Almost a decade and four children in, my husband and I have never uttered a certain four-letter word: love. More specifically, we have never said “I love you.” Why? Because the phrase is a bone-lazy shortcut for expressing affection, naff as chocolate-dipped strawberries. “… And can you pick up some loo roll on the way home? OK, love you, bye.” As that wise woman Agatha Christie once wailed: “I am sick of words … I love you, I love you, that parrot cry.”
By the time I was in my mid-thirties I had parroted those words to five men and whispered them mentally to a few more. Sometimes I had meant it in the moment, sometimes I had felt compelled to say it back—never had it resulted in a relationship that lasted past the flush of the first few years. When I got together with my husband I didn’t relish the prospect of sticking the same old verbal label onto a partnership that felt very different.
Besides, “I love you” is, I think, part of the package of modern love habits that doesn’t serve relationships too well. Without wishing to sound like some deodorant-shunning oddball, for years I have been gleaning lessons for my life by researching hunter-gatherers past and present. A decade ago a bout of serious anxiety led me to a psychiatrist’s office, where the good doctor remarked on how ancient our brains are, and what a shock modern life must be for them. It was a lightbulb moment—or rather a spark from the campfire moment—in which I realized that of course the way we humans have lived our time on earth is relevant to how we feel today.
The contemporary society that might most closely resemble our ancestors is the Hadza of Tanzania. They have been foraging and hunting in the same area for at least 50,000 years. A study comparing life satisfaction levels between the Hadza and a dozen developed nations found that the hunter-gatherers outscored them all. The question is, what do societies like this get right that we get wrong? What can we learn from our ancestors about how to live, work and love?
There are, of course, limits to how far we can draw back the heavy veil of prehistory to peek at the love lives of our ancestors. Every now and then some ancient stone schlong is found that gets tabloid headline writers excited (“Fifty Caves of Grey!”), but on the whole, Stone Age sex remains a mystery. What we do know is that, unlike about 95 per cent of other mammal species, human beings have long practiced monogamy. Love between partners evolved purely as a commitment device, an evolution-mixed hormonal cocktail to bind couples together long enough for children to be created, born and raised to independence.
Researching the roots of love has changed the way I interact with my husband. Sean, a surgeon, and I, both 43, met at university but did the will they, won’t they thing for 15 years before getting together nine years ago. We have four children (aged six, four, three and five months), and as we slump on the sofa after another day on the child-rearing battlefield an onlooker might be forgiven for wondering how exactly we have modeled our lives on couples living hand-to-mouth 50,000 years ago.
Dropping the “I love you” and finding practical ways to demonstrate the depth of our feelings instead is just part of the prehistoric approach to marriage that we follow in our household; an attempt to shrug off some of the baggage that burdens (and buggers up) modern relationships.
Here are the most important of our Stone Age–inspired lessons.
Lesson 1:
Root Your Expectations in Evolutionary Reality
In recent centuries enormous expectations have been created by that great rose-strewin’, tear-jerkin’ juggernaut: romance. Books and films tell us that love must fizz as fiercely in its 40th year as in its first. “The best love is the kind that awakens the soul,” Noah wibbled in The Notebook.
Relationships in the 21st century are creaking under the weight of these expectations. The more we expect, the more likely we are to be disappointed, which may help to explain why 42 per cent of marriages in the UK end in divorce. Studies have found that watching a rom-com can cast a dreary shadow over real-life partners, who alas are not scripted by Richard Curtis.
At the beginning of our relationship I admit I felt disappointed that Sean and I didn’t pull more arch-romance moves such as wandering through a foreign city for hours, lost in conversation as blue dusk dissolved to inky night. “Can’t we just get room service and watch CNN like normal people?” he would say. Eventually it dawned on me that my idea of how we should be was based largely on fiction, setting us up for failure.
These days I swerve the romance juggernaut and its corny tropes (“I love you” among them) and ground my expectations in Stone Age reality. “Love is only a dirty trick played on us to achieve continuation of the species,” as Somerset Maugham put it. To romantics this may be drearily prosaic; to me it is a helpful reminder to enjoy our partnership on its own merits, not measure it against some Mills & Boon yardstick.
Lesson 2:
Recognize That Modern Ideas About What a Spouse Should Provide Are Ludicrous
It’s now not enough for them to care for us; we want them to champion us, help us to grow, share our passion for obscure Korean movies. In the early days I was acutely aware of the ways my husband was falling short. A few months in we had a picnic at which I decided it was time to share my love of poetry. Halfway through my recitation of Jabberwocky he looked as though he wanted to gobble a cyanide pill. TS Eliot he didn’t “get.” Plath? “Weird.” Tennyson: “boring.” His favorite poet? Taylor Swift. I reeled. Where was my twin soul, my arty sparring partner? In the lingo I had inhaled from women’s magazines, I had a right to have my needs met. But seeing the relationship through a prehistoric lens shifted this nonsense. For most of the human story romantic partnerships weren’t isolated in the nuclear family but cushioned within a wider tribe of 30-50 people among which, we might assume, the social load was shared.
So I decided to outsource some of the roles that a modern spouse is often (unfairly) expected to play. Yes, I like having someone to talk about poetry with, gossip with, watch old Merchant Ivory films with, but who says they have to be the same someone? In wonk language this is called “diversifying your social portfolio,” and it’s strongly linked to wellbeing.
Lesson 3:
Be a Practical Team
An academic debate is raging about the prehistoric division of labor between men and women. A study published last year said women did a lot of the hunting. A study published recently said this is woke hogwash—men did most of the hunting while women foraged. But regardless of who was digging up tubers and who was spearing antelopes, everyone had a practical role to play in the business of survival.
The emphasis was on achieving together, whereas today it’s on endlessly talking things through together. Yakking away is the panacea to almost any problem, we’re told. Communicate, communicate. Consequently I used to initiate long debates that my husband christened “the 360s” (as in degrees) because they used to go around and around with no resolution. This isn’t unusual. The marriage expert John Gottman estimates that 69 per cent of the problems among the couples he has studied are never resolved.
So when I feel resentment brewing it’s not a deep’n’meaningful I initiate but a project: sorting out the forgotten corner of the garden, building a den for the children or repainting the kitchen. What I’ve found is that as we undertake practical tasks together—as our ancestors would have done every day—old irritations recede. A practical task can be worth several thousand words.
It’s not just the paired-off who can benefit from Stone Age–inspired lessons but the partner-seeking too. When it comes to sex we like to think we have reached the age of liberation: hook up with whoever you want, as casually as you want. This is all fine in theory, except we cannot liberate ourselves from hormones developed over hundreds of thousands of years. The surge of oxytocin (the bonding hormone) during intercourse means that for most women there is no such thing as truly casual sex.
Many a friend of mine, suckered by “sex-positive feminism” that says it’s empowering to “hook up” just like a man, has ended up feeling decidedly unempowered when their sex-triggered desire to bond is not reciprocated. One was recently joking to me about a colleague who asked her on a date. He looked like Frankenstein’s monster minus the bolt. He still said “Wassup?” in the manner of that old beer advertisement. He ate scotch eggs at his desk. He was, in short, ghastly. Then one lonely night she agreed to a date, slept with him, and now he’s perfection in human form. Alas, for him it was a casual thing; he has no interest in curling up together for Netflix binges. She, meanwhile, is gutted. “Why hasn’t he texted?” The Stone Age-inspired advice? If it’s a relationship you’re after, it may be better to delay intimacy until a certain level of commitment has been reached. This may sound terribly old-fashioned, but so are our atavistic instincts.
Look at dating and relationships through a Stone Age lens and modern scales start falling from your eyes. “Sex-positive feminism” isn’t really that positive for women. It’s not always good to talk (and talk). Your spouse is never going to be the human equivalent of a Swiss army knife, kitted out for your every need. Yes, for a new and refreshing take on love, try turning the clock back several millennia.
Clare Foges is a columnist for The Times of London
