Some of JP's thoughts on sex and love taken further - let me know if I'm out of my mind.

23 points12 commentssubmitted by shallowblue to r/Maps_of_Meaning

Evolution in our ancestors dodged the first threat from our massive brain by a clever trick – giving birth before it reached full size. A baby’s skull bones are soft so the brain can keep growing, and thus human evolution wrangled both a large brain and females who could still walk. But from this came more challenges. Any species you can name has offspring better equipped to survive than a human baby: a newborn foal is up and running after only a few moments, even newly hatched turtles can toddle for the ocean, but a baby is food for even the most hapless predator. Parents must remain close for at least a decade before children can survive on their own and this forced nature to equip us with caring feelings.

But now the mother was vulnerable, doomed not only to shield herself but a brood of helpless miniatures. While the males of other species can make their DNA deposit and vanish, the human father now risks his hard-won investment if his dalliance is only momentary. And so evolution is primed to provide the male with caring feelings too, and again for the female who encourages those feelings by reciprocating. Here is another positive spiral gifted by nature’s benevolence: the hormonally-charged madness of falling in love.

Many of the classic mysteries in the eternal dance of romance coalesce into clarity with a little nudge from evolutionary psychology. While each human being is a unique blend of influences both conscious and unconscious, factors that affect everyone reveal themselves as broad, stable trends that become recorded in myths, proverbs and folk wisdom well before being formally identified in statistical research. This is especially true for something both emotionally intense and evolutionarily discriminative (the two usually go together), and there is no clearer example than the vital complexities of human courtship.

The love bond for men generally only forms from a single sexual encounter when he unconsciously identifies the woman as a prime genetic vessel. Otherwise, he experiences the opposite, the love repulsion, which urges him to flee and find another target. But the woman has potentially booked herself in for nine months of vulnerability and feels the emotional consequences. This is the evolutionary basis for the common experience of an ill-advised one-night stand leaving a woman with crinkled bedsheets and heartbreak, as well as feelings of clinginess – which usually confirm the male’s unconscious assessment of the woman’s genetic unsuitability and propel him further away.

Once a male has hung around long enough to form the love bond, any threat to his investment of time and energy sparks rage – hence the tendency to pathological and possibly murderous jealousy. Men become more enraged over physical infidelity and women over emotional infidelity. One instance of a partner’s physical infidelity can lead to a male wasting all his effort on genes that are not his own but little difference to a woman as long as the love bond remains intact. Hence the long history of wives tolerating uncomplicated affairs – to a point. Emotional infidelity is an entirely different story: genetically irrelevant to a male (unless it threatens physical infidelity) while potentially devastating for the female who might lose her protector. Since female ovulation is covert, the male has no idea when a female is fertile which is another genetic incentive for forming a long-term bond. And so from evolution comes the deep human feelings of love and care that provides the basis for a family unit – and all originally evolving so much intelligence that brain size became a problem.