Friends Help Friends Keep Partners Faithful
Finding a partner is easy. That is, when you compare it to the longer term challenge of keeping them. You might date a person for a couple of weeks or a few months before you both decide to give it a go long-term. Then, you can look forward to a lifetime of worrying when they’re going to leave you, and for whom.
This is why so many of us use what scientists call “mate retention tactics”. These are behaviours we perform to keep our partners from ditching us or being snaffled by a love rival. Some of these behaviours are quite pleasant, like giving your partner gifts or expressing affection. Others are downright dastardly, and go as far as violence towards the partner or rival.
There’s been lots of research on mate retention behaviour, and I’ve covered it on the podcast before, but recently scientists have started looking beyond the love triangle of two partners and a rival. Do we recruit the help of our friends to keep an eye on our partners?
Todd Shackelford’s team of researchers at Oakland University in the US has been instrumental in formulating the idea of “coalitional mate retention behaviour”. They investigate how we set up informal surveillance networks, with our friends acting as spies, informants, and double-agents.
Last year they developed a questionnaire to test how frequently we recruit friends to keep an eye on our partners. Respondents state whether they have requested their friends perform each of a list of behaviours. As with individual mate retention tactics, some coalitional mate retention tactics are quite positive. A friend can suggest gift ideas for your partner: if your partner likes the gift, they’re more likely to stay with you and you’ve got your friend to thank. But coalitional tactics can also be rather nefarious. Has your friend ever followed your partner around to see what they’re up to? Talked to your partner to discover if they’re interested in anybody else? Or even tested your partner’s faithfulness by attempting to seduce them? Or (and this is a nice subtle one) has your friend ever mentioned a story to others that involved you and your partner to remind others that your partner was in a relationship?
In the past few weeks Shackelford’s team has published two new papers on coalitional mate retention behaviour. In the first, they looked at the connections between coalitional mate retention behaviour and how often people have sex with their partner during a typical week. The frequency of sex might be another tactic we use to keep our partners interested.
One of Shackelford’s students, Nicole Barbaro, headed up the experiment. She recruited nearly 400 men and women who’d been in a committed relationship for at least a year. All of the volunteers completed the coalitional mate retention behaviour questionnaire twice. Once while thinking of how a male friend had helped them keep track of their partner, and again while thinking of the help they got from a female friend. The volunteers also filled in the standard mate retention behaviour questionnaire, revealing what they themselves did to keep their partners from straying. Finally, the volunteers reported how often they had sex with their partner.
The team found that women who performed more individual mate retention behaviours also reported more sex with their partner. So men with suspicious girlfriends don’t have it all bad. Women who asked for help from their friends to keep their partner around were not more likely to have a lot of sex with their partner. For women, frequent sex might be an extension of their own mate retention behaviour, but doesn’t say much about whether they seek extra help from their friends.
Men are different. Men reported more sex if they were more likely to request help from their male and female friends to keep an eye on their partner. But we can’t know for sure whether this means men are using sex to keep their partners around (because they’re worried their partners might leave them) or if they’ve requested help from their friends to make sure they don’t lose a partner who’s always up for a spot of how’s-your-father? The direction of the effect isn’t clear.
Men were more likely to ask for certain types of help from a male friend than a female. Male friends were used to monopolise a partner’s time: to hang out with them when the man couldn’t be there himself to see what his partner was getting up to. Men tended to ask for female friends’ help with gift ideas, perhaps because they expected women to have a better insight into what their female partner might like as a present, but also possibly because men don’t feel comfortable asking a female friend to take on more underhand duties.
Michael Pham led a second experiment. I interviewed Michael about his previous research on oral sex back in May 2013, and you can listen to that interview here. In his more recent study, Pham wondered whether men and women are more likely to ask their friends for mate-retention assistance if their friendship quality is high or low. Do we ask good friends or bad friends to keep track of our lovers? You might think the answer is fairly straightforward, but if you’re anything like me you’ll be surprised at the results.
Pham asked around 400 volunteers to fill in the coalitional mate retention questionnaire. The volunteers also completed the McGill Friendship Questionnaire. That includes questions on how close we feel to a specific friend: can you trust your friend with a secret; will they help you when you need it?
The results of the study showed that male-female friendship quality was associated with more frequent requests for coalitional mate retention. In other words, we ask for more help from opposite-sex friends we feel close to. Makes sense. The same was true for female-female friendships. Women help each other keep tabs on their partners more if they are close to one another.
It was when Pham looked at male-male friendships that the results flipped over. Men with weaker bonds to their male friends were more likely to seek help.
Why can’t men count on their best friends to provide coalitional mate retention support? Pham suggests that it could be because men aren’t as comfortable as women are in sharing personal details with their same sex friends. Female friendships are usually based on the exchange of secret information about friends and partners. Men on the other hand… Well, put it like this: I’ve had some male friends that I’ve known for 20+ years and I can safely say I don’t know anything about them. If men can’t share their relationship worries with their male friends, we may be less likely to ask for help keeping our partners on the straight and narrow.
Another possibility is that men are especially concerned about being seen to poach their friends’ partners. Much male-on-male homicide is precipitated by sexual jealousy. A man who thinks his male friend is trying to seduce his female partner is likely to retaliate with violence. At least, he’s more likely to retaliate with violence than a woman would be in a similar situation. This means that it could be dangerous for a man to accept a request from a male friend to keep an eye on his partner.
It would be like the John Travolta plot in Pulp Fiction. Remember how Ving Rhames asked Travolta to take his wife, played by Uma Thurman, for a burger and a $5 shake at Jack Rabbit Slims? And how Travolta worried that Rhames might then suspect him of giving Thurman a foot massage, and chucking him out of a four storey window? This is the sort of thing that can happen to man when he agrees to help out a good friend, in a Tarantino movie anyway.
Barbaro, N., Pham, M. N., & Shackelford, T. K. (in press). Solving the problem of partner infidelity: Individual mate retention, coalitional mate retention, and in-pair copulation frequency. Personality and Individual Differences. Read summary
Pham, M. N., Barbaro, N., Mogilski, J. K., & Shackelford, T. K. (2015). Coalitional mate retention is correlated positively with friendship quality involving women, but negatively with male-male friendship quality. Personality and Individual Differences, 79, 87–90.Read summary
The content of this post first appeared in the 7 April 2015 episode of The Psychology of Attractiveness Podcast.
