Valentine's Day 14 February 2001

Pic of the day: Yeah, right. Gain a heart and lose your head.

Romance as spectator sport

"Single. Bitter. Different." With this slogan someone described themselves, in an online forum, where there was a request for "nothing special on Valentine's Day". Well, every day is a special day at the Chaos Node! So of course Valentine Day is too. Even though we don't actually have that day in Norway, except those of us who have been Americanized by the Net.

Now, "Single - happy - different", that would make sense. It's nothing very different about bitter singles. Ask any tax-paying, rent-paying single who tries to make their own food and perhaps even have a social life. It is a couples' world out there.

As well it should be. For let's face it, if not for couples, very few of us would be here today.

***

I know a lot about romance. Not only did I read my aunts' colored weeklies, but I also read the neighbor girl's Romantikk. (I think it was the girl's.) I used to skip fast forward to "my first kiss", a feature in each issue. More lately, I have collected somewhere near 100 romance novels by the irrepressible Margit Sandemo. (OK, romance, magic, sex & aliens, but pretty heavy on the romance.) So for the benefit of my alien readers, a short explanation of romance as seen from a safe distance.

Basically, romance is like some ridiculously protracted foreplay. Believe it or not, but women seem to be able to draw this out over weeks or months, rather than get along to the bonking already. Romance is always about someone you are supposedly sexually compatible with, which for most women meens a man but sometimes not. Despite this, they seem to be unaware for much of the time that it's all about fitting the parts together. They just want to play and play and hardly make any progress at all. How can this be?

My favorite hypothesis is that it's like the mating rituals of many birds and lizards. You know that before mating it is pretty important to make absolutely sure that your partner belongs to the correct species. In birds this can be assured by making lots of elaborate steps and displaying the correctly colored feathers in the correct sequence until there is absolutely no doubt. In the same way, the human females demand that men go through some kind of drawn-out test in order to make sure they are not some closely related species of ape posing as a human. (For the males, of course, this is much less critical. Better luck next time.)

Another benefit of the mating dance is that the female bird can evaluate the size and coloring of the male, as well as his physical prowess, to ensure that it is a healthy specimen. In some species, the male will build a nest or deliver copious amounts of larvae or in other ways prove himself a good provider. Similar behavior can be found in humans. It seems particularly common to provide the female with food and entertainment at regular intervals. It can also be required to dance for long stretches of time to prove stamina and physical coordination while walking on hind legs.

So even though a male may want to get down to business already, this is a risky move. If he skips steps in the mating dance, the female may conclude he's just a great ape, and ditch him for someone more humanoid. Beware!

***

It has been supposed that the inordinate amount of energy put down in the mating rituals is an adaptation to the long infanthood of human offspring. By going through a long validation process, the couple is more likely to stay together for a long time, rather than start anew. This again ensures that the small and helpless human cub has two parents nearby, both of who have an interest in its survival. A random male may be less keen on this topic, so in evolutionary terms it might be smarter to have the father hanging around, at least for a while.

But ironically, in our high-energy environment, the mating play can often become a goal in itself. It is not just very demanding, but also very rewarding to the average human. They get an opportunity to dedicate a lot of themselves into a single purpose, which creates a sense of "flow" and wholeness. So once the romance is over, they start to look for more romance!

Of course, a truly advanced species would just have used an IQ test instead.