The Evolution of Love and Suicide

You don’t touch a man’s wallet, you don’t touch his wife.
—a former AFL champion footballer’s recent statement, following his discovery of a liaison between his now-divorced wife and a formerly trusted friend

If we want to be really serious about saving lives, we need to understand why people become suicidal, and identify how we can best tackle these issues before they reach crisis point.
—Helen Christensen, of the National Health and Medical Research Council Centre for Research Excellence in Suicide Prevention, and the Black Dog Institute

For courting is pleasure, and parting is grief,

And a false-hearted lover is worse than a thief.

A thief will just rob you, and take what you have,

But a false-hearted lover will send you to the grave.

They’ll hug you and kiss you, and tell you more lies

Than cross-ties on a railroad, or stars in the skies.
—“On Top of Old Smokey”

Betrayal of a sexual partner’s trust is a prominent cause of extreme prolonged distress and despair. Its contribution to fatalities is difficult to estimate. Suicide beneath a train is now a frequent unreported tragedy, with several weekly fatalities on just one metropolitan system (Melbourne’s). These, together with fatalities in dysfunctional Aboriginal communities, account for a considerable proportion of Australia’s awful suicide toll. Having risen by 2014 to twelve per 100,000 people, almost eight victims per day (2160 males, 704 females), suicide deaths now exceed annual motor vehicle fatalities.

Earlier this year my Melbourne city-bound train was held in stationary lockdown for hours between stations, with passengers ignorant of the cause, while well-practised emergency services (police, ambulance, fire brigade) cleared the line, then evacuated the passengers across the rails onto replacement buses, following the suicide of a young woman. These grievous events leave their legacy of traumatised train drivers and passengers, police, fire and ambulance staff, as well as the deceased’s grief-stricken parents and friends, siblings and perhaps children, who carry a life-long burden of reportage to potential employers or insurers requesting any familial history of mental illness or suicide.

Although I am a fairly hard-nosed scientific type, I have been moved by these awful suicide statistics, the recent personal experience (above), and explorations of sexual betrayal and suicide such as the ABC television drama The Beautiful Lie, to seek explanations. A starting point is one’s recall of inebriated renditions of the old song “On Top of Old Smokey” with fellow callow males in student days, devoid of any concept of the truth embedded in our gaudeamus-igitur-inspired bellowings.

In a spirit of belated repentance, may one say how compelling has been the ABC’s warning: an updated transfer to a contemporary Melbourne setting of Tolstoy’s timeless tale of seduction. A foolish wife (Anna) is persuaded to abandon her marriage of ten years, her devastated spouse and young son, for a “beautiful lie” to herself, despite her seducer knowing she was married; the tragic denouement is her suicide under a train in a Melbourne railway tunnel, rejected by her family and friends, betrayed by her manipulative and opportunistic false-hearted lover for his next foolish victim. One also recalls reading Tolstoy’s original, Anna Karenina, the classic tale of infidelities in the nineteenth-century minor Russian aristocracy; most of its warnings passed unretained through our immature prefrontal cortices. In last year’s ABC version, Anna is survived by two children: the young son she had with her husband, and her infant daughter fathered by her seducer.

From an evolutionary perspective, we now realise how it is that a considerable element of Anna’s seducer is found in many males, who are behaviourally programmed through millennia of generations to “spread their wild oats” (that is, their gametes) as widely as opportunity permits; whereas females are likewise genetically programmed to prioritise pair-bonding, a behavioural adaptation favouring improved reproductive success and the survival of offspring throughout their long childhood. Women hence value the support provided by a reliable father or partner. These behavioural adaptations are thought to have accompanied the slow evolution of increasing brain size, from Australopithecine one-pound one-pint chimpanzee size, to our present three-pound three-pint “big brain”, with its accompanying mental capacity for language and social co-operation, during the millions of years while low-browed progenitors of Homo sapiens lived as small bands of ground-dwelling prey species on the perilous and expanding East African savannah.

Did big brains and upright bipedalism lead eventually to romantic amour? Evolutionary anthropologists, including Rutgers University’s Helen Fisher (whose numerous widely cited publications include Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love), note that for most mammals, including other primates, procreation seems emotionally uncomplicated. In us, however, it is frequently accompanied by romantic love, on a spectrum between bliss and despair, depending on your beloved’s response. So: what is this thing called love? Could it be a Darwinian adaptive trait accompanying big-brained bipedalism, arising early in the evolution of our lineage?

Two ancient hallmarks of human evolution—upright walking (bipedalism) in ancestral “upright apes”, and their increasing brain size—should have favoured the emergence of love. Bipedal mothers had to carry helpless infants unable to cling to their backs: with her hands occupied, bipedal mum needed a partner to help provision and protect the newborn. Postcranial fossil material indicates that Lucy, the famous 3.2 million-year-old Australopithecus afarensis hominin, walked upright; she probably pair-bonded only long enough for her child to be weaned and walking. The advent of larger brains, some two million years later, probably extended these monogamous relationships. Our forward-tilted pelvis, adapted for bipedalism, constrains the size of the baby’s head at birth. As a result, human infants are born at an earlier, more helpless stage of development than other primate infants, and require an extended childhood for growing and learning. Longer-duration pair-bonding should therefore have enhanced our ancestors’ reproductive success rate.

Fisher notes that our ballooning brain, and its accompanying organisational features (social, linguistic, tool-making and so on), provided our ancestors with the means for seriously wooing one another, through music (a 43,000-year-old bone flute has been found) and through art, poetry and dance, which were all apparent by at least 35,000 years ago. Indeed, pierced shell beads found in a cave excavation at Pinnacle Point in South Africa indicate that a small Homo sapiens founding population were using personal self-awareness decorations some 100,000 years ago. It would seem that love (and lovesickness?) has been around for a long, long time, and is even of cosmic significance: romance and firelight dinners have been needed for our species to survive to the present time on our dust mote suspended in a sunbeam in the vastness of space and the immensity of time, with our evolved mental capacity for working out the nature of a mainly lifeless universe which has needed 13.8 billion years to evolve at least one life-form capable of an unfolding comprehension of its cosmic origins. (“Ain’t love grand?”—and also, needful for cosmic comprehension?)

Three evolved behavioural “core brain systems” are identified, which can account for much of our species’ reproductive success; also, for our compulsion towards sexual infidelity:

Stage 1: Sex drive, or libido, which evolved to initiate mating with a range of partners.

Stage 2: Attraction, or passionate early-stage intense romantic love, which evolved to focus one’s “mating energy” on one partner at a time. As one 1950s song told us, “The sweetest thing you’ll ever learn, is just to love, and be loved in return.”

Stage 3: Attachment, or companionate deep feelings of union with a partner, which evolved to form a pair bond for rearing the young as a team.

Love can commence with any of these three; for example, sex first, then love: or, love first, then sex; or, attachment first, then love. “Attraction” can begin as “obsessive thinking”—the “special meaning” of one’s beloved, an intense focusing on him or her, with feelings of elation, separation anxiety, mood swings, emotional dependence, possessiveness, craving, even shortness of breath and rapid heartbeat when he or she appears. The central idea is that love is a stronger drive than lust; worldwide, we can suffer greatly from romantic rejection by someone “camping in our head” (Fisher’s term); whereas rejection of, say, a request for a date, or casual sex, is unlikely to impel us to extremes such as suicide. Great distress to both partners can result when either spouse, experiencing Stage 3 attachment, finds himself or herself abandoned by a trusted partner who has succumbed to the “beautiful lie” of a Stage 1 or Stage 2 sexual predator who irresponsibly will “touch a man’s wife, or a woman’s husband”.

Fisher’s brain scans of both sexes have revealed, for those at Stage 1, that males show greater activity in visual integration regions, indicating a “sizing up” of potential partners as healthy, of reproductive age, able to bear and rear progeny. Females demonstrate greater activity in regions associated with memory recall, indicating their recall of the potential partner’s behaviour, achievements and misadventures, rather than merely appearance, to assist in choosing an effective partner for raising children. For those at Stage 2 attraction, the ventral tegmental and caudate nucleus emotional areas become more active.

As a possible guide for partner selection (or “match-making”): each of us is supposedly a more-or-less balanced combination of Fisher’s four “broad personalities”, biologically-based styles of thinking and behaving; also, there are four equivalent “Keirsey temperament types”, or “Platonic thinking styles”:

(a) The Explorer (creative), associated with dopamine; the Artisan temperament.

(b) The Builder (sensible), associated with serotonin; the Guardian temperament.

(c) The Director (reasoning), associated with testosterone; the Rational temperament.

(d) The Negotiator (intuitive), associated with oestrogen, oxytocin; the Idealist temperament.

None of this is to claim that we Homo sapiens are mere “prisoners of our mammalian biology”; but rather, that an evolutionary “biological influenceism” (not a “biological determinism”) plays a larger role in humankind’s sexual behaviours than we are often prepared to admit, and that many of us (as detailed in Fisher’s recent books and TED talks) now stray from these programmed behaviours at considerable peril to ourselves, our children, and our societies. In line with the ecological dictum that everything is connected with everything else, it seems that much of the self-centred unhappiness and dystopia afflicting Western liberal secular democracies has its roots in a selfish insouciance (“it’s only human nature, never mind the consequences”) which currently makes light of, even ridiculing, marital fidelity and the betrayal of a partner’s trust. Could it be that Western secular societies, in order to recover from much of this dystopia, need to re-emphasise sexual fidelity and trust (“forsaking all others”) between partners, whilst the initial passionate (attraction) phase of partnerships evolves to the companionate (attachment) phase which provides security for their families in a stable home life?

Following England’s multi-city outbreak of looting and arson in August 2011, the Prime Minister David Cameron included unstable childhood in his denunciation of “welfarism-induced moral collapse”:

Irresponsibility. Selfishness. Behaving as if your choices have no consequences. Children without fathers. Schools without discipline. Reward without effort. Crime without punishment. Rights without responsibilities. Communities without control. Some of the worst aspects of human nature tolerated, indulged … even incentivised, by a state and its agencies, in parts literally demoralised.

I am not particularly enamoured of many ABC television dramas; their content and presentation frequently seem skewed uncritically in favour of portrayals of self-centred, self-indulgent and somewhat vacuous characters (for example, in the highly praised The Slap), whose self-inflicted messy lives are of no particular interest. In other words, the ABC “holds up a mirror” to, and in support of, the sexually promiscuous society which it has helped to create. To a considerable extent, that would also apply to the Skeet character in The Beautiful Lie, and to the ease with which the foolish Anna character allowed herself to be drawn into a betrayal of her home and family; also, to the infidelities of other characters. Indeed, critics have pointed to its early rejection by some 10 per cent of its first episode viewers, who could not accept that a beautiful intelligent woman could allow herself to be so easily beguiled, duped, entrapped, seduced from home, husband and child by the shallowly unattractive “hippie muso” Skeet character; even when she had been warned off by his mother, and despite his shameful public abandonment of his fiancée in order to pursue her, in full knowledge that she was another man’s wife. Her vulnerability arose from her no-longer-passionate, but now “safe and unexciting” companionate marriage.

Tolstoy’s tale of instant irresistible attraction (or instant infatuation?), and the ABC’s update, although set in contemporary Melbourne’s seemingly less romantic, more sexually cynical climate, might well strike a guilty chord in every male who, having won a woman’s love, has then heartlessly abandoned a loving partner, betraying her emotional investment and reliance on him, causing prolonged distress which, in extreme cases, results in suicide. The portrayal of the story’s characters, in particular the self-inflicted misfortunes of Anna, and her abandonment by her lover and unsympathetically judgmental former friends and family, achieves an atmosphere as ominous and finally harrowing as the original television presentation, some decades ago, with its final scene on a fog-bound night at St Petersburg station as a crowd of horrified onlookers gathered around the locomotive under which the distraught Anna Karenina had cast herself.

Sarah Snook, playing Anna, brought considerable dramatic power to her plight, following her betrayal and rejection by her seducer, for whom she had left her home despite her early premonition of “smashed-up bones and blood”. She lost her young son’s love to her abandoned husband’s new-found partner, and received little sympathy from former friends and relatives (with the exception of her brother and his friend). This unbearable personal disaster cost her life, alone, under awful circumstances. It constitutes a grievous warning to all women not to allow themselves to be seduced from partners and children by men unworthy of their affections; it also reproaches all predatory men who have generated and then betrayed the trust of a partner, and warns of their consequent responsibility for abandoned homes and families.

It seems to me that “On Top of Old Smokey” sums up what the entire cast compellingly portrayed, with full credit also to the others involved in this modern adaptation of Anna Karenina. The ABC might even consider a dramatisation of the post-suicide consequences, perhaps as a further warning of the grief and guilt awaiting a suicide’s contemporaries, and the probable lifelong consequences for a suicidal parent’s children. Such a sequel might perhaps portray Anna’s grief-and-guilt-ridden funeral, and its aftermath, with all its dramatic possibilities. It could follow events in the lives of The Beautiful Lie’s characters, with their “flashback memories” of the ever young and beautiful Anna, and even her “dream-spirit” appearing (as the appalling Skeet appeared to her during her moments of final despair and desolation) to occasionally console and guide her young son and infant daughter through their teen and young adult years. I am one viewer of this compelling ABC series and its evolutionary-based behavioural implications (“know thyself” in order to avoid the consequences of betrayed love), who would await with interest such a sequel. One suspects there would be many others of like mind.

Never hang your affections on a green willow tree.

For the leaves they will wither, and the roots they will die,

And you’ll be forsaken, and never know why.