I wonder if evolutionary psychology would throw any light on this. You could imagine scenarios in which natural selection pressures could favour either words or actions depending on the context. If you can successfully avoid most of the costs of rearing children, then being able to rely on words to convince your partner you care about them and will make a good parent might enable you to keep several relationships on the boil at one time, increasing the chances your genes will pass down to the next generation.
By contrast, if you are more likely to bear the costs of bringing up children, evaluating your partner by their actions is a much surer bet they will stick around. Given women are disproportionately responsible for childcare (even now and much more so in the past), you might expect to see a difference in the words/action weighting between the sexes.
If I really wanted to speculate I could argue historical social norms provide some evidence for this. Think of the age of courtly love, when it was expected that your average nobleman would put it about a bit before settling down, and taking lovers was considered acceptable as long as you penned suitably florid odes of love to your wife. Meanwhile women were expected to be chaste before marriage and faithful afterwards.
Two big caveats: (1) my sole knowledge of evolutionary psychology comes from reading The Selfish Gene 30-plus years ago when I should have been studying for my finals (didn't do me much good, given I was studying physics at the time); (2) selection pressures apply at a population level and are not a reliable guide to any one individual.
I wonder if evolutionary psychology would throw any light on this. You could imagine scenarios in which natural selection pressures could favour either words or actions depending on the context. If you can successfully avoid most of the costs of rearing children, then being able to rely on words to convince your partner you care about them and will make a good parent might enable you to keep several relationships on the boil at one time, increasing the chances your genes will pass down to the next generation.
By contrast, if you are more likely to bear the costs of bringing up children, evaluating your partner by their actions is a much surer bet they will stick around. Given women are disproportionately responsible for childcare (even now and much more so in the past), you might expect to see a difference in the words/action weighting between the sexes.
If I really wanted to speculate I could argue historical social norms provide some evidence for this. Think of the age of courtly love, when it was expected that your average nobleman would put it about a bit before settling down, and taking lovers was considered acceptable as long as you penned suitably florid odes of love to your wife. Meanwhile women were expected to be chaste before marriage and faithful afterwards.
Two big caveats: (1) my sole knowledge of evolutionary psychology comes from reading The Selfish Gene 30-plus years ago when I should have been studying for my finals (didn't do me much good, given I was studying physics at the time); (2) selection pressures apply at a population level and are not a reliable guide to any one individual.