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Your Parents Hate Your Boyfriend Because of Evolution

“In general, evolution favors parents who give more resources to daughters whose partners are less supportive."
Image via striatic on Flickr

My parents never cared who I dated. Sure, they appreciated good manners and general social adroitness, but ultimately, as long as the dude was good to me, they were satisfied. That’s certainly not the case for everyone. Some parents are pretty vocal about disapproving of their children’s romantic partners. And as weird as it sounds, apparently their distaste may be rooted in some of our most innate behaviors.

A team of researchers from the University of Bristol and University of Groningen suggest that conflict between parents and children over the latter’s chosen mates might be a consequence of something as seemingly far-removed as resource allocation. Noting that these sort of conflicts occur across cultures—though certainly in some more than others—they inferred that mate choice is probably evolutionarily significant and therefore a potential source of tension.

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In order to explore this hypothesis, the team devised a computer model that cycled through a series of simulations where parental resources were distributed in different ways. To simplify things, they focused on female children only. According to Dr. Tim Fawcett, a co-author of the study published today in Evolution and Human Behavior, conflict is highest when parents do not bequeath their resources evenly.

“In general, evolution favors parents who give more resources to daughters whose partners are less supportive,” Fawcett explained. “This opens up the parents to a sort of ‘exploitation’ by the daughters—they can afford to choose a partner who is less supportive than the parents would ideally like because their parents will pick up the slack.”

Obviously, this is not going to sit well with mom and dad.

Being a computer model, however, many factors had to be streamlined or discarded. Fawcett and his colleagues readily note these throughout the paper. One major exclusion is that of external cultural influences.

“In strictly arranged marriages, parents have almost complete control,” Fawcett noted. “In many Western societies, the parental influence may be much lower. In future work, we’d like to look at how cultural variation in the degree of influence affects the predictions.”

Fawcett cautions not to read too much into these results. Although they serve as the first theoretical analysis of this sort of conflict, empirical data is still needed to confirm its accuracy in relation to real life relationships.

“We’ve identified some broad evolutionary pressures affecting human mate choice, but by no means can our study explain personal choices made by specific individuals, nor whether their parents approved or disapproved of that choice," he said.

But while it remains purely conceptual thus far, Fawcett believes the model serves another purpose: demonstrating that “evolutionary theory can help us to understand some of the most interesting features of human behavior.”