don’t go together like a horse and carriage anymore, like Frank Sinatra once sang. What has happened? As you can see from the statistic (English and Wales) marriages have gone down since the 70s and divorce rates have gone up rapidly. Divorce rates have been slightly decreasing recently, but only because people aren’t getting married anymore. Accounting for this fact, divorce rates are probably at a historic high.
Let’s start our investigation in the 1960s when the contraceptive pill was started to be used widely.
As you can see there is an almost perfect correlation between women using the pill and rising divorce rates. There is a lag of approximately seven years, though. This is the famous “Seven Year Itch”. There have been a lot of speculations about this correlation. A common one I have read is that the pill makes women unattractive (putting on weight). If even that makes sense to some people, I wouldn’t say that most people would be so shallow to leave their partner because of a few more pounds.
The real reason can be expressed in terms of evolutionary psychology: if a partner hasn’t produced offspring after a longer period of time (studies show that on average it is actually rather six years than seven years), it is the best strategy to leave the partner and find a new mate.
Of course, the pill has had many upsides too, above all letting people choose when to have children. It allowed women to choose long term careers, reduced abortion rates and probably also reduced crime rates considerably (fewer unwanted children means fewer children in danger of becoming delinquents).
The pill in combination with our capitalist economic system has made it possible that people can postpone having children and pursue a career instead. This the average age for the first child has jumped up to around 30 years compared to around 20 years in the 1950s.
For many people having children has become a luxury, which is absurd considering how well off economically we are nowadays. If and how many children people want to have nowadays is greatly determined by people’s personality. The more traditional personality types still want to have children, they merely start a little bit later than they used to because everybody wants to have a good education nowadays.
If you check the above table of distribution of personality types (MBTI), you will find that the more traditional S types have a higher distribution. This simply means that more traditionally minded S types have more children. Also, the more ambitious types (TJ), who on average have higher incomes, have more children. A male ISTJ/ESTJ female (ISFJ/ESFJ) pair would have the highest number of children nowadays, say a hospital doctor and his stay-at-home wife.
The more traditional types have a certain genotype of the OXTR rs53576 gene. GG types have been found to have more stable relationships and report higher marital satisfaction than carriers of the AA/AG genotypes.
The more traditional types have a certain genotype of the OXTR rs53576 gene. GG types have been found to have more stable relationships and report higher marital satisfaction than carriers of the AA/AG genotypes.
It has been interpreted that the AA/AG types are less social. However, I think those types are frequently intuitives and have a different kind of sociality. Intuitives might have lower social cognition (recognition of feelings, memory for names), however, they have a “thinner skin”, when it comes to emotions. That’s probably one of the reasons why intuitives are more prone to divorce. Personally, I know many intuitives who don’t want to have children in the first place. My hypothesis is that intuitives were programmed by evolution to survive during hard and unsettled times and a prone to postponing settling down until more settled times. The problem is that the right time might never arrive in these unsettled times. Intuitives are already programmed by evolution to invest all their resources in fewer children. This would be the most advantageous parental strategy in hard times.
In order to cement my hypothesis, I want to point out that contrary to traditional S types the more ambitious types among intuitives (NJ) have in fact fewer children, rather than more. How can this obvious paradox be explained? It does make sense when you consider that NJ types are willing to postpone reproduction longer than NP types and of course they want to have fewer children too, in order to optimise their resources on even fewer offspring.
The consequences of these patterns of marriage and child-bearing is that we will see an increase of SJ personality types in the near future and a (further) decrease of N (in particular NJ) types.
The consequences of these patterns of marriage and child-bearing is that we will see an increase of SJ personality types in the near future and a (further) decrease of N (in particular NJ) types.
Dedicated to my wife Alyona
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