Intimate

Relationships

Rowland S.Miller

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C H A P T E R 1 0

Stresses and Strains（I）

Perceived Relational Value ◆ Hurt Feelings ◆ Ostracism

◆ Jealousy ◆ Deception and Lying ◆ Betrayal ◆ Forgiveness

◆ For Your Consideration ◆ Chapter Summary

Let’s take stock. In previous chapters, we have encountered adaptive and maladaptive cognition, good and bad communication, and rewarding and unrewarding social exchange. We’ve been evenhanded in considering both beneficial and disadvantageous influences on close relationships. But that won’t be true here. This chapter focuses on various pitfalls, stumbling blocks, and hazards that cause wear and tear in relationships (with just one bright spot at the end). And importantly, the stresses and strains I cover here—hurt feelings, ostracism, jealousy, lying, and betrayal—are commonplace events that occur in most relationships somewhere along the way. We’ve all had our feelings hurt (Vangelisti, 2009), and sooner or later, almost everyone lies to their intimate partners (DePaulo et al., 2009). Even outright betrayals of one sort or another are surprisingly widespread and hard to avoid (Baxter et al., 1997).

However, the fact that these incidents are commonplace doesn’t mean they are inconsequential. Negative events like these can be very influential. They help explain why most of us report having had a very troublesome relation- ship within the last 5 years (Levitt et al., 1996). And despite their idiosyncra- sies, all of these unhappy events may share a common theme (Leary & Miller, 2012): They suggest that we are not as well liked or well respected as we wish we were.

10.1 PERCEIVED RELATIONAL VALUE

Fueled by our need to belong,1 most of us care deeply about what our intimate partners think of us. We want them to want us. We want them to value our com- pany and to consider their partnerships with us to be valuable and important. We want our partners to evaluate their relationships with us positively, and sometimes, we want that relationship to be very meaningful and close. As a result, according to theorist Mark Leary (Leary & Miller, 2012), it’s painful to perceive that our relational value—that is, the degree to which others consider their relationships with us to be valuable, important, or close—is lower than we would like it to be.

1Need a reminder about the human need to belong? Look back at p. 4 in chapter 1.

Over time, we’re likely to encounter various degrees of acceptance and rejection in our dealings with others, and Leary (2001) has suggested that they can be arranged along the continuum described in Table 10.1. At the extreme of maximal inclusion, people seek our company and don’t want to have a party unless we can come. They are somewhat less accepting, but still positively inclined toward us when they offer us active inclusion: They invite us to the party and are glad we can come. However, their acceptance is more passive when they don’t invite us to the party but admit us if we show up, and they are ambivalent, neither accepting nor rejecting, when they genuinely don’t care one way or the other whether we show up or not.

If we want others to like us and value their relationships with us, noncom- mittal ambivalence from them may be bad enough, but things can get worse. We encounter passive exclusion when others ignore us and wish we were else- where, and we suffer active exclusion when others go out of their way to avoid us altogether. However, the most complete rejection occurs when, in maximal exclusion, others order us to leave their parties when they find us there. In such instances, merely avoiding us won’t do; they want us gone.

Our emotional reactions to such experiences depend on how much we want to be accepted by particular others, and just what their acceptance or rejection of us means. On occasion, people exclude us because they regard us positively, and such rejections are much less painful than are exclusions that result from our deficiencies or faults. Consider the game show Survivor: Con- testants sometimes try to vote the most skilled, most able competitors off the island to increase their personal chances of winning the game. Being excluded because you’re better than everyone else may not hurt much, but rejection that suggests that you’re inept, insufficient, or inadequate usually does (Çelik et al., 2013).

In addition, it’s not much of a blow to be excluded from a party you didn’t want to attend in the first place. Exclusion is much more painful when we want to be accepted by others than when we don’t much care what they think of us. Indeed, it’s also possible to be accepted and liked by others but be hurt because they don’t like us as much as we want them to. This is what unrequited love is often like (see p. 265). Those for whom we feel unrequited love may be fond of us in return, but if we want to be loved instead of merely liked, their mildness is painful.

All of these possibilities suggest that there is only a rough connection between the objective acceptance or rejection we receive from others and our feelings of acceptance or rejection that result, so we will focus on the percep- tion that others value their relationships with us less than we want them to as a core ingredient of the stresses and strains that we will inspect in this chapter (Leary & Miller, 2012). We feel hurt when our perceived relational value for others is lower than we want it to be.

10.2 HURT FEELINGS

In fact, the feelings of acceptance or rejection we experience in our dealings with others are related to their evaluations of us in a complex way: Maximal exclusion doesn’t feel much worse than simple ambivalence does (Buckley et al., 2004). Take a careful look at Figure 10.1. The graph depicts people’s reac- tions to evaluations from others that vary across a 10-point scale. Maximal exclusion is described by the worst possible evaluation, a 1, and maximal inclu- sion is described by the best possible evaluation, a 10; ambivalence, the point at which others don’t care about us one way or the other, is the 5 at the mid- point of the scale. The graph demonstrates that once we find that others don’t want us around, it hardly matters whether they dislike us a little or a lot: Our momentary judgments of our self-worth bottom out when people reject us to any extent (that is, when their evaluations range from 4 down to 1).

On the other hand, when it comes to acceptance, being completely adored doesn’t improve our self-esteem beyond the boost we get from being very well- liked. Instead, we appear to be very sensitive to small differences in regard from others that range from ambivalence at the low end to active inclusion at the high end. As people like us more and more, we feel better and better about ourselves until their positive regard for us is fully ensured. This all makes sense from an evolutionary perspective (Leary & Cottrell, 2013); carefully discerning degrees of acceptance that might allow access to resources and mates is more useful than monitoring the enmity of one’s enemies. (After all, when it comes to reactions from potential mates, there are usually few practical differences between mild distaste and outright disgust!)

So, mild rejection from others usually feels just as bad as more extreme rejec- tion does. But decreases in the acceptance we receive from others may have a greater impact, particularly when they occur in that range between ambivalence and active inclusion—that is, when people who liked us once appear to like us less now. Leary and his colleagues demonstrated the potent impact of decreases in acceptance when they manipulated the evaluations that research participants received from new acquaintances (Buckley et al., 2004). As young adults talked about themselves to another person over an intercom system, they received intermittent approval ratings on a computer screen (see Figure 10.2); the ratings supposedly came from their conversation partner, but they were actually controlled by the experimenters, who provided one of four patterns of feedback. Some people received consistent acceptance, receiving only 5’s and 6’s, whereas others encountered constant rejec- tion, receiving only 2’s and 3’s. It’s painful to be disliked by others, so of course, those who were accepted by the unseen acquaintance were happier and felt better about themselves than those who were rejected. But other people received evalu- ations that changed over time, starting poorly and getting better, or starting well and getting worse. In the latter case, over a span of 5 minutes, the research par- ticipants received successive ratings of 6, 5, 3, 3, and 2. Apparently, as the new acquaintance got to know them better, the less the acquaintance liked them.

The pattern of decreasing acceptance was particularly painful, causing more negative reactions than even constant rejection did (Buckley et al., 2004). Evidently, it’s especially awful to experience drops in our perceived relational value—that is, relational devaluation, or apparent decreases in others’ regard for us—and it causes a variety of unhappy emotions. When their partners turned against them, people felt sad, angry, and hurt, with the latter emotion being a particular sensation that is uniquely associated with losses of relational value (Leary & Leder, 2009). Hurt feelings have much in common with real pain; when people suffering from romantic rejection are placed in fMRI scan- ners and asked to study pictures of the ex-lovers who broke up with them, their brains respond as if they were experiencing physical pain (Eisenberger, 2013). Rejection really hurts. And remarkably, the pain reliever acetaminophen reduces the pain of social rejection just as it does a headache:2 After a week- and-a-half of daily doses of acetaminophen, college students had fewer hurt feelings at the end of the day than did other students who were taking a placebo (DeWall et al., 2010). Marijuana blunts3 social pain, too (Deckman et al., 2014). Obviously, psychological wounds can cause real distress, and the sense of injury that characterizes hurt feelings—the feeling that relationship rules have been broken and that one has been damaged, shattered, cut, or stabbed— makes hurt feelings a distinct emotional experience (Feeney, 2005).

2 Acetaminophen, the active ingredient in the product known to Americans as Tylenol, is called paracetamol in most places outside North America.

3 No pun intended.

When relational devaluation occurs, some people experience more hurt than others do. As always, attachment styles are influential. People who have high levels of anxiety about abandonment experience more hurt in response to drops in perceived relational value than those with lower anxiety do. (As you can imagine, their nervous dread that others don’t love them magnifies the hurt they feel.) And people who are high in avoidance of intimacy experience less pain when others withdraw; exclusion hurts less when you don’t want to be close to others to begin with (Shaver & Mikulincer, 2013a). People’s levels of self-esteem matter, too: People with low self-esteem get their feelings hurt more easily than those with higher self-regard do (Ford & Collins, 2010).

In fact, self-esteem may be an important predictor of how people respond to potent experiences of rejection, such as ostracism. Let’s see what happens when people get their feelings hurt by being ignored and getting the “silent treatment.”

10.3 OSTRACISM

A specific form of rejection that often occurs even in close relationships is ostracism, in which people are given the “cold shoulder” and ignored by those around them. When the silent treatment is intentional, ostracizers deliberately refrain from responding to others, sometimes pretending that their targets are not even present. Most of us have experienced ostracism; in one broad survey, 67 percent of Americans admitted that they had given an intimate partner the cold shoulder, and 75 percent reported that they had received such treatment from a loved one (Williams, 2001).

Why do people sometimes intentionally ignore their partners? Ostraciz- ers usually justify their actions as an effective way to punish their partners, to avoid confrontation, or to calm down and cool off following a conflict, and they usually believe that the ostracism was beneficial in helping them achieve their goals (Sommer et al., 2001). But by its very nature, ostracism often leaves its targets wondering why they are being ignored. Only rarely is an explanation offered when a partner remains silent, and the victims of ostracism often have no idea why it is happening. As a result, the targets of ostracism typically do not consider their partners’ withdrawal to be a kind or effective way to behave, and they usually believe that the ostracism has damaged their relationships (Zadro et al., 2008).

Ostracism can be potent and painful because it threatens basic social needs (Wesselmann & Williams, 2013). It’s dehumanizing (Bastian & Haslam, 2010). The silent treatment threatens our need to belong, damages our feelings of self-worth, and reduces our perceived control over our interactions. And our initial reactions to such threats usually involve confused, unhappy disar- ray (Wesselmann et al., 2012). A “cold shoulder” feels cold: When people feel excluded, they think the room is cooler and that warm food and drink are more desirable than they do when they have not been rejected (Zhong & Leonardelli, 2008). Our bodies show signs of stress; our adrenal glands dump cortisol, a stress hormone, into our blood (Dickerson & Zoccola, 2013). Time seems to pass more slowly, too; in one study in which they were asked to estimate how much time had passed during a 40-second interval, people who felt accepted by others offered an average (and quite accurate) estimate of 42 seconds, whereas those who were rejected believed that 64 seconds had passed (Twenge et al., 2003). What happens next seems to depend on which of a person’s needs are in the most peril (Wesselmann & Williams, 2013). When belongingness is threatened, people who are being ostracized may work hard to regain their partners’ regard, being compliant and doing what their tormentors want, espe- cially when they think the relationship—and their relational value—can be repaired (Richman & Leary, 2009). However, they may also start looking for new, less punishing partners. After an experience with exclusion, people are often especially eager to make new, kinder friends (Maner et al., 2007).

More antagonistic reactions may occur when ostracism seems illegitimate and unjust and threatens people’s feelings of control or self-worth (Lemay et al., 2012). When ostracized people get angry, they dismiss the opinions of those who are ignoring them as unfounded, unfair, and dim-witted, and they become more surly and aggressive (even toward innocent bystanders) than cowed and compliant (DeWall et al., 2009). In fact, instances of ostracism or romantic rejec- tion precede most of the awful cases in which students take guns to school and shoot innocent classmates (Leary et al., 2006). Those who ostracize others are just as likely to frustrate and anger them as to shame or instruct them.

Researchers who study ostracism have developed a variety of ingenious procedures to create potent experiences of rejection in the lab. After short intro- ductions to strangers, people have learned that no one wanted to work with them (Leary, 2005), and others have been ignored in face-to-face discussions or Internet chat rooms run by research assistants (Williams, 2001). But an inspired procedure created by Kipling Williams and his colleagues that involves a sim- ple game of catch is especially nefarious. If you encounter this procedure, you’ll find yourself sitting for 5 minutes with two other people who begin playfully tossing and bouncing a racquetball back and forth. You’ve all just met, and you’re all just passing time, waiting for an experimenter to return; so, the first minute of play, in which you frequently receive the ball, is pretty lighthearted. But then things change. Over the next 4 minutes, nobody tosses you the ball. The two other people gleefully toss the ball between themselves and completely ignore you, neither looking your way nor acknowledging any protest. It’s as if you have ceased to exist.

Researchers have even conducted studies of ostracism online, and thou- sands of people around the world have now encountered a variation of the ball-tossing procedure on the Web (Williams & Jarvis, 2006). In this version, people believe that they are online with two other people represented by screen icons who are sending a Cyberball back and forth by clicking each other’s icons. What happens next is all controlled by the computer program and there really aren’t any other people involved, but as in real life, after a few warm-up throws, participants are partially or fully excluded from the “tossing” of the ball. What’s striking is that this Internet ostracism is quite painful even when it is (apparently) dispensed by strangers one will never meet. In fact, even after people learn that their exclusion is controlled by the computer and that no real interpersonal evaluation is even remotely involved, they still get their feelings hurt when the computer program fails to toss them the ball (Zadro et al., 2004)! Ostracism even hurts when it is dispensed by groups we despise, such as the Ku Klux Klan (Gonsalkorale & Williams, 2007). Our species seems to be quite sensitive to even the merest hint of social rejection.

So, ostracism is an obnoxious, unpleasant experience that can be just as likely to engender hostility as compliance. And people with high self-esteem are relatively unlikely to put up with it. When they are ignored by others, peo- ple with high self-regard are more likely than those with lower self-esteem to end their relationships with their ostracizers and to seek new partners who will treat them better—and perhaps as a result, they get the silent treatment less often. In comparison, people with low self-esteem experience more ostracism, and they are more likely to carry a grudge and to ostracize others in return (Sommer & Rubin, 2005). Instead of leaving those who ostracize them, people with low self-regard are more likely to hang around but be spiteful.

In sum, then, we are likely to feel sadness, anger, and hurt when others ostracize us, and a core ingredient in such experiences seems to be the perception that those others do not value their relationships with us as much as we wish they did. Let’s turn now to the special kind of threat to our relational value that occurs when we believe that a romantic rival is luring a beloved partner away.

10.4 JEALOUSY

A different kind of negative emotional experience results from the potential loss of a valued relationship to a real or imagined rival. Jealousy can involve a variety of feelings, ranging all the way from sad dejection to actual pride that one’s partner is desirable to others, but the three feelings that define jealousy best are hurt, anger, and fear (Guerrero et al., 2005).4

4 Jealousy is sometimes confused with envy, but the two are quite different (DelPriore et al., 2012). We envy someone when we wish we had what they have; envy is characterized by a humiliating longing for another person’s possessions. In contrast, jealousy is the confused state of hurt, anger, and fear that results from the threat of losing what we already have, a relationship that we do not wish to give up.

Hurt follows from the perception that our partners do not value us enough to honor their commitments to our relationships, and fear and anxiety result from the dreadful prospect of abandonment and loss. But the unique element in jealousy is the romantic rival who threatens to lure a partner away: “To be jealous, one must have a relationship to lose and a rival to whom to lose it” (DeSteno & Salovey, 1994, p. 220). It’s being cast aside for someone else that gets people angry, and that anger is usually directed both at the meddlesome rival and at the partner who is beginning to stray (Schützwohl, 2008b). Some- times that anger turns violent; 13 percent of all the murders in the United States result from one spouse killing another, and when that occurs, jealousy is the most common motive (Buss, 2000).

Obviously, jealousy is an unhappy experience. But here’s an interesting question: How would you feel if you couldn’t make your lover jealous? Would you be disappointed if nothing you did gave your partner a jealous twinge? Most people probably would be, but whether or not that’s a sensible point of view may depend on what type of jealousy we’re talking about, why your partner is jealous, and what your partner does in response to his or her jealousy. Let’s explore those issues.

Two Types of Jealousy

Reactive jealousy occurs when someone becomes aware of an actual threat to a valued relationship (Buunk & Dijkstra, 2006). The troubling threat may not be a current event; it may have occurred in the past, or it may be anticipated in the near future (if, for instance, your partner expresses the intention to date some- one else), but reactive jealousy always occurs in response to a realistic danger. A variety of behaviors from one’s partner can cause concern; just fantasizing about or flirting with someone else is considered “cheating” by most young adults in the United States (Kruger et al., 2013). Unfortunately, there may be a lot to be jeal- ous about. In two surveys of over 800 American college students, lots of young adults reported having dated, kissed, fondled, or slept with someone while they were in a serious dating relationship with someone else (Brand et al., 2007). Half of the women and two-fifths of the men said they had kissed or fondled someone else, and a fifth of both men and women said they had had intercourse with a rival (most of them more than once).

In contrast, suspicious jealousy occurs when one’s partner hasn’t misbe- haved and one’s suspicions do not fit the facts at hand (Buunk & Dijkstra, 2006). Suspicious jealousy results in worried and mistrustful vigilance and snooping as the jealous partner seeks to confirm his or her suspicions, and it can range from a mildly overactive imagination to outright paranoia. In all cases, how- ever, suspicious jealousy can be said to be unfounded; it results from situations that would not trouble a more secure and more trusting partner.

The distinction between the two types of jealousy is meaningful because almost everybody feels reactive jealousy when they realize that their partners have been unfaithful (Buss, 2000), but people vary a lot in their tendencies to feel suspicious jealousy in the absence of any provocation. Nevertheless, the distinc- tion between the two isn’t quite as sharp as it may seem. A jealous reaction to a partner’s affair may linger on as suspicious jealousy years later when trust, once lost, is never fully regained. And people may differ in their judgments of what constitutes a real threat to their relationship (Guerrero, 1998). Knowledge that a partner is merely fantasizing about someone else may not trouble a secure partner who is not much prone to jealousy, but it may cause reactive jealousy in a partner who is insecure. So, the boundary between them can be vague, and as we explore individual differences in susceptibility to jealousy in our next section, I’ll ask a generic question that refers to both types of jealousy.

Who’s Prone to Jealousy?

On the whole, men and women do not differ in their jealous tendencies (Buunk, 1995), but there are individual differences in susceptibility to jealousy that lead some people to feel jealous more readily and more intensely than other people do. One obvious precursor of jealousy is dependence on a relationship (Rydell et al., 2004). When people feel that they need a particular partner because their alternatives are poor—that is, when people have a low CLalt—any threat to their relationship is especially menacing. In contrast, people who have desirable alternatives tend to be less jealous because they have less to lose if the relation- ship ends.

Jealousy also increases with feelings of inadequacy in a relationship (White, 1981). People who worry that they can’t measure up to their partners’ expecta- tions or who fret that they’re not what their lovers are looking for are less cer- tain that their relationships will last, and they are more prone to jealousy than are people who feel certain they can keep their partners satisfied (Knobloch et al., 2001). Self-confidence in a relationship is undoubtedly affected by a person’s global sense of self-worth, and people with high self-esteem do tend to be less prone to jealousy than those with low self-esteem (DeSteno et al., 2006). However, a person’s perceptions of his or her adequacy as a partner in a specific relationship are especially important, and even people with generally high self-esteem can be prone to jealousy if they doubt their ability to fulfill a particular partner.

One of the ingredients in such doubt is a discrepancy in the mate value each person brings to the relationship (Buss, 2000). If one partner is more desirable than the other, possessing (for example) more physical attractiveness, wealth, or talent, the less desirable partner is a less valuable mate, and that’s a potential problem. The less desirable partner is likely to be aware that others could be a better match for his or her lover, and that may cause a sense of inadequacy that does not exist in other areas of his or her life (or with other partners). Here is another reason, then, why matching occurs with people pairing off with others of similar mate value (see chapter 3): Most of us want the most desirable part- ners we can get, but it can be threatening to realize that our partners could do better if they really wanted to.

In any case, consider the perilous situation that faces people who feel both dependent on and inadequate in their current relationships: They need their partners but worry that they’re not good enough to keep them. It’s no wonder that they react strongly to real or imagined signs that a romantic rival has entered the scene.

Of course, attachment styles influence jealousy, too. To some extent, people with a preoccupied style routinely find themselves in a similar fix: They greedily seek closeness with others, but they remain chronically wor- ried that their partners don’t love them enough in return. That’s a recipe for jealousy, and sure enough, preoccupied people experience more jealousy than do those with the other three styles (Buunk, 1997). The folks who are least affected when a relationship is threatened are typically those with a dismissing style of attachment. Feeling self-sufficient and trying not to depend on others is apparently one way to stay relatively immune to jeal- ousy (Guerrero, 1998).

Finally, personality traits are also involved. People who are high in neuroti- cism, who tend to worry about a lot of things, are particularly prone to jeal- ousy. On the other hand, agreeable people, who tend to be cooperative and trusting, are less likely than others to become jealous (Buunk & Dijkstra, 2006).

Who Gets Us Jealous?

We become jealous when our partners are interested in someone else, but not all rivals are created equal. It’s particularly obnoxious when our friends start horning in on our romantic relationships; rivalry from a friend is more upset- ting than is similar behavior from a stranger (Bleske & Shackelford, 2001). It’s also especially painful when our partners start expressing renewed interest in their former lovers (Cann & Baucom, 2004). But no matter who they are, roman- tic rivals who have high mate value and who make us look bad by comparison are worrisome threats to our relationships, and they arouse more jealousy than do rivals who are milder competition.

And what kind of rivals are those? It depends on what our partners like. As you’ll recall from chapter 3, women care more than men do about a mate’s resources, so men are more jealous of other men who are self-confident, domi- nant, assertive, and rich than they are of rivals who are simply very handsome (Buunk et al., 2011). On the other hand, a handsome rival is bad enough: Every- body likes lovely lovers (Eastwick & Finkel, 2008), so attractive competitors evoke more jealousy in both men and women than homely rivals do (Massar & Buunk, 2009). The good news is that our rivals are usually not as attractive to our partners as we think they are, so our fears are usually overblown—but the bad news is that we do make such mistakes, overestimating the desirabil- ity of our competition and thereby suffering more distress than is warranted (Hill, 2007).

What Gets Us Jealous?

Evolutionary psychology has popped up here and there in this book, and here’s another place it’s pertinent. In this case, an evolutionary perspective suggests that jealousy evolved to motivate behavior designed to protect our close relationships from the interference of others. Presumably, early humans who reacted strongly to interlopers—being vigilant to outside interference, fending off rivals, and working hard to satisfy and fulfill their current partners— maintained their relationships and reproduced more successfully than did those who were blasé about meddlesome rivals. This perspective thus suggests that because it offered reproductive advantages in the past, jealousy is now a natural, ingrained reaction that is hard to avoid (Buss, 2000). More provoca- tively, it also suggests that men and women should be especially sensitive to different sorts of infidelity in their romantic partners.

Remember (from chapter 1) that men face a reproductive problem that women do not have: paternity uncertainty. A woman always knows whether or not a particular child is hers, but unless he is completely confident that his mate hasn’t had sex with other men, a man can’t be certain (without using some advanced technology) that he is a child’s father. And being cuckolded and raising another man’s offspring is an evolutionary dead end; the human race did not descend from ancestors who raised other people’s children and had none of their own! Indeed, the potential evolutionary costs of failing to detect a partner’s infidelity are so great that natural selection may have favored men who were too suspicious of their partners’ faithfulness over those who were not suspicious enough (Haselton & Galperin, 2013). Unwarranted doubt about a partner’s fidelity is divisive and painful, but it may not be as costly and danger- ous to men in an evolutionary sense as being too trusting and failing to detect infidelity when it occurs. Thus, today, men have more extramarital affairs than women do (Tafoya & Spitzberg, 2007), but it’s men, not women, who are more accurate at detecting sexual infidelity in a cheating partner (Andrews et al., 2008). And vigilance is sometimes sensible; as we saw in chapter 9, about 2 percent of the world’s children are being raised by men who do not know that the children were fathered by another man (Anderson, 2006).

For their part, women presumably enjoyed more success raising their chil- dren when they were sensitive to any signs that a man might withdraw the resources that were protecting and sheltering them and their children. Assum- ing that men were committed to them when the men in fact were not would have been risky for women, so sexual selection may have favored those who were usually skeptical of men’s declarations of true love. Unfairly doubting a man’s commitment may be obnoxious and self-defeating, but believing that a mate was devoted and committed when he was not may have been more costly still. In our ancestral past, women who frequently and naïvely mated with men who then abandoned them probably did not reproduce as successfully as did women who insisted on more proof that a man was there to stay. Thus, modern women are probably the “descendants of ancestral mothers who erred in the direction of being cautious,” who tended to prudently underestimate the com- mitment of their men (Haselton & Buss, 2000, p. 83).

As a result of all this, an evolutionary perspective suggests that men should experience more jealousy than women do at the thought of sexual infidelity in their mates, whereas women should react more than men do to the threat of emotional infidelity, the possibility that their partners are falling in love with someone else. Either type of infidelity can provoke jealousy in either sex, of course, but they differ in their evolutionary implications. For a man, it’s not a partner’s love for someone else that’s the bigger threat to his reproductive success—it’s the sex; his children may still thrive if his mate loves another man, but he certainly does not want to raise the other man’s children. For a woman, it’s not a partner’s intercourse with someone else that’s more dangerous, it’s the love; as long as he continues to provide needed resources, her children may still thrive even if he impregnates other women—but if he falls in love and moves out entirely, her kids’ future may be imperiled.

This reasoning led David Buss and his colleagues (Buss et al., 1992, p. 252) to pose this compelling question to research participants:

Please think of a serious committed romantic relationship that you have had in the past, that you currently have, or that you would like to have. Imagine that you discover that the person with whom you’ve been seriously involved became interested in someone else. What would distress or upset you more (please pick only one):

(A) Imagining your partner forming a deep emotional attachment to that person.

(B) Imagining your partner enjoying passionate sexual intercourse with that other person.

Which one would you pick? Most of the men—60 percent—said the sex would upset them more, but only 17 percent of the women chose that option; instead, a sizable majority of the women—83 percent—reported that they would be more distressed by a partner’s emotional attachment to a rival. Moreover, a follow-up study demonstrated that men and women differed in their physi- ological reactions to these choices (Buss et al., 1992). Men displayed more auto- nomic changes indicative of emotional arousal when they imagined a partner’s sexual, rather than emotional, infidelity, but the reverse was true for women.

These results are consistent with an evolutionary perspective, but they have engendered controversy (Carpenter, 2012; Sagarin et al., 2012) with critics suggesting that they are less convincing than they seem. One straightforward complaint is methodological. The use of a “forced-choice” question in which research participants have to pick one option or the other can exaggerate a sub- tle and relatively minor difference between the sexes (DeSteno, 2010). If men find sexual infidelity only slightly more threatening than women do, a forced- choice question could yield the striking results Buss et al. (1992) obtained even if the actual difference in men’s and women’s outlooks was rather trivial. And in fact, when they are allowed to simply indicate that they would find both types of infidelity equally upsetting, most people—both men and women—do (Lishner et al., 2008).

More subtly, the two types of infidelity may mean different things to women than they do to men (DeSteno & Salovey, 1996). Because men are more accepting of casual sex, women may routinely assume that a man’s sexual infidelity is just that: casual sex. His emotional infidelity, however, may mean that he’s having sex with someone else and is in love with her, which would make emotional infidelity the more serious threat. For their part, men may assume that women often love someone without having sex, but usually love those with whom they do have sex, and that would make her sexual infidel- ity more momentous. In fact, men and women do generally hold such views (Whitty & Quigley, 2008). We tend to think that a cheating spouse is more likely to be emotionally attached to the illicit lover when the cheater is a woman instead of a man (Sprecher et al., 1998). Thus, because we assume that sex and love are more closely connected for women than for men,5 a choice between the two types of infidelity probably does mean different things for men than for women.

5 This assumption, you’ll recall, is correct. On average, sex and love are more closely connected for women than for men. Look back at our discussion of sociosexual orientation that begins on page 288.

So, consider this: You’ve discovered that your partner has fallen in love with someone else and is having great sex with him or her. Both emotional and sexual infidelity have occurred. Which aspect of your partner’s faithlessness, the sex or the love, bothers you more? This scenario answers the criticism that, individually, they mean different things to the different sexes, and in the United States, Korea, and Japan, more men than women chose sexual infidelity as the more hurtful insult (Buss et al., 1999). (In the United States, 61 percent of the men chose sexual infidelity as the more alarming threat, but only 13 percent of the women did.) In addition, the same sex difference is usually (Sagarin et al., 2012)—but not always (Zengel et al., 2013)—obtained when people rate their distress in response to the two infidelities instead of just picking the one that bothers them most (Edlund & Sagarin, 2009), so the pattern doesn’t depend much on how you ask the question.

Various other research results are also consistent with the evolutionary perspective. Men and women show different patterns of neural activity when they think about jealousy-evoking situations; regions of the brain controlling sex and aggression are more active in men when they think about sexual infidelity than when they imagine emotional infidelity, but no such difference appears in women (Takahashi et al., 2006). And sex differences disappear when parents are asked to envision the infidelity of a daughter-in-law or son-in-law. Grandmoth- ers face the same challenges to their reproductive success as grandfathers do, so an evolutionary perspective suggests that they should not differ in their reactions to infidelity from a child’s partner. And indeed, when they imagine their sons or daughters having a cheating spouse, both mothers and fathers regard sex- ual infidelity to be more worrisome when it is committed by a daughter-in-law, and emotional infidelity to be more distressing when it is committed by a son-in-law (Shackelford et al., 2004). Siblings feel the same way about their sisters- and brothers-in-law (Michalski et al., 2007).

At bottom, men and women appear to be differentially sensitive to the two types of threat. When the possibility exists, men are quicker to assume that sexual infidelity is occurring than women are, whereas women decide that emotional infidelity is occurring faster than men do (Schützwohl, 2005). After suspicions arise, men are more preoccupied by the threat of their mate’s sexual infidelity whereas women fret more about their partner’s emotional infidelity (Schützwohl, 2006). For instance, if they interrogate their partners, men are more likely than women to inquire about the sexual nature of the illicit relationship, whereas women are more likely than men to ask about its emotional nature (Kuhle et al., 2009). This pattern is evident on the TV show Cheaters, which allows viewers to eavesdrop as unfaithful partners are confronted with evidence of their infidelity by their jealous partners; careful coding of 55 episodes of the show revealed that jealous men were usually more keen to find out if sex had happened, whereas women more often wanted to know if their men had fallen in love with their rivals (Kuhle, 2011; see Figure 10.3). And if their suspicions turn out to be unfounded, men are more relieved to learn that sexual infidelity has not occurred, whereas women are more relieved to find that their partners do not love someone else (Schützwohl, 2008a).

Finally, the sex difference disappears, and men dread sexual infidelity only as much as women do when the cheating carries no risk of conceiving a child— that is, when their partners cheat with someone of the same sex in a gay or lesbian affair (Sagarin et al., 2003). Paternity uncertainty is irrelevant when a romantic rival is of the same sex as one’s partner, and sure enough, men and women are equally threatened by the two types of infidelity in such situations. (And which kind of rival is worse? By a large margin, men consider a lover’s affair with another man to be worse than one with a woman, but women think it would be equally awful for their men to cheat with either a woman or a man [Kruse et al., 2008]).

Our responses to the dreadful prospect of a partner’s infidelity are com- plex, and men and women don’t differ much: All of us tend to get angry at the thought of a lover’s sexual infidelity, and we’re hurt by the prospect of an emotional affair (Green & Sabini, 2006). Clearly, the most reasonable conclusion from all of these studies is that everybody hates both types of infidelity, and here, as in so many other cases, the sexes are more similar to each other than different. Still, to the extent that they differ at all, women are likely to perceive a partner’s emotional attachment to a rival as more peril- ous than men do, whereas men are more threatened by extradyadic sex— and evolutionary psychology offers a fascinating, if arguable, explanation of these reactions.

Responses to Jealousy

People may react to the hurt, anger, and fear of jealousy in ways that have either beneficial or destructive effects on their relationships (Dindia & Timmerman, 2003). On occasion, jealous people lash out in ways that are unequivocally harm- ful, retaliating against their partners with violent behavior or verbal antag- onism, or with efforts to make them jealous in return (Guerrero et al., 2005). On other occasions, people respond in ways that may be intended to protect the relationship but that often undermine it further: spying on their partners, restricting their partners’ freedom, or derogating or threatening their rivals. There are times, however, when people respond positively to jealousy by straightforwardly expressing their concerns and trying to work things out with their partners or by making themselves or their relationships more desirable (by, for instance, improving their appearance, sending the partner gifts, or doing more housework) (Guerrero & Andersen, 1998).

Attachment styles help determine what people will do. When they become jealous, people who are relatively comfortable with closeness—those with secure or preoccupied attachment styles—are more likely to express their con- cerns and to try to repair their relationships than are those with more avoidant styles (Guerrero, 1998). By comparison, people who are dismissing or fearful are more likely to avoid the issue or deny their distress by pretending nothing is wrong or by acting like they don’t care.

Men and women often differ in their responses to jealousy, too, with consequences that can complicate heterosexual relationships. Imagine your- self in this situation: At a party, you leave your romantic partner sitting on a couch when you go to refill your drinks. While you’re gone, your partner’s old boyfriend or girlfriend happens by and sits for a moment, and they share a light kiss of greeting just as you return with the drinks. What would you do? When researchers showed people videotapes of a scenario like this and measured their intentions, men and women responded differently (Shettel- Neuber et al., 1978). Women said they would react to the rival’s interference by seeking to improve the relationship; they intended to put on a show of indif- ference but compete with the rival by making themselves more attractive to their partners. In contrast, men said they would strive to protect their egos; they planned to get drunk, confront and threaten the rival, and pursue other women. Whereas women seemed to focus on preserving the existing relation- ship (Aylor & Dainton, 2001), men considered leaving it and salving their wounded pride with conquests of new partners.

Sex differences such as these have also been obtained in other studies (Miller & Maner, 2008), and one thing that makes them worrisome is that women are much more likely than men to try to get their partners jealous (White, 1980a). When they induce jealousy—usually by discussing or exaggerating their attrac- tion to other men, sometimes by flirting with or dating them—they typically seek to test the relationship (to see how much he cares) or try to elicit more attention and commitment from their partners (Fleischmann et al., 2005). They evidently want their men to respond the way women do when they get jeal- ous, with greater effort to protect and maintain the relationship. The problem, of course, is that that’s not the way men typically react. Women who seek to improve their relationships by inducing jealousy in their men may succeed only in driving their partners away.

Coping Constructively with Jealousy

An unhappy mixture of hurt, anger, and fear occurs when your partner wants you but isn’t sure he or she can keep you. It may be a natural thing for humans to feel, but it’s often an ugly, awful feeling that results in terribly destructive behavior (Buss, 2000). Someday you may find yourself wishing that you could feel it less intensely and limit its effects. What can be done?

When jealousy is justified and a rival is real, the experts suggest that we work on reducing the connection between the exclusivity of a relationship and our sense of self-worth (Salovey & Rodin, 1988). Finding that someone we love is attracted to a rival can be painful—but it doesn’t mean that your partner is a horrible, worthless person, or that you are. We react irrationally when we act as though our self-worth totally depended on a particular relationship.

In fact, when they succeed in reducing unwanted jealousy, people tend to use two techniques that help them to maintain a sense of independence and self-worth (Salovey & Rodin, 1988). The first is self-reliance, which involves efforts to “stay cool” and to avoid feeling angry or embarrassed by refus- ing to dwell on the unfairness of the situation. Endless rumination about the injustice that’s been done is painful, and it undermines successful adjustment (Elphinston et al., 2013). The second is self-bolstering, boosting one’s self-esteem by doing something nice for oneself and thinking about one’s good qualities. Maintaining a sense of self-confidence about one’s ability to act and to survive independently apparently helps keep jealousy at manageable levels.

When people are unable to do that on their own, formal therapy can help. Clinical approaches to the treatment of jealousy usually try to (a) reduce irra- tional, catastrophic thinking that exaggerates either the threat to the relation- ship or the harm that its loss would entail; (b) enhance the self-esteem of the jealous partner; (c) improve communication skills so the partners can clarify their expectations and agree on limits that prevent jealous misunderstandings; and (d) increase satisfaction and fairness in the relationship (Pines, 1998). Most of us don’t need therapy to cope with jealousy. But it might help some of us if romantic relationships came with a warning label:

WARNING: It may be dangerous to your and your partner’s health if you do not know beyond doubt that you are a valuable and worthwhile human being with or without your partner’s love.

10.5 DECEPTION AND LYING

Other sources of stress and strain occur much more often than jealousy does. Indeed, the hazards I’ll consider next, lying and other forms of deception, occur so often in social life that they are commonplace (whether we realize it or not). As we’ll see, deception of some sort or another occurs regularly even in inti- mate relationships that are based on openness and trust.

Deception is intentional behavior that creates an impression in the recipi- ent that the deceiver knows to be untrue (Vrij et al., 2010). Outright lying in which people fabricate information and make statements that contradict the truth is the most straightforward example of deceptive behavior, but there are various other ways to convey misleading impressions without coming right out and saying things that are untrue (Buller & Burgoon, 1994). For instance, people may simply conceal information and not mention details that would communi- cate the truth, or they may divert attention from vital facts, abruptly changing topics to avoid the discussion of touchy subjects. On other occasions, they may mix truthful and deceptive information into half-truths that are misleading. I’ll focus on lies because they have been studied much more extensively than other forms of deception, but we’ll only be scratching the surface of the various ways intimate partners mislead each other.

Lying in Close and Casual Relationships

Research by Bella DePaulo and her colleagues (2009) has painted a remark- able portrait of lying in everyday life. College students who keep diaries of their interactions with others report telling two lies a day on average, lying to one out of every three people with whom they interact (DePaulo et al., 1996). Adults off campus tell fewer lies, about one per day, lying in one of every five interactions. These averages are a little misleading because on any given day, most people—about 60 percent—don’t tell any lies, and a small minority of prolific liars lie a lot (Serota et al., 2010). Most people are honest most of the time, and only a small minority of us lie frequently (Halevy et al., 2014). Nev- ertheless, very few people, only 5 percent, report having told no lies at all in a given week. Most of these lies are casual, spontaneous events that are not con- sidered to be serious by those who tell them, and most of them are successful; the liars are confident that their lies are accepted most (59 percent) of the time, and they feel that they’ve been caught lying only rarely (19 percent of the time). (On other occasions, they aren’t sure of the result.)

In most interactions, the most common type of lie is one that benefits the liar, warding off embarrassment, guilt, or inconvenience, or seeking approval or material gain. In particular, when they are trying to appeal to a member of the other sex, men and women may tell lies that exaggerate their attractiveness. Men are more likely than women to misrepresent their ambition and income and to claim they are committed to a relationship when they are not. Women are more likely to promise but not provide sex, cry out in fake pleasure during sex (Brewer & Hendrie, 2011), and to fake orgasms (Muehlenhard & Shippee, 2010). Both sexes, then, tell selfish lies that are especially designed to appeal to the other sex (Haselton et al., 2005).

However, one-fourth of all lies are told to benefit others, protecting their feel- ings or advancing their interests, and when women interact with other women, such lies are as common as self-centered ones (DePaulo et al., 1996). People are especially likely to misrepresent the truth when brutal honesty would hurt the feelings of someone who is highly invested in the issue at hand. For instance, imagine that you really dislike a painting but are describing your feelings about it to an art student who may have painted it. Would you be totally honest? In just such a situation, no one was (DePaulo & Bell, 1996). People typically admit- ted that the painting wasn’t one of their favorites, but they were much less criti- cal than they had been in prior written evaluations of the piece.

Some lies are obviously undertaken to promote polite, friendly interaction with others. We often claim to agree with others when in fact we do not, and we often say that we are more pleased with events than we really are. Most lies in close relationships, where we expect our partners to be generous and honest, are benevolent, small lies like these (DePaulo & Kashy, 1998). Partners may (try to) communicate more affection to each other than they really feel (Horan & Booth-Butterfield, 2013), and claim that they find each other more attractive than they really do (Lemay et al., 2013). But overall, people tell fewer self- serving, greedy lies—and fewer lies overall—to their lovers and friends than to acquaintances and strangers.

These patterns make lying sound rather innocuous in close relationships. However, people still tell a lot of lies to their intimate partners—in one study, 97 percent of the participants admitted that they had lied to their lovers within the last week (Guthrie & Kunkel, 2013)6—and when they do tell serious lies about topics that could destroy their reputations or relationships, they tell them more often to their closest partners than to anyone else (DePaulo et al., 2004). The biggest deceptions we undertake occur more often in our intimate relation- ships than anywhere else.

In addition, lies can be consequential even when they go undetected. In general, people consider interactions in which they tell a lie for any reason to be less pleasant and less intimate than interactions in which they are totally honest, and lying to a close partner makes them particularly uncomfortable (DePaulo & Kashy, 1998). Despite its prevalence in social life, most of us judge lying harshly (Tyler et al., 2006), and people evidently know they’re living dangerously when they lie to others. Moreover, lying in close relationships undermines the liar’s trust in the partner who receives the lie (Sagarin et al., 1998). This is a phenome- non known as deceiver’s distrust: When people lie to others, they often begin to perceive the recipients of the lies as less honest and trustworthy as a result. This seems to occur both because liars assume that other people are just like them, so they assume that others share their own deceitful motives, and because they feel better about themselves when they believe their faults are shared by others (Sagarin et al., 1998). In either case, lying can sully a relationship even when the liar is the only one who knows that any lying has taken place.

Liars are also likely to think that their lies are more harmless and inoffen- sive than the recipients do (Kaplar & Gordon, 2004). This is a common pattern when someone misbehaves in a partnership, and we’ll see it again a few pages from now when we discuss betrayals: The recipient (or victim) of a partner’s wrongdoing almost always considers it more informative and influential than the perpetrator does (Cameron et al., 2002). Thus, what liars consider to be a small fib may be considered to be a harmful and duplicitous deceit by others if the lie becomes known. But that begs the question, how often do liars get caught? As we’ll see, the answer is, “it depends.”

6 And the other 3 percent may have been lying when they said they hadn’t. That’s ironic, isn’t it?

Lies and Liars

Some people do lie more than others do (Kashy & DePaulo, 1996). Those who are gregarious and sociable, and those who are more concerned with the impres- sions they make on others, tell more lies than do those who are less outgoing. In addition, people who have insecure attachment styles tell more lies than secure partners do (Gillath et al., 2010).

However, frequent liars are not necessarily more successful liars. High social skill makes people more convincing (Burgoon & Bacue, 2003), but a liar’s performance also depends on the level of motivation (and guilt and fear) with which he or she enacts the lie. Lies are typically shorter and less detailed than truths are (Newman et al., 2003) unless the lie is important and the liar is highly motivated to get away with the lie; when liars care enough to send their very best, they create scripts that are more convincing than those authored by liars who are less highly motivated (DePaulo et al., 1983). However, when they deliver their lies, motivated liars do a poorer, more suspicious job than do those who have less to lose and who are more spontaneous and relaxed (Forrest & Feldman, 2000). People who really want to get away with a lie tend to be more obvious than they would be if they didn’t care so much because strong emotions are harder to conceal than mild feelings are (Porter et al., 2012).

What goes wrong when lies are detected? Most of us assume that liars look shifty, avoiding eye contact, fidgeting, and generally looking nervous, but that’s not necessarily true at all. Liars can appear to be cool and calm, and those tell- ing the truth can fidget, and there’s no reliable relation between any particu- lar pattern of nonverbal behavior and lying (Levine et al., 2011). Really, there is nothing that people do, “not a single verbal, non-verbal, or physiological cue [that is] uniquely related to deception” (Vrij, 2007, p. 324); “there are no clear-cut guaranteed clues to deceit” (Frank & Svetieva, 2013). However, careful atten- tion to what people are saying—not just how they are saying it—can alert us to inconsistencies in their statements (Reinhard et al., 2011), and there may be dis- crepancies between their verbal and nonverbal behavior that give them away. A fascinating frame-by-frame analysis of television coverage of people who were emotionally pleading for the return of a missing relative was able to distinguish the liars (who, as it turned out, had actually murdered the missing person!) from those who were telling the truth (and who were genuinely upset); these were high-stakes lies, and the liars could not fake entirely convincing sadness and completely conceal their secret pleasure (Ten Brinke & Porter, 2012). Their faces didn’t seamlessly match what they were saying, but the discrepancies were sub- tle and hard to detect. And there wasn’t any particular thing that the liars were always doing that indicated that they weren’t telling the truth.

So, How Well Can We Detect a Partner’s Deception?

The problem is that the specific reactions that indicate that a person is lying can be quite idiosyncratic. People differ in their mannerisms. Some of us speak hesitantly most of the time, whereas others are more verbally assertive; some people engage in frequent eye contact, whereas others rarely look us in the eye. Lying is usually apparent in changes in a person’s ordinary demeanor, but to notice those changes, one may need some prior familiarity with the person’s style (Vrij et al., 2010). People can learn to detect deception in others: When research participants get repeated opportunities to judge whether or not some- one is lying—and are given continuing feedback about the accuracy of their judgments7—they do become better judges of that person’s truthfulness. How- ever, their improvement is limited to that particular person, and they’re no bet- ter at detecting lying in anyone else (Zuckerman et al., 1984)!

7 Researchers can provide feedback like this in a lab procedure, but it doesn’t often happen in real relationships. How often do you get exact and accurate feedback about your judgments of a lover’s truthfulness?

Intimate partners have personal, idiosyncratic knowledge of each other that should allow them to be sensitive judges of each other’s behavior. But they also trust each other (or their relationship probably isn’t very intimate), and that leads them to exhibit a truth bias in which they assume that their partners are usually telling the truth (Burgoon & Levine, 2010). As a result, intimate partners often make very confident judgments of each other’s veracity, but their confidence has nothing whatsoever to do with how accurate they are (DePaulo et al., 1997). This means that people are sometimes certain that their partners are telling the truth when their partners are actually lying.

In fact, as relationships become intimate and trust increases, the partners’ accuracy in detecting deception in each other doesn’t improve, it declines (McCornack & Parks, 1990). Now, if anyone routinely knows when your inti- mate partner is lying, you probably do. But any belief that our partners are completely transparent to us is probably misplaced. People tend not to be very skilled lie detectors: A sprawling meta-analysis of studies involving 24,483 research participants demonstrated that we correctly distinguish truths from lies 54 percent of the time (Bond & DePaulo, 2006)—but because we’d be right 50 percent of the time just by flipping a coin, that’s not very good. So, despite our considerable experience with our close friends and lovers, we usually do a poorer job of distinguishing their fact from fancy than we realize (Elaad et al., 2012). In fact, not many lies in close relationships are detected at the time they’re told; if the truth comes out, it’s usually later on, when information from others, physical evidence, and the occasional confession come into play (Burgoon & Levine, 2010).

Thus, people tell lots of lies, even in close relationships, and they get away with most of them. However, don’t pat yourself on the back if you’re currently deceiving a partner. You’re probably not as good at it as you think you are (Grieve & Hayes, 2013). And consider the big picture. People tell fewer lies in the relationships they find most rewarding, in part because lying violates shared expectations of honesty and trust. Keeping secrets isn’t easy. And even if your lies go undetected, they may poison the atmosphere in your relationship, contributing to unwarranted suspicion and doubt. And you run the risk that if they are detected, your lies may seem to your partner to be a despicable example of our next topic: betrayal of an intimate partner.

未完待续，持续更新中

The series continues to be updated...

Chapter 1 The Building Blocks of Relationships （I）【121777】

Chapter 1 The Building Blocks of Relationships （II）【152979】

Chapter 2 Research Methods 【596719】

Chapter 3 Attraction （I）【431743】

Chapter 3 Attraction （II）【213329】

Chapter 4 Social Cognition（I）【607185】

Chapter 4 Social Cognition（II）【388771】

Chapter 5 Communication (I) 【261909】

Chapter 5 Communication (II) 【230707】

Chapter 6 Interdependency 【228653】

Chapter 7 Friendship 【166249】

Chapter 8 Love 【240092】

Chapter 9 Sexuality 【598969】

Chapter 10 Stresses and Strains (I) 【511197】

Chapter 10 Stresses and Strains (II) 【767379】

Chapter 11 Conflict

Chapter 12 Power and Violence

Chapter 13 The Dissolution and Loss of Relationships

Chapter 14 Maintaining and Repairing Relationships