I want to share some of my recent reads. The first is about why women stray, and includes suggestions that men and women keep opposite-sex friends as back-up mates. The second is on how extreme rituals strengthen bonds between people. The third describes some poses and mannerisms women often have in ads, and the fourth is an article showing a preference of the sex of a child and certain qualities and conditions of the parents. They're not news but interesting and may be fun to talk about?

1. Keeping opposite-sex friends as backup mates:

According to the mate-switching hypothesis, scanning for alternative mates remains activated even among those in happy relationships. Sometimes that tracking occurs at low levels when newly available mates appear or when a potential mate’s attraction or interest increases. Sometimes it gets activated at high levels, as when a woman becomes increasingly dissatisfied with her regular mate and wants out of the relationship.

The back-up mate hypothesis contends that even people experiencing relatively high relationship satisfaction benefit from cultivating back-up mates because nothing in life or love comes with a guarantee. Our studies on this, led by the psychologist Joshua Duntley at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, find that both women and men report cultivating back-up mates – potential replacements for their current mate should their relationships implode. On average, both sexes list having roughly three potential back-up mates. People also report that they would be upset if their back-up mate became seriously involved romantically with someone else. Interestingly, women are more likely than men to report that they would be upset if their back-up entered a long-term relationship or fell in love with someone else. Women more than men report that they would actively try to prevent their back-ups from marrying someone else.

The high number of back-ups was surprising to me, but I do find it true to real life. I was also shocked that the women admitted to being upset if their male friend back-ups entered relationships.

2. How Extreme Rituals Forge Intense Bonds:

Dancing, jumping, chanting and even suffering as part of a crowd awakens our most primitive social instincts, producing that transcendent feeling of losing oneself into the group that Durkheim called ‘effervescence’.

Collective arousal + shared identity result in alignment of emotional states and are especially conducive of community and bonding. Synchronous movement is known to boost social cohesion, and rowers moving in synchronicity had higher levels of endorphins.

I think people in all types of relations naturally play up aligning views and values, but this underlines the benefits from going out of the comfort zone together. If not as intense as walking on fire like in the text, then at least ice bucket challenge type things. Let's discuss this idea + suggestions!

3. Goffman’s portrayal of femininity in ads:

I didn't share this for the intro, but it’s still interesting to read about feminine presentations, mood and engagement cues.

4. Stress Gives You Daughters, Sons Make You Liberal:

A growing literature shows that stressful events like natural disasters and political upheavals also affect sex ratios, even in humans. Florencia Torche, for example, found that exposure to an earthquake in Chile during the third month of pregnancy led to a reduction in the number of males born. [...] And, in perhaps the most troubling study, Amar Hamoudi and Jenna Nobles found that high conflict marriages lead to the birth of more girls. Cortisol, a stress hormone, is the likely culprit in the above studies; though if stress causes pregnant mothers to neglect eating, glucose could still be the operant pathway.

[...] sons, not daughters, made parents (of both sexes) more liberal and more likely to vote Democratic. Curiously, while daughters made parents more Republican, they also made them more pro-choice. When we dug deeper, we found that the only issues on which the gender of offspring affected parental opinion were related to sexuality. [...] And while daughters caused parents to adopt more conservative views toward sexuality, they paradoxically made them more pro-choice.

The article also mentions that having sons make the marriage last longer on average, but having adolescent sons make dads the least happy.