I Do, I Don’t : Some Say You Can Scratch the Notion of Romance After 4 Years
Pick a number from 1 to 10. Odds are better than even you will choose a 7. That, psychologists say, has to do with our numerical environment where 7 is a friend and talisman.
There is 7-Up and 7-Eleven, Plato’s seven wise men and Rome’s seven hills. We sail seven seas, list seven wonders of the world and lose at seven-card stud.
Seventh-day Adventists fight the seven deadly sins. Seven days of creation. Then there’s the seven-year itch.
“The four-year itch,” says broadcast psychologist Joyce Brothers. Excuse me? “In reality, it’s the four-year itch to switch intimate partners . . . which has been with us throughout history and is with us today around the world.
“It is just a theory . . . but if this is so, then evolution has programmed us not for lifetime marriage, but rather for serial marriages of about four years each.”
Helen Fisher agrees. But then Fisher developed the theory after examining data, discounting medians and realizing that worldwide, most marriages end at the four-year mark.
And on this Valentine’s Day, Fisher’s somewhat threatening claim is that studies from the Kalahari Desert to Kansas indicate “this four-year itch is going to be with us until the end of humanity . . . basic to the human animal is to form a pair bond, maintain the pair bond for a period of years, break the pair bond, form another. . . .”
It is called serial monogamy and favors no gender.
Fisher, a research associate with the department of anthropology at New York’s American Museum of Natural History, knows that birds do it. Bees do it. The jury is still out on educated fleas.
But, she says, the incurably romantic, carnation-waving, Hallmark-loving human animal reigns supreme when it comes to itching and switching. Even unmarried Fisher follows the Cro-Magnon pattern: “I’ve had some very nice relationships that were about four to five years long.”
Fisher insists, however, that the itch need not be scratched by a divorce judge. Psychologist Brothers suggests an easier and less expensive alternative for partners in a relatively new but largely oomphless marriage: “Buy a Porsche.” Neither believes that the existence of a four-year soft spot means society is verging on serial monogamy for the masses.
* Current U.S. Bureau of the Census statistics show that about 50% of all marriages in America end in divorce. “That means 50% of all marriages do not end in divorce,” Fisher said. “That’s what is key (to the issue) . . . that we are a cultural animal and we can work on these relationships.”
* Knowing thy enemy is another way of short-circuiting the four-year cycle. Said Fisher: “When you know it is there, you can pull out the nighties and change the lighting in the bedroom and realize you might be going through a more fragile time in your relationship and begin to work on it.”
* Humans no longer need claws to find grubs beneath bark. Will our quadrennial twitches also fade as did the dinosaurs?
Brothers hopes so “because there is so much of value to be obtained from a lifetime relationship with another person.”
* Young people, Fisher explains, are more vulnerable to the four-year itch. It also is an urge that fades with an increase in the number of children of a relationship.
“Margaret Meade (the late anthropologist) said something important here,” Fisher said. “‘That the first group of relationships (of a lifetime) are for sex. The second are for children. The third are for companionship.’
America, she believes, is in that third stage of connubial comfort. And that may be yet another legacy of the baby boom.
“We have this enormous population of 76 million people, moving through the American demography like a pig through a python,” Fisher explained. “They are in their late ‘30s moving into their ‘40s and that’s past the age of highest divorce risk.
“Worldwide, 80% of divorces occur before age 44. So there is every reason to think that these baby boomers are going to settle down in the relationship they’ve got now.”
Fisher’s research into the four-year itch tabulated divorce data for 58 countries and touched the Yanomamo of Venezuela, the Tamang of Nepal and the Joneses of Newark.
Her theory is supported by studies by psychiatrist Michael Liebowitz of the New York State Psychiatric Institute, and Dr. John Money, an expert in human sexuality from Johns Hopkins University.
Ashley Montagu, formerly of Princeton University, an author and intellectual known as both the eminence grise and the Alistair Cooke of anthropology, has read Fisher’s theory.
“It is, to coin a phrase, perfect rubbish,” he said. “In the first place, human beings don’t have any instincts. The only thing they have that scarcely resembles an instinct is a newborn baby’s sudden reaction to a sudden and loud noise, a sudden reaction to a sudden withdrawal of support. And that’s (only) instinct-like.”
But what of these proposed four-year itches supposedly reaching from primal ooze? “Cultural phenomena in a particular society in which people get married for all the wrong reasons. Plato, 2400 years ago, pointed out that love is a form of madness.
“The reasons that marriages fail is obviously that people marry for the wrong reasons. Love is not the right reason. It would be, if you really knew what love is.”
Then Love Is? “Friendship with someone you can depend on, someone who will never commit the supreme treason of letting you down when you stand in need of them, someone who will never tyrannize you. Friendship is the important thing--and it is the profoundest form of love.”
Yet surely world statistics should flatten any doubts that most marriages fail at the four-year point. Of course, Montagu said. But the failure is not biological. “It seems perfectly logical that it would take four years of shilly-shallying all over the place before an unhappy couple would arrive at a divorce. All this is explicable on psychological grounds.”
Fisher, however, points out that the research of Money and Liebowitz indicate that the four-year itch is no psychological craving.
It may even be the result of brain physiology.
Said Fisher: “Psychiatrists divide the love between a man and woman into two fundamental stages--the ‘attraction’ phase and the ‘attachment’ phase.”
The attraction period is usually a two-year romp through infatuation, euphoria, long weekends in bed and the high energy of Plato’s madness--and may be caused by increased activity in the brain of phenylethylamine and other natural brain stimulants.
The attachment phase also is a two-year affair--as the brain develops a tolerance for the aphrodisiacs and another set of brain chemicals kick in, the endorphins, opiates that dull the fires to bring peace, security, comfort and a little boredom to a relationship.
But then the flighty gray matter develops an immunity to endorphins. Phenylethylamine stirs again. Another firecracker is set.
“And why not?” asks Dr. Hyla Cass, an assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at UCLA. “We do have biochemistry, we are stimulated, and animal studies have shown there are pheromones (chemical secretions) that are perceived by the sense of smell and that lead to mating behavior.”
There is a further reflection of our 4-million-year-old habit, believes Fisher, in many of today’s tribal societies where women tend to nurse their infants for three or four years. Males remain with the mothers during this period of dependency. But, said Fisher, U.N. statistics show that cohabitation of the biological parents of 5-year-olds declines sharply.
And that, she says, should be enough detective work for Agatha Christie to accept that the human pair originally evolved “to last long enough to raise a single child through infancy . . . and the seven-year itch, recast as a four-year human reproductive cycle, may be a biological phenomenon.”
Yet good talk and communication, Montagu suggests, could be the perfect Valentine gift. Young marrieds, he said, might pause to consider the state of their union on this Feb. 14. Then decide remedies.
Communication, he said, is synonymous with community and “is not a wrestling match, is not a competition between a dominant and a subservient.” Montagu is 85 and has shared community with Helen, his wife, for 60 years.
Brothers, widowed last year after a 39-year marriage, sees a similar need for people to examine their relationships and reaffirm “the reasons why we fell in love the first time. And then emphasize the good things . . . not the things that have crept in and made us dissatisfied. . . .”
