LOS ANGELES - Gentlemen, take note: If your wife has stopped calling you as much as she used to and you feel like you're being replaced, you might be right to suspect that there's someone else in her life. But it's not another man - it's another woman. And she's probably your own daughter.
While men tend to maintain a woman as their closest confidante throughout their adult lives, women's focus shifts from their spouse to their adult daughter as they age, according to an analysis of nearly 2 billion cellphone calls and almost half a billion text messages.
The findings, released this week by the journal Scientific Reports, suggest that women's urge to ensure the survival of their genes may be connected with the nature of, and shift in, these intimate relationships.
Identifying the most important people in someone's life is a tricky task for researchers, said Ruth Mace, an evolutionary anthropologist at University College London who was not involved in the study.
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"It's not politically correct to talk about some of these things," Mace said. "If I said, 'Were you equally close to your son or your daughter?' you wouldn't want to answer that question.
"But if you're looking at phone calls, you're getting a statistical picture that is quite unbiased."
That's why an international group of researchers obtained electronic communication records from 3.2 million customers of a mobile phone carrier in an unidentified European country. They looked for patterns among 1.95 billion calls and 489 million text messages over a seven-month period, noting the age and gender of the participants. The two contacts each person called and texted most often were deemed to be their first and second "best friends."
"No. 1 is very easy to distinguish," said physicist Vasyl Palchykov of the Aalto University School of Science in Finland.
