The Social Animal

CHAPTER 2 THE MAP MELD

ROB AND JULIA WERE WONDERFULLY HAPPY IN THE FIRST few months after their wedding, but they were also engaged, as newlyweds must be, in the map meld. Each of them had come into the marriage with a certain unconscious mental map of how day-to-day life worked. Now that their lives were permanently joined, they were discovering that their maps did not entirely cohere. It was not the big differences they noticed, but the little patterns of existence that they had never even thought of.

Julia assumed that dishes should be rinsed and put in the dishwasher as they are soiled. Rob assumed that dishes should be left in the sink for the day and then cleaned all at once in the evening. Julia assumed that toilet paper should roll clockwise so the loose sheets furl out the front. In Rob’s house the toilet paper had always rolled counterclockwise so that the sheets furled out the back.

For Rob, reading the morning paper was a solitary activity done in silence by two people who happened to be sitting together. For Julia, the morning paper was a social activity and an occasion for conversation and observations about the state of the world. When Rob went to the grocery store, he bought distinct meal products—a package of tortellini, a frozen pizza, a quiche. When Julia went to the store she bought ingredients—eggs, sugar, flour—and Rob was amazed that she could spend $200 and when she came back there was still nothing for dinner.

These contrasts did not really bother them, for they were in that early stage of marriage when couples still have time to go running together and have sex afterward. In this mode, they slowly and sensitively negotiated the bargain of their new interdependence.

First came the novelty phase, when they were tickled by the interesting new habits each brought into the other’s lives. For example, Rob was fascinated by Julia’s ferocious attachment to sock wearing. Julia was game for any naked erotic activity he could fantasize about, so long as she was permitted to wear socks while performing it. She could work herself up into a sweaty, panting heat, but apparently blood flow didn’t extend to her lower extremities, and if you really wanted to remove those white anklets, it would be like prying a rifle from the president of the NRA—you were going to have to rip them from her cold, dead toes.

Julia, meanwhile, had never seen anybody so much in the habit of buying toothpaste during every trip to the drugstore. Rob bought a tube a week, as if Martians were about to invade us for our Crest. She was also tickled by his pattern of attention. Rob was intensely interested in any event happening thousands of miles away, especially if it was covered by SportsCenter, but any event directly impinging upon his own emotions and inner state entered the zone of negative interest. He was incapable of focus.

Gradually they entered the second stage of map melding, the stage of precampaign planning. A house divided against itself cannot stand. Both Rob and Julia subliminally understood that the quirks that seemed so charming and lovable in the early stages of marriage—Julia’s tendency to fire up the laptop in bed at six a.m., Rob’s feigned Laddie Helpless in the face of any domestic chore—would cause the other to harbor homicidal urges once the first blush of matrimonial bliss expired.

And so they began to make little mental checklists of Things That Would Have to Change. But they were sensitive enough not to be Maoist about it. They had somehow absorbed the fact that cultural revolutions lead to angry backlashes or prolonged bursts of passive-aggressive withdrawal, and so reforming the other person’s habits would have to be a gradual process.

Especially in the first few months, Julia watched Rob the way Jane Goodall watched chimpanzees, with rapt attention and with a sense of constant surprise about the behavior patterns he exhibited. The man had absolutely no interest in artisanal cheeses or any subtle flavors, yet get him within 150 yards of a Brookstone store in the mall, and suddenly he became rapt at the thought of indoor putting greens with automatic ball return. He considered himself a neat man, but neatness for him consisted of taking everything that had been cluttering the countertops and shoving them willy-nilly in the nearest available drawers. He never laid out the pieces he would need in preparation for some assembly project. His simply dove right into the project and spent hours in the middle of it trying to figure out where everything was. He was apparently smarter than every football coach he had ever watched, but lacked the foresight to see that leaving your shoes in the path that leads from the bed to the bathroom might create problems in the middle of the night.

Then there was the night of the movie ticket. One night, Rob was walking home from work and he walked past a theater that had seats available for a film he had wanted to see. He bought a ticket impromptu, as he had done many times during his bachelorhood, and called Julia to let her know that he’d texted some buddies to join him and that he’d be home late that night. He called in a happy, haphazard mood, and was utterly stunned when he sensed that the temperature on the other end of the call had dropped two hundred degrees. He could hear Julia doing the sort of breathing exercises one does when one is trying to restrain an impulse to put an ax in another person’s head. It soon became clear that, in fact, he would not be going to the movies that night. It became clear that these sorts of spontaneous larks would no longer be a regular feature of his life and that marriage was not simply an extended phase of boyhood, but with serving dishes and regular sex.

Rob was made to understand, in phrases—interrupted by long glacial pauses—of the sort one uses when trying to explain something to a particularly stupid preschooler … that life from now on was going to involve a different level of commitment and joint planning and that a certain sort of carefree, what-do-I-want-for-myself-at-this-moment thinking would have to go.

Once this unconscious paradigm shift occurred in Rob’s head, the relationship progressed relatively smoothly. Both issued their own domestic Monroe Doctrines, parts of their lives that they considered sacred, and where external meddling would be regarded as an act of war. Both were pleased by the loving acts of compromise each made on behalf of the other. Rob admired his own selfless nobility every time he remembered to put the toilet seat down. Julia silently compared herself to Mother Teresa every time she pretended to enjoy action movies.

And so commenced the division of marital labor. Both gravitated to areas of superior passion. For example, Rob somehow took control of all vacation planning, because he secretly considered himself the Robert E. Lee of the travel excursion, the brilliant tactician who could rise to any canceled flight, airport snafu, or hotel screwup. This meant Julia had to endure his Bataan Death March vacation schedule—six vineyards before lunch. But to her that was better than sitting down with a travel agent and going through hotel reservations. Julia, meanwhile, took over all aspects of the material surroundings. If Rob was unwilling to engage in discerning commentary during their trips to funky yet casual furniture stores, he could hardly expect to render the final judgments when the purchase decisions had to be made.

Marital satisfaction generally follows a U-shaped curve. Couples are deliriously happy during the first years of marriage. Their self-reported satisfaction declines and bottoms out when their children hit adolescence, then it climbs again as they enter retirement. Newly wed, Rob and Julia were indeed phenomenally happy and quite well suited for each other. And on most days they had sex.

Procreation

One day, about six months after their wedding, Julia and Rob woke up late and had brunch at a neighborhood place with country furniture and distressed wooden tables. Then they went shopping and grabbed sandwiches, which they ate on a bench in the park. They were alive to sensations of all sorts: the way the bread felt in their hands, the feel of stones they tossed into a pond. Julia absentmindedly watched Rob’s hands as he used a little plastic knife to spread mustard across his sandwich. Her conscious thoughts were on the story she was telling him, but unconsciously she was becoming aroused. Rob was listening to her tale, but without even thinking about it, he was looking at a soft small crease in the skin of her neck.

In the back of his mind he was ready to have sex right then and there, if a conveniently sized bush could be found. People used to argue that men and women had the same desire for sex, but, on average, that’s not true. Male desire is pretty steady and only dips in response to some invisible awareness of their partner’s menstrual cycles. Studies in strip clubs have found that dancers’ tips plunge 45 percent while they are menstruating, though the explanation for the drop is not clear.

That particular day in the park, Rob wanted Julia with all his body and all his soul. This wasn’t merely a Darwinian reflex. Rob had all sorts of internal barriers that made it hard for him to express his emotions. His feelings were there, but they were hidden somewhere inside in a place where he couldn’t easily grasp or understand them. Even in those moments when he did have a sense of what he was feeling, the words wouldn’t come to help him express it. But during sex, his internal communication barriers dissolved. In the throes of passion, he went into a mental fog. He was no longer aware of his surroundings, or how he might be perceived. His emotions for Julia surfaced with their full force. He could feel his own emotions directly and express them unselfconsciously. The quickie acts of copulation that Julia sometimes granted him as a favor didn’t really do this for him. But when they were both in the throes of passion together, Rob experienced the bliss of unencumbered communication that was the real object of his longing. There’s something to the old joke that women need to feel loved in order to have sex and men need to have sex in order to feel loved.

Julia’s desire was even more complicated. It was like a river with many tributaries. Like most women, Julia’s interest in sex was influenced by how much testosterone her body produced at any given moment and by how she processed serotonin. It was influenced by the busyness of her day, her general mood, and the conversations she’d had with friends at lunch. It was influenced by images and sensations she wasn’t even aware of—the sight of a piece of art, a melody, a field of flowers. Julia enjoyed looking at male bodies, female bodies, or anything in between. Like most women, she got lubricated even while looking at nature shows of animals copulating, even though consciously the thought of being aroused by animals was repellant.

Julia’s sexual tastes were more influenced by culture than Rob’s. Men want to do the same sexual acts regardless of education levels, but female sexual preferences differ by education, culture, and status level. Highly educated women are much more likely to perform oral sex, engage in same-sex activity, and experiment with a variety of other activities than less-educated women. Religious women are less adventurous than nonreligious women, though the desires of religious men are not much different than those of secular ones.

They say that foreplay for a woman is anything that happens twenty-four hours before intercourse. That evening, they watched a movie, had a drink, and before long they were playfully, then passionately, making love, heading toward the usual climax.

An orgasm is not a reflex. It’s a perception, a mental event. It starts with a cascade of ever more intense physical and mental feedback loops. Touches and sensations release chemicals like dopamine and oxytocin, which in turn generate even more sensory input, culminating in a complex and explosive light show in the brain. Some women can achieve orgasms just by thinking the right thoughts. Some women with spinal cord injuries can achieve orgasm through the stimulation of their ears. Others can achieve orgasms through stimulation of the genitals that, because of a paralyzing accident, they are supposedly unable to feel. A woman in Taiwan could experience temporal-lobe seizures and shattering orgasms merely by brushing her teeth. A man studied by V. S. Ramachandran at UC San Diego felt orgasms in his phantom foot. His foot had been amputated, and the brain region corresponding to the foot had nothing to do. Since the brain is plastic and adaptive, sensations from the penis spread into the vacant real estate and the man felt his subsequent orgasms in a foot that didn’t exist.

As they made love, Rob and Julia sent rhythmic vibrations through their minds and bodies. Julia had the mental traits that are associated with ease of orgasms—a willingness to surrender mental control, the ability to be hypnotized, the inability to control thoughts during sex—and she felt herself once again heading in the right direction. A few minutes later, their frontal cortexes partially shut down, while their senses of touch became ever more acute. They lost all remaining self-consciousness—any sense of time or where each other’s bodies ended and theirs began. Sight became a series of abstract patches of color. The result was a pair of satisfying climaxes, and eventually, through the magic of the birds and the bees, a son.