Geoffrey Miller, “The Mating Mind: How sexual choice shaped the evolution of human nature”

Matching interests

By viewing human evolution as a romantic comedy, we might understand not only our creative capacities for producing witty novelties, but also our ability to reinvent ourselves with each new sexual relationship. People act differently when they’re in love with different people. We tend to match our expressed interests and preferences to those of a desired individual. One develops a crush on a mountain-climber, and suddenly feels drawn to the sublime solitude of the Alps. One dates a jazz musician, and feels prone to sell one’s now puerile-seeming heavy metal albums. Should an otherwise perfect lover confide her secret belief in the healing power of crystals, one may find yesterday’s sneering skepticism about such nonsense replaced by a sudden open-mindedness, a certain generosity of faith that must have lain dormant all these years. In courtship, we work our way into roles that we think will prove attractive.

Chimpanzees have some capacities for «tactical deception,» for pretending to do something other than what they are really doing. But they cannot pretend to be someone other than who they are. Sexual courtship may have been the arena in which we evolved the capacity for dramatic role-playing. With each new lover, we experience a shift in image and identity. These shifts are rarely as dramatic as the changes of sexual personae adopted by David Bowie or Madonna with each new album. But they are more profound. Often, we may find it difficult to relate to our former selves from previous romances. Events experienced by that former self, which seemed so vivid at the time, become locked away in a separate quadrant of memory’s labyrinth, accessible only if we happen to run into the former lover. Our minds undergo these sexual revolutions, reshaping themselves to each new lover like an advertising company dreaming up new campaigns for capturing new market niches.