Reply to Why do people refuse to be realistic about the consequences of long term relationships?

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[quote=Anonymous]

I don't think you know what you're talking about. The desire to procreate, which for women means pregnancy and for men means sex is most definitely hard wired into our biology. It outs hard wired into the entire animal kingdoms biology because it's how a species survives. That is not socialized into us.

Men and women can fight these urges or may not even feel them but that will always be anomalous because a species made up of women who don't want children would die out. It is a bad mutation for humanity.

Modern society has made the whole process more dignified but if anything we've built our societal encouragement around our biological proclivities not the other way around. [/quote]

I actually don't think it is as simple as you claim it is.  It's like trying to understand hunger and eating and metabolism.  There are biological systems in place that have an evolutionary basis, but those systems are complicated, and we don't fully understand the subtleties.  We never will if we keep insisting, "It's simple!"

In nature, you don't find that it always amounts to males with huge sex drives wanting to mate with as many females as possible and females wanting to have as many babies as possible.  Some animals, like crows and swans, mate for life.  Some animals have social structures wherein only one pair actually mates and procreates.  Some animals actually procreate less when there are environmental pressures because the survival of the species doesn't JUST depend on procreating; it also depends on the ability of the group to function as a group, and if there are too many mouths to feed and not enough food, the group breaks down.

So stop putting forth this simplistic notion that men biologically want to have lots of sex with lots of women and move on and women biologically want to have lots of babies and lose any sex drive when they get all of the babies.  That's not the full picture.  For one, many women have a enhanced sex drive when they go through menopause.  If it were all about procreation and making babies, then biologically, there would be no basis for that.  But it's possible that, as with animals who live in groups, sex is connected to bonding and lifelong mates because having lifelong mates helps ensure the long-term success of the entire group, the entire social structure.  I'm just saying that is a possibility.

All of that aside, I think people are unrealistic about long-term relationships the same way they are unrealistic about children. Look at all of the posts about people contemplating having kids and all of the posters who suggest that whether it's hard or not having kids, it's the "best thing that ever happened to them!"  It causes a lot of people who perhaps really don't want to have kids to feel pressured to go along that path.  I think the same is true of marriage.  I don't think it's wrong for someone to think marriage isn't for them, but women constantly get the message that they'll end up a lonely spinster when their beauty fades if they don't nail down a mate immediately.  And men who perhaps don't want to get married get pressured into it with the suggestion that by not marrying whatever girlfriend they happen to be with, they are somehow doing wrong by her (even if they are clear and upfront that marriage isn't something they want).

Marriage and kids are both things that, because of the social messages around and pressures, people can easily kind of get pushed along into without really considering if it is maybe not for them.  And then they are shocked when they realize how hard both of those things are, because we kind of gloss over that as a society.  Sure, we depict the struggles of changing diapers or dealing with the small issues that arise in marriage, but we treat them as jokes and always with the underlying message that "it's all worth it! it all works out!"  [/quote]

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