Men and power – the online counseling

(Part 5 from: The Man-Woman-conflict from evolutionary-psychological view)
(How spiritual assessments from the primeval times guide and influence love relationships)
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No desire for a relationship

The imbalance of power within partnerships begins to entrench itself when one develops a stronger feeling of security for the partnership than the other, due to the consistency of everyday life. This security subconsciously gives him the feeling to have control over the relationship. This is the case throughout nature. If an organism obtains control over a certain situation, then emotions and motivations, which used to function as boosters, ceases to exist because they have become unnecessary. Think for example about a life form, which achieved its goal through an aggressive mobilization of physical strength. Subsequently, it will go back to a neutral emotional state and start to relax.

It is similar with the emotions of love and passion: These feelings decrease and even a feeling of boredom can occur, if one or both have reached a good measure of security in the relationship. Many of our love relationships start stammering over a time frame of three to four years, which can be proved by the worldwide divorce statistics and most likely have deeper biological reasons.

Husbands take their wives for granted and start slacking in their efforts which wives usually understand as a relationship: Intensive exchange of ideas and interesting conversations, nice walks, dinners at romantic restaurants, taking care of children, common festivities, and so on.

Men, who came to piece in a relationship, mostly display similar behaviors:

They become involved in their jobs, maintain their hobbies, possibly have affairs and leave their wives alone with all the other things, which still belong to a relationship. For them, the world is in its best order if they get to have sex twice a week as well. Sex doesn’t fall prey to habit very easily when it comes to men, because men have a much stronger sexual drive than women. Especially not when his wife has still been sexually attractive to him for years.

Males only sperm donors

To understand this relationship-lazy male behavior, one has to examine the origin of the reproduction strategy that males have practiced for millions of years. Over most of the time in earth’s history men solely functioned as sperm donors – admittedly they had to face the female selection and rival amongst each other – but other than that, they had a comfortable life. For the most part, men didn’t have to take care of the offspring or had to engage in parental care for the longest periods of time in world’s history.

For about four million years there has been the persistence in our evolutionary line, for a woman to have an enhanced need to have a man as a protector and provider by their side. However, only as long as she had to take care of a small child. Love – an emotional mix of spiritual and physical attraction – connected the prehistoric couple for the purpose of raising children. This archaic arrangement could only work because the woman lost her rutting time and developed a sexual drive even during her non-fertile days to keep him in line.

Over millions of years, nature developed the genders to such an extent, that a mutual addiction arose due to a relationship interlocking. The bait for this was: food, protection and emotional devotion; sex for him, because it was more necessary for him and she was always willing.

If a man gains an overlarge portion of security in his relationship, i.e. power, to have is sexual needs fulfilled, then it is “not his fault at all” when he slowly mutates into a relationship-lazy husband. The relationship situation, meaning the overly positive and accommodating behavior of his wife won’t give any reason to expect any dedicated behavior by him……Subconsciously, he falls back into the “primitive macho behavior”, which goes back to times when there were no family obligations expected of a man.

He acts like the primate pasha in a pre-humanoid troop of monkeys: Females are only here for THE one thing. Otherwise, they are totally unappealing, as the main attention is focused on securing power and status.

Talking makes everything worse

But what happens when a neglected wife becomes more and more unhappy about this condition and doesn’t know what to do anymore? “You finally have to talk to him, it can`t go on like that, you are going to break on this. You have to put your foot down.” is the advice of an empathizing friend.

In the first moment, the scolded is startled, shows discernment and pledges improvement, when the wife comes clean. Unfortunately, this improvement doesn’t last long and eventually, the negligent is back in the old habit. Consequently, the scolding is repeated louder and with even more emphasis.

They anticipate it already: The effect is dissatisfying again and in addition, the petulant one displays spite and resistance, even though he mustered understanding in the beginning.

In the guidebook, one can read that communication is the essence of a relationship. To allege wishes and to solve conflicts, couples have to learn the right style of communication. On one hand, this is just as right as it is wrong on the other. How can you explain such a paradox?

A non-hurtful, free of accusation and adult style of communication should be the tool of choice, when it comes to find compromises for factual issues, which both can live with. However, the expression of wishes and needs will not lead to success in certain presentations of problems. Problems can even be aggravated by this by this.

This difficulty is common amongst couples. It is imperative to look at this phenomenon from the evolutionary point of view. In general, the following situation is present:

The defendant has already taken on a state of mind, which shapes his behavior like this or like that. The plaintiff mostly plays an unconscious part in this. Out of understandable reasons, he does not agree with the way his partner runs the relationship, and would like him to bring on a change. He tells himself – if he or she only would want it – everything could be so simple.

He forgets the fact that there has to be an underlying emotional base for every Want. If this is missing, the Want is “in limbo” and the desired behavior ceases again in time, as it costs energy and time to do something without inner motivation.

To get to the core of this wide spread phenomenon, I can`t help but to make a few remarks about the functionality of our brain.

The Man-Woman-conflict from evolutionary-psychological view: next page

 

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