Birth and Divorce

I found another interesting item when I was looking at birth spacing.  In this book, Anatomy of Love, the author looks at divorce from a sociobiological perspective.  Her research shows that the worldwide divorce peak is around 4 years after marriage.  She concludes that there may be a "natural" desire for divorce at this point, and it is more a function of biology than anything else.

The idea is that four years is the time it takes for a woman to have a child and breastfeed for the usual three years that is seen in traditional culture.  After this breastfeeding period, a child is then no longer dependent on the mother for food, and can function more independently.  In other words, it appears that a relationship between a man and woman is only "designed" to last four years or so, the time necessary to have a child and nurse the child to a state of semi-independence.

I also read somewhere else (I can't find the article), that the first six months of a relationship are the most sexually passionate because the unconscious evolutionary objective is to produce a child.  After the initial six month period, if a child isn't conceived, then physical attraction subsides somewhat.  In the days when there wasn't birth control, this time period would often lead to a women getting pregnant.  Nowadays birth control short-circuits this process.