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24. What Are Couples Made of? Union Formation in High-income Societies

Chapter of: Human Evolutionary Demography(pp. 575–598)

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Metadata
Title24. What Are Couples Made of?
SubtitleUnion Formation in High-income Societies
ContributorAnna Rotkirch(author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.11647/obp.0251.24
Landing pagehttps://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0251/chapters/10.11647/obp.0251.24
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
CopyrightAnna Rotkirch
PublisherOpen Book Publishers
Published on2024-06-14
Long abstractCompared to the evolutionary psychology of mating, the evolutionary demography of unions is little developed. We know quite a bit about why and how people have sex, much less about why and how they have spouses. Yet couples continue to be a central building block of families, the biosocial tie within which most adults live, most sex takes place, and through which most children are made and raised. Arguably, sexual selection in humans happens through long-term pair bonds rather than short-term relationships. Evolutionary theory approaches unions as reproductive contracts: a precarious balance of conflict and compromise between individual reproductive and sexual strategies. Sexual strategies are predicted to vary especially with age, gender and resources, but also with ecological and social conditions such as increasing gender equality and lower fertility. This chapter discusses the formation of unions in high-income, increasingly gender equal societies from the intersection of family demography and evolutionary studies. How is selection of spouses affected by having more highly educated women in the population? Why does contemporary family formation often involve a stage of cohabitation before marriage? I argue that sexual strategies theory could move beyond the division into short-term versus long-term pair bonds, and suggest that cohabitation represents one mid-term form of temporal and psychological commitment to a romantic partner.
Page rangepp. 575–598
Print length24 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)
Contributors

Anna Rotkirch

(author)
Research Director at the Population Research Institute at Väestöliitto
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9429-1499
https://blogs.helsinki.fi/rotkirch/

Anna Rotkirch is Research Director at the Population Research Institute of Väestöliitto, the Family Federation of Finland. Her research focuses on fertility and childbearing motivations, family relations, and population change in contemporary Europe.

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