Eros

survival, reproduction, romantic love, sexual passion and jealousy

"Better a thousand times to fall a prey to smallpox or typhoid fever than to be inoculated with the germ of the Hollywood type of love-life, which is nothing but a bestial service of lust camouflaged by fine dresses and glamorous music." - Dr Theodore Graebner

Romantic love with candlelight dinners, avowals of eternal love and soul transforming passion is perhaps our strangest cultural ideal: that our ultimate fulfillment as a individual happens only when we lose ourselves in a sexual relationship – one whose intensity signifies the depth and essence of our spirit or soul.

Idealization of sex as a force of personal liberation and fulfillment would have struck the Greeks, Western culture's icons of pagan sexual liberation as very naive. To the Greeks, Eros was a powerful force of nature, volatile and destructive. It was an energy necessary for life to continue but one prone to sudden uncontrollable excess.

The Greeks invented a whole repertoire of images that communicated erotic destructiveness; insanity, burning disease and the violence of war – all expressed the lethal, mind destroying power of sex. Rather than a soul nurturing flame, Eros was the conflagration that burned Troy and left its plains strewn with corpses, lit by Paris and Helen's illicit passion.

The inherited imagery of Eros, the Greek Cupid, has been emptied of its sinister connotations and signifies instead our sexual sentimentalism. We feel no threat from his puny arrows, no danger in his targeting us. Yet to the Greeks, who knew firsthand the excruciating pain of barbed steel and infected flesh, the image was more grimly potent. Imagine Eros brandishing a rocket propelled grenade or more fiendishly as a suicide bomber and you can begin to understand why the Greeks would call Eros a "killer," a "monster," a "destroyer."

The Greeks understood that cultural and social controls were necessary both to limit the force of sex and to exploit its creative energy. Sexual taboos, the institution of marriage, emotions like guilt and shame, reason itself, all were devices for clipping Eros' wings.

Philosophers may have debated whether these devices ultimately could work, but no one believed that Eros could be "liberated" from social checks and limits and left in the hands of the individual alone.

Recently popular Western culture has liberated Eros.

Traditional social restraints are now considered archaic, puritanical inhibitions stifling the expression of our authentic selves and repressive impediments to the conjoining of true hearts.

Guilt and shame have been discarded as hypocritical and reason has been dismissed as the instrument of repression and neurosis.

The result of this experiment?

Venereal plagues, debasement of women, vulgarization of sex in popular culture, chronic dissatisfaction with sexual identities – all testify to the costs of slighting Eros' dark power.

A modern day Medea drowns her two children because her boyfriend does not want them; a kindergarten beauty queen is raped and murdered; countless women are stalked and butchered by estranged and deranged boyfriends and spouses.

Why is this happening? The answer is the nature of Eros itself and its potential for madness and violence.

To speak of sex in these deadly terms is out of fashion.

These days everybody endorses sexual expression, even literalist Christians, although they restrict it to marriage.

Radical feminists who meticulously catalog the depredations of heterosexual Eros are silent about the darker side of homosexual sex. Indulging in the sentimental rhetoric only blinds us to the poison dripping from Eros' arrows.

Consumerism and popular culture love a liberated sexuality.

Liberated sexuality sells products.

"Love based solely on one's pleasure in another is not love at all. True love moves beyond mere emotion, transforming itself into the kind of commitment that has staying power and the power to change lives. After 33 years of marriage, I believe that all lasting unions have one thing in common: two people who look past themselves and, instead, fix their gaze on the dignity and value of the other person, as well as the value of marriage itself - for couples, children and society as a whole. It is an acknowledgment, a celebration, of the truth that your spouse has a dignity given by God, who admonishes us foremost to love one another. While musicians reflect on the ephemeral nature of romantic love, and scientists research its cerebral workings, the more important study is how love can be nurtured and developed into healthy and enduring marriages."- Gary Bauer

"Let's face it, Valentine's Day is a consumer ploy. Romance and propaganda have long made steamy bedfellows. The relationship between diamonds and romance is not rooted in ancient mating rituals but in Machiavellian marketing techniques. Romantic love is built around the illogical premise that infatuation can be shoehorned into a permanent state of being." - Meghan Daum

"For me, Valentine's Day is a reminder that a marriage - like your job, your house, and your child's college - is a competition. What matters isn't that Cassandra and I have a healthy, growing marriage. What matters is that no else has a better marriage." - Joel Stein

"To be in love is merely to be in a state of perpetual anesthesia - to mistake an ordinary young woman for a goddess. "
- H.L. Mencken

"Lust is to the other passions what the nervous fluid is to life; it supports them all, lends strength to them all ambition, cruelty, avarice, revenge, are all founded on lust." - Marquis de Sade

survival, reproduction, romantic love, sexual passion and jealousy

"Men and women have always depended on each other for survival and reproduction.

In my study of 10,041 individuals from 37 different cultures, men and women rated romantic love as the single most important quality in selecting a spouse.

Across the Earth, people sing romantic love songs and pine for lost lovers.

They elope with loved ones against the wishes of parents.

They recount personal tales of anguish, longing, and unrequited love.

And they narrate great love stories of romantic entanglements down through the generations.

The German writer Herman Hesse summed it up best: life is "the struggle for position and the search for love." Romantic love is the universal human emotion that bonds the sexes.

The universal existence of romantic love, however, poses a puzzle.

From an evolutionary perspective, no single decision is more important than the choice of a mate.

That single fork in the road determines one's ultimate reproductive fate.

More than in any other domain, therefore, we expect evolution to produce supremely rational mechanisms of mate choice, rational in the sense that they lead to wise decisions rather than impetuous mistakes.

How could a blind passion like romantic love - a form of dementia that consumes the mind, crowds out all other thoughts, creates emotional dependency, and produces a delusional idealization of a partner possibly evolve to solve a problem that might be better solved by cool rationality?

To penetrate this mystery, we must start with the scientific evidence for mate preferences.

Across the Earth, from the coastal dwelling Australians to the South African Zulu, women desire qualities such as ambition, industriousness, intelligence, dependability, creativity, exciting personality, and sense of humor - characteristics that augur well for a man's success in acquiring resources and achieving status. Given the tremendous investment women undertake to produce a single child, the nine months of costly internal fertilization and gestation, it is perfectly reasonable for women to want men who can invest in return. A woman's children will survive and thrive better if she selects a resourceful man. Children suffer when their mothers choose "slackers."

Men, in contrast, place a greater premium on qualities linked with fertility, such as a woman's youth, health, and physical appearance — clear smooth skin, bright eyes, full hips, symmetrical features, and a slim waist.

These preferences are perfectly sensible. We descended from ancestral mothers and fathers who chose fertile and resourceful partners. Those who failed to choose on this basis risked reproductive oblivion.

Although these rational desires set minimum thresholds on who qualifies as an acceptable mate, rationality profoundly fails to predict the final choice of a mate.

"Murmuring that your lover's looks, earning power, and IQ meet your minimal standards would probably kill the romantic mood, even if statistically true. The way to a person's heart is to declare the opposite - that you're in love because you can't help it." - psychologist Steven Pinker, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

"One key to the mystery of love is found in the psychology of commitment. If a partner chooses you for rational reasons, he or she might leave you for the same rational reasons: finding someone more desirable on all of the "rational" criteria. But if the person is blinded by an uncontrollable love that cannot be helped and cannot be chosen, a love for only you and no other, then commitment will not waver when you are in sickness rather than in health, when you are poorer rather than richer.

Romantic love overrides rationality. It's the emotion that ensures that you won't leave when someone more desirable comes along or when a perfect "10" moves in next door. It ensures that a partner will stick by you through the struggles of survival and the hazards of childbirth.

Romantic love, however, has a tragic side.

The stories of great lovers of the past, in fiction and in history, are often marked by disaster. Juliet died of poison. Romeo chose to kill himself rather than live without her.

Romantic love suicides have pervaded Japanese culture for centuries, a final vindication of the intensity of a person's commitment. When parents and society conspire to keep lovers apart, lovers sometimes tie themselves together and jump off a cliff or hurl themselves into a well. The most perilous side of romantic love, however, comes not from a folie à deux, but from a folie à un — the demonic possession that consumes a person when romantic love is not reciprocated.

Unrequited romantic love is the foundation for fatal attraction.

The experience of unrequited love is quite common.

In one recent survey, 95 percent of men and women indicated that, by the age of 25, they had experienced unrequited romantic love at least once, either as a would-be lover whose passions were rejected or as the object of someone's unwanted romantic desires.

Only one person in 20 has never experienced unrequited romantic love of any kind.

Although unrequited romantic love is a perilous passion, producing fatal attractions and unwanted stalking, the dogged persistence it produces sometimes pays off.

One of the great romantic love stories in history is that of Nicholas and Alexandra.

Nicholas inherited the Russian throne at the end of the 19th century. During his adolescence his parents started looking for a suitable mate for him. At age 16, contrary to his parent's wishes, he became obsessed with Alexandra, a beautiful princess then living in England with her grandmother, Queen Victoria. Despite parental objections, cultural chasms, and a separation spanning thousands of miles, Nicholas was determined to capture Alexandra's romantic love. Alexandra, however, found him a bit dull and did not relish the thought of moving to the harsh climate of Moscow. She spurned his advances.

In 1892, Nicholas turned 24 and, having romantically loved Alexandra for nearly eight years, resolved to make one final effort to win her heart. Given this state of mind, he was devastated when she wrote saying that she had definitely decided not to wed him. She asked him not to contact her again.

All seemed lost.

Nicholas left Moscow immediately. He traveled across Europe, suffering rough terrain and treacherous weather in the journey to London. Although exhausted from travel, Nicholas immediately began to persue Alexandra with great passion. After two months, she finally relented and agreed to marry him. The young couple thus became husband and wife, rulers of the Russian empire.

Although Nicholas's romantic love was initially unrequited, their marriage proved a joyful one. Diary entries from each revealed sublime happiness, the great joy of their union, and the depth of their love for each other. They produced five children. Nicholas so enjoyed spending time with Alexandra and their children that the Russian empire suffered from his neglect. When forced to be apart, they pined for each other, wrote often, and endured great emotional pain until their reunions. Their mutual love lasted throughout their lives, until the Russian Revolution brought down the czarist rule and they were executed. They died on the same day, their lifelong romantic love never having diminished. Had Nicholas given up when initially spurned, their great romantic love would have been lost forever.

Once humans evolved romantic love, the bonds they created required protection. It would be extraordinarily unlikely that evolution would fail to defend these fragile and fruitful unions against interlopers.

In the insect world, there is a species known as the "lovebug."

Male lovebugs venture out in a swarm of other males each morning in search of a chance to mate with a female. When one succeeds, the couple departs from the swarm and glides to the ground to copulate. Because other males sometimes attempt to copulate with her, even after the pair has begun mating, the couple maintains a continuous copulatory embrace for as long as three days, hence the nickname "the lovebug." This strategy guards the union against outside intruders.

In humans, guarding a bond must last more than days, months, or even years if romantic love is to last a lifetime.

The dangerous emotion of jealousy evolved to fill this void.

Romantic love and jealousy are intertwined passions.

Romantic love and jealousy depend on each other and feed on each other.

Just as the prolonged embrace of the lovebug tells us that their bonds can be threatened, the power of jealousy reveals the ever-present possibility that our love bonds can be broken. The centrality of jealousy in human love reveals a hidden side of our desires, one that we typically go to great lengths to conceal — a passion for other partners.

To understand the origins of sexual passion we must introduce a disturbing difference between the sexes.

Everyday observation tells us that men are more promiscuously inclined than women. "Men found to desires more sex partners than women desire" would be no more likely to make the newspaper headlines than "Dog bites man."

Science has verified the everyday knowledge that men do display a greater passion for multiple sexual partners.

In one of our recent studies of more than 1,000 men and women, men reported desiring eight sex partners over the next three years, whereas women reported desiring only one or two.

In another study, men were four times more likely than women to say that they have imagined having sex with 1,000 or more partners.

Observing that men and women differ, however, is not the same as explaining why they differ.

There are compelling evolutionary reasons for the fact that this difference in desire for sexual variety is universal, found not just in cultures saturated with media images of seductive models, not just among Hugh Hefner's generation of Playboy readers, and not just in studies conducted by male scientists.

To explain this desire, we must introduce another key fact about human reproductive biology.

To produce a single child, women bear the burdens and pleasures of nine months of pregnancy — an obligatory form of parental investment that men cannot share.

Men, to produce the same child, need only devote a few hours, a few minutes, or even a few seconds.

Wide is the gulf between men and women in the effort needed to bring forth new life.

Over time, therefore, a strategy of casual mating proved to be more reproductively successful for men than for women.

Men who succeeded in the arms of many women out-reproduced men who succeeded with fewer.

An ancestral woman, in contrast, could have had sex with hundreds of partners in the course of a single year and still have produced only a single child. Unless a woman's regular partner proved to be infertile, additional sex partners did not translate into additional children.

As a consequence, men evolved a more powerful desire for sex with a variety of women.

This sex difference in desire creates an intriguing puzzle.

Sexual encounters require two people.

Mathematically, the number of heterosexual encounters must be identical for the sexes.

Men cannot satisfy their lust for sex partners without willing women.

Men's sexual passion for multiple partners could never have evolved unless there were some women who shared that sexual desire.

Three scientific realities provide compelling evidence.

First, the existence of men's sexual jealousy - the ominous sexual passion. If ancestral women were naturally inclined to be flawlessly faithful, men would have had no evolutionary catalyst for jealousy. Men's jealousy is an evolutionary response to something alarming: the threat of a loved one's infidelity. The intensity of men's jealousy provides a psychological clue that betrays women's desire for men other than their regular partners.

Second, infidelity is known in all cultures, including tribal societies, pointing to the universal prevalence of infidelity. Prevalence rates vary from culture to culture (high in Sweden and low in China), but infidelity occurs everywhere. Sexual infidelity causes divorce worldwide more than any other marital violation, being closely rivaled only by the infertility of the union. The fact that women have affairs in cultures from the Tiwi of northern Australia to the suburbs of Los Angeles reveals that some women refuse to limit themselves to a single partner despite men's attempts to control them and despite the risk of divorce if discovered.

A third line of evidence comes from new research on human sperm competition. Sperm competition occurs when the sperm from two different men inhabit a woman's reproductive tract at the same time. Human sperm remain viable within the woman's reproductive tract for up to seven days. Hundreds of "crypts" recessed within the vaginal walls of women store a man's sperm and then release it several days later to enter a marathon race to her egg. If a woman has sex with two men within the course of a week, sperm competition can ensue, as the sperm from different men scramble and battle for the prize of fertilizing the egg.

Research on sperm competition reveals that men's sperm volume, relative to their body weight, is twice that which occurs in primate species known to be monogamous, a clue that hints at a long evolutionary history of human sperm competition. Human sperm, moreover, come in different shapes designed for different functions. Most common are standard sperm with conical heads and sinewy tails designed for swimming speed. But a substantial minority of sperm have coiled tails. These so-called kamikaze sperm are poorly designed for swimming speed. But that's not their function. When the sperm from two different men are mixed in the laboratory, kamikaze sperm wrap themselves around the egg getters and destroy them, committing suicide in the process.

This physiological evidence reveal a long evolutionary history in which men battled with other men, literally within the woman's reproductive tract, for access to the vital egg needed for transporting their genes into the next generation.

Without a long history of sperm competition, evolution would have favored neither the magnitude of human sperm volume nor the specialized sperm shapes designed for battle. All this evidence - the universality of infidelity, men's sexual jealousy, and the hallmarks of sperm competition - point to a disturbing answer to the question of ancestral women's sexual strategies.

Evidence reveal the persistent expression of women's passion for men other than their husbands as a natural phenomenon that has occurred repeatedly and continually over the long course of human evolution.

Modern women have inherited sexual passion for men other than their husbands from their ancestral mothers.

Why else would the modern prevalence among past and present religious social cultures of limiting a woman's freedom exist?

As scientists have focused primarily on the obvious reproductive benefits of men's desire for sexual variety, the potential benefits to women of short-term sexual passion languished for years unstudied. The puzzle is compounded by the fact that a woman's infatuation with another man comes laden with danger.

An unfaithful woman, if discovered, risks damage to her social reputation, the loss of her partner's commitment, physical injury, and occasionally death at the hands of a jealous man. In most cultures women weigh these risks and choose not to act on their sexual desires.

The benefits to women who do act on their passion for other men, given the possibility of catastrophic costs, must be perceived as sufficiently great to make it worth the risk.

Historically, women may have benefitted from multiple sexual partners in countless ways.

The first and most obvious benefit comes from the direct resources that a sexual partner may provide. A few expensive dinners may not seem like much today, but an extra supply of meat from the hunt would have made the difference between starving and surviving during ancestral winters when the land lay bare, or between merely surviving and robustly thriving during more plentiful times.

Women also can benefit from multiple sexual partners in the currency of quality genes. The puzzle of the peacock's tail provided the telltale clue to this benefit. A peahen's preference for peacocks with brilliant plumage may signal selection for genes for good health. When peacocks carry a high load of parasites, their diminished health is revealed in duller displays. By selecting for luminescence, peahens secure successful healthy genes that will benefit their offspring.

Research by Steve Gangestad and Randy Thornhill of the University of New Mexico reveals that women may be choosing sexual partnerss with especially healthy genes. Women who have sex with different men can also produce more genetically diverse children, providing a sort of "hedge" against environmental change. Although genetic and resource benefits may flow to women who express their hidden sexual passions, our studies uncovered one benefit that overshadowed the others in importance, a benefit we call "mate insurance."

During ancestral times, disease, warfare, and food shortages made survival a precarious proposition. The odds were not trivial that a husband would succumb to a disease, become debilitated by a parasite, or incur injury during a risky hunt or a tribal battle. The paleontological and cross-cultural records reveal this clue - the skulls and skeletons show injuries mostly on males. A woman's husband, in short, stood a significant chance of suffering a debilitating or lethal wound. Ancestral women who failed to have mate insurance, a backup replacement in the event that something happened to her regular partner, would have suffered greatly compared to women who cultivated potential replacements.

Modern women have inherited the desires of their ancestral mothers for replacement mates.

In the words of one woman in our study, "Men are like soup - you always want to have one on the back burner."

Mate insurance provides a safeguard against reasonable risks of losing a partner. And mate insurance remains relevant today, even though we've conquered many of the hazards that felled our forebears.

American divorce rates now approach 67 percent for those currently getting married, up from the mere 50 percent figure that alarmed many over the past two decades.

Remarriage is rapidly becoming the norm.

Women's attraction to lovers has another mysterious ingredient: the puzzle of concealed ovulation.

Women's genitals do not become engorged when they ovulate.

Women have "lost estrus" and engage in sex throughout their ovulatory cycle. Conventional scientific wisdom has declared that a woman's ovulation is cryptic, concealed even from the woman herself.

Have the desires associated with ovulation totally vanished?

In the most extensive study of ovulation and women's sexuality, several thousand married women were asked to record their sexual desires every day for a period of twenty-four months. The methods were crude but straightforward: women simply placed an X on the recording sheet on each day that they experienced sexual desire. Basal body temperature was recorded to determine the phase of the menstrual cycle. These thousands of data points yielded a startling pattern. On the first day of a woman's period, practically no women reported experiencing sexual desire. The numbers rose dramatically across the ovarian cycle, peaking precisely at the point of maximum fertility, and then declining rapidly during the luteal phase after ovulation.

Women, of course, can experience sexual desire at any phase of their cycle. Nonetheless, they are five times more likely to experience sexual desire when they are ovulating than when they are not.

Women sometimes act on their sexual passions. A recent survey of 1,152 women, many of whom were having extra martial sexual liaisons, revealed a startling finding. Women who stray tend to time their sexual liaisons with their affair partners to coincide with the peak of their sexual desire, when they are most likely to conceive. Sex with husbands, in sharp contrast, is more likely to occur when women are not ovulating, a strategy that may be aimed at keeping a man rather than conceiving with him.

None of this is conscious, of course. Women do not think "I'll try to time sex with my affair partner when I'm ovulating so that I'll bear his child and not my husband's."

Psychologically, women simply experience sexual desire more when they are ovulating, and if they have an extra martial sexual liaison partner, have urges to have sex with him during this phase.

Ovulation may be concealed to outside observers but women act on the impulses that spring from it.

When that desire for men other than their husbands occurs, it's difficult for most men to tell when their mates are straying or may be likely to stray.

Spouses experience a signal detection problem.

Consider camping in the woods at night and hearing a sound somewhere in the dark. Was that the sound of a twig snapping, merely the wind blowing, or the unfamiliar night sounds playing tricks on your ears? Assuming that you have correctly detected the signal as a twig snap, the possible causes of this event are many, but they are not infinite. It could be a rock that somehow got dislodged.
It could also be a dangerous animal or a hostile human.

The signal detection problem is not merely about picking up accurate signals in the face of an uncertain and ambiguous welter of information. It is also about making correct inferences about the cause of the signal.

Since sexual infidelities are almost invariably secret, the signals they might emit are intentionally muted.

An unfamiliar scent, the purchase of a sharp new jacket, the running of a yellow light, a new interest in Beethoven or the Beastie Boys, an unexplained absence — all of these can be signals, but they can originate from many causes other than infidelity.

The jealous person experiences an elevated sensitivity to signals of infidelity: "A man may see a red flush on his wife's cheek, she may appear to be standing awkwardly, or sitting sideways on a chair, she has put on a clean dress, there is a cigarette in the fireplace... the jealous man sees a handkerchief on the floor, a wet cloth in the bathroom, newspapers in a ditch, and attaches to all the same import."

Consider the case of a European psychiatrist who counseled many couples referred to him in which one of the spouses experienced "morbid jealousy." Most cases were husbands who had delusions that their wives were sexually unfaithful, and these delusions destroyed the fabric of trust required for harmonious marriage. As he believed that extreme jealousy was a psychiatric illness that could not be cured, his most common recommendation was that the couples separate or divorce.

Many couples followed his recommendations.

As he was keenly interested in the subsequent fate of his patients, he routinely contacted them after a number of months had passed. To his astonishment, he discovered that many of the wives of his patients had subsequently become sexually involved with the very men about whom their husbands had been jealous!

Some of these women actually married the men who were the objects of their husbands' suspicions. In many cases, the husbands must have been sensing signs of infidelity. As the wives proclaimed innocence and declared that their husbands' jealousy was irrational, the husbands ended up believing that the problem was in their heads.

The problem of signal detection is how to identify and correctly interpret a partner's betrayal in an uncertain social reality containing a chaos of conflicting clues.

Jealousy is often triggered by circumstances that signal a real threat to a relationship, such as differences in the desirability of the partners

A man was 35 years old, working as a foreman, when he was referred to a psychiatrist and diagnosed with "morbid jealousy." He had married at age 20 a woman of 16 whom he deeply loved. During their first two years of marriage, he was stationed in military service in England. During this two-year separation, he received several anonymous letters saying that his wife was carrying on an affair. When he returned to America to rejoin her, he questioned her intensely about the allegations, but she denied them. Their own sexual relations proved disappointing. He became obsessed with the earlier time in their marriage, repeatedly accused his wife of infidelity, and hit her from time to time, especially after a bout of drinking. He tried to strangle her twice, and several times he threatened to kill himself.

He openly admitted his problems to the psychiatrist: "I'm so jealous that when I see anyone near her I want to hurt her. I have always loved her but do not think she has returned my affection. This jealousy is something I feel in my stomach and when it comes out of me there is nothing I can do about it. That is why I behave so madly.... My wife is always telling me that other men are stronger and can beat me.... I'm not a big chap or a handsome chap but my wife is so pretty and I don't think I come up to her high standards."

In other words, he perceived a difference in their level of desirability; she was attractive and alluring, and he saw himself as beneath her. When the psychiatrist questioned the wife in private, she admitted to meeting and having an affair with a married man. The affair was carried on in secret, and throughout the duration of her affair she insisted that her husband's jealousy was delusional. The affair began roughly one year before the husband was referred to the psychiatrist to treat "his problem."

Differences in desirability - when an "8" is married to a "10" - can heighten sensitivity to signals of infidelity in the partner who has fewer outside mating options.

Elaine Hatfield and her colleagues at the University of Hawaii discovered that the more desirable partner in the couple in fact is more likely to stray. Those who have been in relationships with both more attractive and less attractive partners have an acute awareness of how jealousy is attuned to these differences.

Jealousy is necessary because of the real threat of sexual treachery.

In a hazardous social world where rivals lurk, partners harbor passions for other people, and infidelity threatens to destroy what could have been a lifelong love, it would be surprising if evolution had not forged elaborate defenses to detect and fend off these threats.

Exposing these threats, and the psychological arms we have to combat them, is a first step toward comprehending the wisdom of passions that sometimes seem so destructive.

Jealousy can be emotional acid that corrodes marriages, undermines self-esteem, triggers battering, and leads to the ultimate crime of murder. Despite its dangerous manifestations, jealousy helped to solve a critical reproductive quandary for ancestral men.

Jealous men were more likely to preserve their valuable commitments for their own children rather than squandering them on the children of their rivals. As descendants of a long line of men who acted to ensure their paternity, modern men carry with them the dangerous passion that led to their forebears' reproductive success.

Extreme jealousy has been given many names — the Othello syndrome, morbid jealousy, psychotic jealousy, pathological jealousy, conjugal paranoia, and erotic jealousy syndrome.

Jealousy can be pathological.

Jealousy can destroy previously harmonious relationships, rendering them hellish nightmares of daily existence.

Trust slowly built from years of mutual reliance can be torn asunder in a crashing moment.

Jealousy leads more women to flee in terror to shelters than any other cause. A full 13 percent of all homicides are spousal murders, and jealousy is overwhelmingly the leading cause.

The view of jealousy as pathological ignores a profound fact about an important defense designed to combat a real threat.

Jealousy is not always a reaction to an infidelity that has already been discovered.

Jealousy can be an anticipatory response, a preemptive strike to prevent an infidelity that might occur.

Labeling jealousy as pathological simply because a spouse has not yet strayed ignores the fact that jealousy can head off an infidelity that might be lurking on the horizon of a relationship." - David M. Buss

satisfaction of the flesh

Life is short.

The pleasures of the flesh beckon.

One may live his or her life in the attempt to placate the needs and wants of the flesh.

No matter the road to the pleasure of the flesh all of these roads start out as wide, straight and smooth avenues.

No matter the road chosen all become narrow, winding roads strewn with potholes and boulders.

Flesh cannot be pleased.

This is impossible.

The flesh will grow old on the bone and whither.

The nature of flesh requires this to be so.

As flesh cannot be pleased what does that leave?

Nobility, honor and duty.

The societies of man scream for the elevation of the individual but fall short in teaching the one and only true way that one may be elevated. Power over others is the elevation that is generally accepted by society as the badge of success.

This badge of success is easily recognized in the accumulation of wealth or the attainment of celebrity.

The accumulation of wealth gives the holder the power to control scarce resources.

The attainment of celebrity gives the holder the ability to control scarce emotional resources of others.

The only true way to be truly elevated is to hold firm in treating
each individual with respect and dignity regardless of their wealth or celebrity.

An individual that accumulates excessive wealth does so at the expense of others. If a man or woman is accumulating excessive wealth then they have not been fair with the humans with whom they deal. A fair deal requires that both parties are equally enriched.

An individual that worships celebrity or wealth does so at the emotional and physical expense of the humans closest to the one who has been bewitched by the status of celebrity and wealth.

Nobility and honor comes from following Natural Law of God .

Duty has been exercised by following a course that one knows to be wise and correct.

"For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God's law; indeed, it cannot." - Romans 8:7 (English Standard Version)

Love for me had taken on the form and the being of my little Josette.

"We had met long before, in the rear of the millinery shop in which she worked at Tours.

She had smiled at me with singular persistence, and I caught her head in my hands, kissed her on the lips--and found out suddenly that I loved her.

I no longer recall the strange bliss we felt when, we first embraced.

It is true, there are moments when I still desire her as madly as the first time.

This is so especially when she is away.

When she is with me, there are moments when she repels me.

Love.

I dreamed of a unique, an unheard of idyll with a woman far from the one with whom I had hitherto lost all my time, a woman whose features I did not see, but whose shadow I imagined beside my own as we walked along the road together.

Bracelets, necklaces, rings. The sparkling of the jewels made me feel far away from them as do the stars.

A young girl looked at me with vague blue eyes. What could I do against that kind of sapphire?

I watched her bosom rising and falling, and her motionless face, and the living book that was merged with her.

Her complexion was so brilliant that her mouth seemed almost dark.

Her beauty saddened me.

I looked at this unknown woman with sublime regret.

She caressed me by her presence.

A woman always caresses a man when she comes near him and they are alone.

In spite of all sorts of separation, there is always an awful beginning of happiness between them." - Henri Barbusse

See Social Control

See The Corruptuion of the American Dream

See Satisfaction of the Flesh

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This website defines a new religious ideology to which its author adheres. The author feels that the falsification of reality outside personal experience has created a populace unable to discern propaganda from reality and that this has been done purposefully by an international corporate cartel through their agents who wish to foist a corrupt version of reality on the human race. Religious intolerance occurs when any group refuses to tolerate religious practices, religious beliefs or persons due to their religious ideology. This web site marks the founding of the religion aptly named The Truth of the Way of Life - a rational religion based on reason which requires no leap of faith, accepts no tithes, has no supreme leader, no church buildings and in which each and every individual is encouraged to develop a personal relation with God through the pursuit of the knowledge of reality in the hope of curing the spiritual corruption that has enveloped the human spirit. The tenets of The Truth of the Way of Life are spelled out in detail on this web site by the author. Violent acts against individuals due to their religious beliefs in America is considered a “hate crime.”

This web site in no way condones violence. To the contrary the intent here is to reduce the violence that is already occurring due to the international corporate cartels desire to control the human race. The international corporate cartel already controls the world central banking system, mass media worldwide, the industrial military complex of America and is responsible for the collapse of morals, the elevation of self-centered behavior and the destruction of global ecosystems. Civilization is based on cooperation. Cooperation does not occur at the point of a gun.

American social mores and values have declined precipitously over the last century as the corrupt international cartel has garnered more and more power. This power rests in the ability to deceive the populace in general through mass media by pressing emotional buttons which have been preprogrammed into the population through prior mass media psychological operations. The results have been the destruction of the family and the destruction of social structures that do not adhere to the corrupt international elites vision of a perfect world. Through distraction and coercion the direction of thought of the bulk of the population has been directed toward solutions proposed by the corrupt international elite that further consolidates their power and which further their purposes.

All views and opinions presented on this web site are the views and opinions of individual human men and women that, through their writings, showed the capacity for intelligent, reasonable, rational, insightful and unpopular thought. All factual information presented on this web site is believed to be true and accurate and is presented as originally presented in print media which may or may not have originally presented the facts truthfully. Opinion and thoughts have been adapted, edited, corrected, redacted, combined, added to, re-edited and re-corrected as nearly all opinion and thought has been throughout time but has been done so in the spirit of the original writer with the intent of making his or her thoughts and opinions clearer and relevant to the reader in the present time.

Fair Use Notice This site may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of criminal justice, human rights, political, economic, democratic, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the United States Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information see: www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.