Celebs dance to Nature's tune

Posted by:  Dr. Helen Fisher
Topic:  What’s with all these celebrity couples having kids out of wedlock?

Why are so many celebrity couples having kids out of wedlock? Because they are rich and famous. And although this sounds glib, bearing babies out of wedlock can be an adaptive Darwinian strategy—particularly if you are rich and famous.

“Marriage,” Voltaire wrote, “is the only true adventure open to the cowardly.” It is an adventure. And swearing lifelong fidelity to (and responsibility for) another human being during a wedding ceremony has psychic pressures that “living together” simply cannot match. Moreover, it is much easier and cheaper to wiggle out of a bad love affair than a bad marriage, even when children are involved.

So if you can afford to raise your babies without taking on the psychological accountability and financial risks of marriage (and you can weather the social criticism), you would be advised by Mother Nature to buck tradition and bear your babies out of wedlock. Celebrities are not the only ones to adopt this strategy, however. In 1960 one in 20 children were born out of wedlock; today it is one in three. Moreover, today 40% of these births are planned, and many of these children are born to women over age 25.

Darwinian logic isn’t solely for the rich and famous. (By the way, many of these women will eventually marry.) But regarding celebrities: More interesting to me is why they say they have not wed. One Hollywood couple recently announced that they would wed “the day that all Americans had the right to wed.” This is to be respected, to be sure.

But from the Darwinian perspective, this couple is also collecting social capital, in the form of admiration, as they reap their reproductive gains. I don’t mean to be cynical about our human conduct. Poor people, middle-class people; we all engage in unconscious reproductive tactics to survive and reproduce. It’s natural to “think of the children.” The rich and famous are simply playing out a well-designed (albeit unconscious) strategy to win the mating game.