Marriage and Mate Selection

As discussed in Chapter 3, some romantic relationships pass beyond initial attraction and continue to develop over time until they reach a state of relative permanence; the partners become “steady” dates, they move in together, they form a civil union or domestic partnership, or they marry. In this chapter, we examine research on mate [Page 62]choice and on marriage, cohabiting relationships, and other forms of committed, long-term relationship. Because marriage historically has been socially and legally defined as a heterosexual relationship, much of the existing literature—and thus, much of our discussion—is focused on the experiences and outcomes of heterosexual married couples.

Mating Systems across Cultures

The norms or general “rules” that govern mate selection and reproduction differ across cultures. Cultural anthropologists, ethnographers, and other social scientists have identified several mating systems that occur (with varying degrees of frequency) in human societies around the world. These include polygyny, which literally means “many females” and refers to a mating system in which men marry multiple women; polyandry (“many males”), which is defined as a system in which women pair with multiple men; monogamy, which encompasses both monogyny (“one female”) and monandry (“one male”) and refers to a system in which two individuals pair bond; and polygynandry (“many females and males,” also called cenogamy), which is defined as group marriage or a system in which husbands and wives share the same spouses (Fisher, 1989; Goodwin, 1999). Some marriage arrangements are more prevalent than others. One of the most comprehensive sources of cross-cultural information on mating systems is the Ethnographic Atlas. The Atlas contains data on a variety of sociocultural features (e.g., economy, living arrangement, family organization, mode of marriage, kinship terminology, community size) that characterize more than 1,100 human societies located in Africa, the Mediterranean, Eurasia, the Pacific, North America, and South America. In 1967, ethnologist George Murdock presented information on a subset of 862 of those societies in a special edition of the journal Ethnology. Examination of this information, summarized in Table 4.1, reveals that polyandry is much less common than either polygyny or monogamy. For example, only 4 societies (less than 1%) explicitly endorse a mating system based upon a single woman marrying multiple husbands. Monogamy, either between a man and woman who marry and then live within an extended family or who marry and then form a single independent family, is the predominant mating system in 137 societies (16%). By far, the most common form of marital arrangement is polygyny; a total of 713 (approximately 83%) of the societies included in the Atlas permit this mating arrangement. [Page 63]Polygyny is common in 379 of those societies and is practiced on a limited basis within the remaining 334 societies.

Table 4.1 Prevalence of Mating Systems Across 862 Human Societies

In all but a handful of human societies, then, women practice monandry; a woman marries one man at a time (although in polygynous societies, her spouse may have multiple wives). Similarly, although the data at first glance suggest a high frequency of polygyny, a closer look reveals that men also tend to practice monogyny; they marry one woman at a time. Based on his own analysis of the Atlas data, Pierre van den Berghe (1979) reported that only about 10% of the men in polygynous societies actually have more than one wife. Thus, the most frequent type of mating arrangement is that of one man and one woman. As noted by evolutionary scientists Martin Daly and Margo Wilson

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