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15 - Emotional Commitment

from Part III - Postcopulatory Adaptations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 June 2022

By
Marissa A. Harrison
Edited by
Todd K. Shackelford
Todd K. Shackelford
Affiliation:
Oakland University, Michigan
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Summary

A commitment ensures I forsake other options and allows another to make predictions about my future actions. Emotions are physiological and psychological experiences that serve a survival function by motivating our behavior. From an evolutionary psychological perspective, an emotional commitment is a mating strategy with a psychological, physiological, and behavioral milieu naturally selected to forge an ensuring partnership with short-term sacrifices for long-term gains. Using Dawkins’ concept of genesmanship, people have the predisposition to commit to another because this long-term alliance will increase the likelihood of passing on their own genetic legacy. Women and men faced differing reproductive issues over the course of human evolution, and through sexual selection, the sexes have developed competing mating strategies to solve problems of maximizing fitness. Women have far fewer reproductive opportunities and far more substantial childbearing and childrearing costs compared to men, and therefore making a an emotional commitment to a man, and securing one from him in return, would have allowed for a better chance of offspring survival in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA) by access to provisioning and protection. With our minds still operating today as they did over the course of millions of years of human existence, women world-wide still seek emotional commitment to a greater extent than men. In this chapter, I discuss the nature of emotional commitment, and the significance of love, romance, and marriage. Moreover, emotional commitment to others (nonromantic partners) also serves a survival function. I therefore also discuss emotional commitment to kin (parent-child attachment, other family) and to non-kin (friends, pets).

Keywords

Emotional commitmentpair bondattachmentlovesex differences
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Evolutionary Perspectives on Sexual Psychology , pp. 399 - 425
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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