"Did Romantic Love Evolve from Same-Sex Friendship in Humans?"
Anthropologist Aaron Sandel from the University of Texas at Austin proposes that human romantic relationships may have evolved from the close friendships formed by male chimpanzees, suggesting that the ability to develop close emotional bonds may have arisen in a common ancestor of the two species. Sandel notes that chimps don’t form pair bonds with their mates, but the intimate friendships that arise between male chimpanzees share numerous characteristics with human romance. He hypothesizes that pair bonds in humans rely on the physiological and neural architecture already in place in our ape ancestors for social bonds, especially same‐sex social bonds, and that “homosexual friendships may be the basis of heterosexual romance.”
