First, our young are born especially helpless, so that mother and infant are especially vulnerable.
Second, our young take an unusually long time to mature. That, in large part, is because our natures have been increasingly crafted for culture, which means that our young face an unusually large task of learning-- language, custom, ways of understanding the world -- in order to become ready for the mature roles in their societies.
For these reasons, it is of great value in the evolutionary game --where survival of one's kind is the goal -- for the male of the species to continue his role in fostering the next generation beyond the act of "mating." The children of a father who invests in his offspring -- as protector, as helper, as teacher -- are fortified in their own ability to recapitulate the success of transmitting their genetic heritage to participate in the future.
The bond of heart and body and soul between lovers who have created a sacred space for them to inhabit together, one might say, is something that has evolved with our species to provide the emotional motivation for male as well as female to maintain their connection, providing a scaffold around which a healthy family can best form.
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Made for LoveThe sexual and the romantic-love dimensions are both inherent parts of our human nature.
That the sexual dimension is a part of our inborn animal selves goes almost without saying. (Though, as will be discussed in later installments, even our sexuality has some specifically human qualities--and many of these distinctive qualities are also conducive to the formation of more stable family life.)
But also inborn to our natures is the yearning for romantic love. Despite the many cultural differences in the relationship between mates/lovers that anthropologists and historians can point to regarding things like sex and romance and marriage, science has now shown that romantic passion is not just a cultural artifact, but is also, like sexuality, something structured into our bodies. (Helen Fisher, for example, in her book Why We Love, provides much of this science -- about the way our brains are "wired" so that neurotransmitters will sweep us up in the power of romance and attraction and bonding .)
The intensity of our feelings of fulfillment or frustration, regarding any given dimension of our experience, is a gauge of the importance of that dimension to the survival of our kind.
Intensity in the experience of desire, and intensity in the experience of fulfillment in satisfying that desire.
Think of the person unable to breathe, and the urgent need for air, or the person parched with thirst, and the intense craving for water.
And think of the intensity of feelings involved in the human bond that transmits life into the future. Nature (meaning evolution) has underscored the importance of that lovers' connection by infusing the experience of that connection with unusual intensity along both the sexual and the romance/love dimensions.
From the feeling of sacredness that can infuse that space, we can infer that important life-serving business is involved.
We were made for love. In our bodies, in our consciousness, we are built so that we naturally yearn for the sacred space of lovers.
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The Ideal is Not All We FindThat space represents an ideal--ideal for individual fulfillment, ideal for the flourishing of the next generation. But the ideal is not all we find. For two reasons:
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