find Helen Fisher. Thank you so much for talking to me today. You've been an absolute treat. And same. Thank you. Thank you for listening. And thank you so much to Helen for joining me. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like, review and follow along whatever it is that you get your podcasts.

If you'd like us to explore a subject or if you just fancy dropping by to say hi, then you can email us at betwixt at history hit.com. We've got episodes on everything from our continuing series on The Real Bridgeton to sex work in early Australia, all coming your way. This podcast was edited by Tom Delagie and produced by Stuart Beckwith, the senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again, Betwicks the Sheets, The History of Sex Scandal and Society, a podcast by. a history hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.