Love and slavery, two of our oldest human behaviors, may have coevolved, with romantic love emerging from various forms of sexual servitude as a type of evolutionary Stockholm Syndrome in which people held captive within sexual relationships were compelled to bond with their captor for protection and resources in exchange for loyalty, submission, and exclusive servitude. Our masculine animalistic drive to secure and dominate sexual resources, has evolved against a feminine nature that has bargained sexual intimacy for means of survival and security. As the famed writer Ian Fleming once wrote, "All history is love and violence.". Here we attempt to explain not only why humans often pair bond with sexual partners, but why the feminine remains captivated by toxic relationships and deviant partners, while the masculine craves female submission. Our human desire to pair bond and forge romantic relationships with selected sexual partners may be darkly rooted, deep within our inherent biological archive, forged from the fires of our often violent and lawless evolutionary history.
Pair Bonding in humans is the process by which we engage in sexual intimacy with primarily a single exclusive partner for an extended period of time, and in some cases for life. Humans are the only members of the Hominoidea superfamily or Great Apes, known to pair bond, however it's possible other recent human species such as Neanderthal and Erectus had also engaged in some type of monogamous pair bonding as well. In pair bonding species such as humans, emotional attachments and psychological dependencies are forged between sexual partners that are experienced as what we typically identify as love, in addition to attachment, possessiveness and jealousy. Oftentimes these emotions can be so overwhelmingly powerful they hold us captive, directing our romantic behavior until death. Whenever these bonds become threatened, for example by a rival or waning interest, neurobiological processes can trigger rage, causing us to act out violently should the bond become severed without our mutual agreement. CDC statistics show that 55% of all homicides in the United States are the result of IPV (Intimate Partner Violence), while an estimated 42% of all suicides are estimated to be related to relationship woes. These statistics highlight the dangerous and often violent behavior within the human species that inseparably pervades much of our mating and pair bonding psychology.
Evolutionary theory suggests the reason why we fall in love, pair bonding within sexual relationships, is due largely to our inherent Neurobiology. While this peculiar human behavior is not unique to the human species, it is rather rare within the animal kingdom, with only about 2% of species pair bonding as a reproductive strategy. When pair bonding species are presented with a sexual partner, various types of neurochemical cocktails are released within the brain in response to sexual stimuli. These neuro cocktails burn like fuel driving our sexual desires and mating psychology. This evolutionary fuel consisting of neurotransmitters and hormones such as oxytocin, vasopressin, testosterone, dopamine, and estrogen, has been sexually selected for within the human species, for the purpose of genetic enhancement and propagation, driving those with optimal production and sensitivity to reproduce offspring at optimal rates. This human psychobiological drive to pair bond, has become a foundational pillar, defining who we are both physically and socially as a species. As noted Biological Anthropologist Helen Fisher points out, "Anthropologists have found evidence of romantic love in 170 societies. They've never found a society that did not have it." and "We are wired to find love.". Her statements lending credence to the theory that romantic love and Pair Bonding, are intrinsically linked to shared, common, biological processes within the human body.
Stockholm syndrome is a psychological adaptation to high stress environments involving extreme power dynamics that occur within captive or abusive relationships. Within these troubling relationships, victims often form emotionally traumatic bonds with their captors believing them to be superior, intellectually, authoritatively and often spiritually. The psychological phenomenon of Stockholm Syndrome develops among captives for a number of reasons, among these are, isolation from social support systems, threats to personal safety, feelings of powerlessness, amongst other emotional traumas, coupled with random moments of psychological relief, fleeting emotional support, and possessiveness masquerading as protection. Commonly seen among cult-like environments, captors will often filter information and provide fake news in regards to the outside world, while using fear and intimidation along with praise and positive reinforcement. This mix of negative threats to one's well being, followed by moments of reassurance, works to facilitate a sense of attachment and dependence further deepening the syndrome. These tactics can be most profound when infused with religious or spiritual dogma, in which captives are manipulated into believing the captor has some type of divine connection or authority, which also gives the captor a false appearance of insight over outsiders. As one infamous cult leader would say to his devoted followers, in order to further bond them to the group, "The way out of a room is not through the door. Just don't want out. And you're free…" ~Charles Manson.
Throughout much of our evolutionary history, extending to other related ape species, women have been among the most sought after prized spoils of war and conflict within the hominid lineage. Part of the reason for this is due to the fact that genetic variability among humans is key to reproductive success. There is a sweet spot that is necessary in order to produce fertile offspring, too much variability, for example as seen between Homosapiens and Neanderthal, or too little variability as seen in close relatives, dramatically decreases the probability of producing healthy offspring, while increasing the likelihood of birth defects and infertility. This meant that oftentimes your best option for sexual partners offering high reproductive success would be women from neighboring tribes who offered not only the benefits of the genetic goldilocks zone necessary to produce healthy offspring, but also would lack the familial and social protection offered by closely aligned tribal members further increasing their dependency. Due to this need for a specific variability among the genes of sexual partners, practices such as capture by conflict, bride kidnapping and forced marriages were not uncommon amongst ancient hunter gatherer and agrarian societies. Many of these practices still exist today with an estimated 22 million people living in forced marriages world wide.
These evolutionary circumstances facilitated environments in which the prevalence of such sexual practices and strategies heavily influenced our mating psychology. Women were essentially in many cases forced into sexual relationships through acts of violence or economic coercion. Those who resisted such relationships risked suffering further acts of violence, diminished status within the tribe, and inadequate access to resources, reducing their reproductive success and decreasing their genetic influence over future generations. While women who were perceived as less likely to rebel, received better social support in exchange for their sexual servitude, increasing their genetic influence . Women who received enhanced access to resources such as food, shelter, and protection formed emotional attachment bonds to their male captors as a result, which in turn was further rewarded as males formed emotional bonds of their own. This type of exchange creates a dependency, while forging a relationship similar to that of a captor and someone suffering from Stockholm syndrome. This caused us to form relationships in which emotionally traumatic bond were developed, inadvertently increasing our ability to effectively reproduce successful progeny that would benefit from this bond. As Evolutionary Psychologist David Buss stated in his critically acclaimed book "When Men Behave Badly", "Evolution operates by the ruthless criterion of reproductive success, no matter how repugnant we may find the strategies produced by that process, and no matter how abhorrent the consequences of those strategies may be.".
Over time, certain reproductive strategies emerged as various biological symphonies were sexually selected based on their reproductive success. These selected biological predispositions favored women who developed an inclination to stay within toxic relationships, often seeking out inherently aggressive, dominant, narcissistic partners with a litany of other toxic personality traits that were adaptive for much of our evolutionary history. In America, just as many men have criminal records as do high-school diplomas, according to Brennan Center for Justice. Statics from National Coalition Against Domestic Violence show that "1 in 4 women and 1 in 9 men experience severe intimate partner physical violence, intimate partner contact sexual violence, and/or intimate partner stalking with impacts such as injury, fearfulness, and post-traumatic stress disorder. However it's through experience, many of these various preprogrammed biological reactions are selected for as a person develops, with much of the selection process depending on what is most adaptive within our environments. While our propensity for certain psychological traits such as machiavellianism undoubtedly exist, it is important to acknowledge that these dark traits are not our only psychobiological programs, and they do often need a process of environmental selection to occur through experience in order to become a dominant psychological driver. However much of human society, from Erectus to our modern Sapienic civilizations, have created environments selecting for these dark psychological responses.
Our desire to create sexual relationships, while forming emotional attachment bonds such as love, with particularly selected partners, may very well have arisen from our often violent, dark evolutionary psychology. While other theories exist, such as pair bonding for child rearing, this theory fails to address our propensity towards sexual partners who often exhibit dark traits, further failing to address the role family members often play in child rearing, diminishing the need for long term bonding partners. Considering the manner in which sexual relationships were often formed throughout our evolutionary and cultural history, the various psychological processes such as Stockholm Syndrome that cause us to bond and develop a dependency within coerced relationships, and the inherent violent nature of our modern culture, romantic love is likely to have evolved as an evolutionary coping mechanism to help us survive relationships that were often dark and violent. This is why many women show an almost nonconcious attraction towards dark partners, while men tend to crave partners that are often submissive and loyal. We associate romantic love with an almost otherworldly nirvana, romanticizing romance because of the various pleasurable feeling states it generates, however how we feel often misleads us from the reality of our environment, such feelings and emotions can even be reproduced artificially through various exogenous means such as drugs. As Historian and Author of Sapiens Yuval Harari has said, “Natural selection makes people choose what is good for the reproduction of their genes, even if it is bad for them as individuals.”. Natural selection accomplishes this goal by generating various feeling states and emotions such as love, that drive us to reproduce offspring.
All this being said I'd like my final thought on this matter to be… Believe in love, practice love, we couldn't survive as a species without love.
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By,
Jesse
The Mad Philosophers Society
