Romantic Decay As Cultural Drift

For the last year or so I’ve focused on the idea that our world’s dominant monoculture is slowly going maladaptive, due to cultural drift. But just as oceans are hard for fish to see, macro cultures are hard for humans to see. So I’ve tried to point to corporate cultures, as a more visible analogy.

Most firms die within ~5 years after birth. The biggest only last on the S&P500 for ~20 years, and only ~10% of the stock value of such firms is accounted for by their tangible assets; the rest is in their cultures, i.e., “the way we do things around here”. Firms seem to mainly die due to their cultures going bad, plausibly due to their cultures changing often due to forces that are mostly not aligned with adaptive pressures.

CEOs are aware of this drift and try to stop it via costly “cultural change initiatives”, which take ~5 years and are admitted to have failed ~2/3 of the time. Our overall pool of corporate cultures mainly improves on average only because of selection; bad firms die and new firms copy better firm cultures.

But most people haven’t lived in any one firm long enough to see its culture clearly go bad. Making me search for a more vivid analogy. I might have found one, in romantic decay. Most romantic relations start with high hopes, but then decline, maybe due to drift of the very local culture particular to that pair of people. Let me explain.

While the median romantic relation lasts 2-4 years, most personality or lifestyle incompatibilities should be clear within a few months. Yes, partner priorities, options, and market values might can change, but shouldn’t change much in just a few years. Yes, an initial novelty may wear off, but familiarity adds compensating benefits. Why then do such relations typically last for years, instead of only months (or forever)?

Evolutionary biology says to expect animals mating habits to be carefully optimized. But humanity’s superpower of culture has strongly shaped most everything we do, including mating. Consider how much such habits vary across human cultures. This leads me to consider cultural drift as a partial explanation for romantic decay, like how such drift causes most firm decay. (Two polls seem to confirm this view.)

Game theory says that human interaction patterns are set not only by our options, info, and preferences, but also by the fact that many games have multiple equilibria. Different equilibria have different sets of matching strategies and expectations. And it can be hard to intentionally change equilibria, especially in a large group.

The actions of a pair of people in a strong relation are also strongly shaped by a set of mutual expectations. And in a complex relation, there can be a large number of possible equilibria. Furthermore, while a pair might intentionally change their equilibria more easily than can a hundred, such change is may still be hard. Accidental changes, in contrast, may happen often.

We are quite picky about starting new romantic relations, and wait for unusually positive signals before doing so. We then approach our new romances with many diverse expectations drawn from songs, movies, etc., as well as from our family and prior romances. We also care a lot about the details of our partner’s motives and intentions, and their expectations of those in us, even though these things are hard to see.

We can thus fall into a wide range of initial relation equilibria, especially at first, when we know the least about each other. Also, we seem to follow norms of trying to see the best in new relations, and trying to at least not contradict our partner’s initial interpretations of us. And we often misinterpret random changes in our partner’s energy, mood, or focus as signs about their changing attitudes toward us.

Random features of further interactions may suggest new or refined interpretations, which we may then also try to accommodate. In this way, a relation may drift through many equilibria over the course of a few years. How that relation is experienced by those partners also changes as equilibria change. And since the initial interaction vibe was selected for being unusually good, the changes after that will on average be bad. Until the relation seems to someone too hopeless to continue, and they break up.

You may have vivid memories of how your past romances went bad over time, even though the two of you didn’t actually change much over that period, You might remember how the two of you repeatedly fell into different interaction vibes, yet had little idea of why, or of how to move to better vibes.

If you can see how hard it is for a couple to manage the drift of their pairwise culture, you might get how much harder it is for a CEO to steer his or her corporate culture away from drifting into dysfunction and bankruptcy over time. Or for our world monoculture to prevent its decline into maladaption. In all three cases, selection is the main force limiting decay. So if our world monoculture is undergoing little selection, it is likely also drifting into maladaption.