Is being possessive basically just on the spectrum of neediness? So basically if someone highly esteems someone else but lowly esteems themselves they feel like they need that person around because life seems empty without someone so wonderful in it. Because they definitely don’t see themselves that way. So their behavior gets weird. One way or another they try to control the situation. Needing turns into entitlement. This person is mine.

Idk I think that describes some breeds of possessiveness but it’s not what people are generally talking about. How does neediness turn into an actual feeling of entitlement? I feel like something else needs to be there.

I think a lot of people assume it’s the way we were raised. Gender roles, relationship structure examples, role models. This stuff gets imprinted on us and we can’t help it. That’s an easy place to blame. Everyone knows all of that shit is fucked up. But we like to think we are conscious individuals with free agency. And at the end of the day if someone chooses to be really territorial with their dates, maybe there’s a combination of unconscious and conscious stuff going on. Right? They may have been primed to see that as the normal way to be. But they are also choosing to make specific decisions, they don’t suppress it. So it sounds like at best that’s only part of the explanation.

Do sex and territorial aggression just go hand in hand? Is there an animalistic urge in all of us to enact this ritual? Two guys fighting it out over a girl, one guy kills the other guy and then rapes the girl over his pathetic corpse? And then the girl strings him along into taking care of her and the baby? Something like that? Is that what everyone secretly wants because it’s an instinctual unconscious impulse we inherited? Are we still animals on a certain level with fucked up urges?

Is it people wanting to right a wrong? A girl is tired of fuckboys so she plays their game to get back at them? After nonstop rejection a guy finally is able to date a girl but now he’s jaded and he treats her as a commodity he owns because he felt like an unwanted object on a grocery store shelf for years?

What do you think?