It’s About Making Babies!

If my perspective is correct, that our ‘id’, our ‘psyche’, matures after puberty to ‘find a partner’, ‘nurture the children’, and ‘Retire from making babies’, then the next question is how to find the best partner.

Today’s novelist and advertising media blitzes are centered on defining ‘best partner’ as ‘most successful at attracting partners’, ‘most romantic’, ‘most intense and satisfying sexual encounters’. The courts deal with the high percentage of inappropriate choices in divorce court and child custody cases.

I believe that the ‘best’ partner when you go to pick one, is the one best suited to help you meet your roles in the next life cycles — nurture the children, and retiring from making babies. The day after the wedding the most worthless skill is — attracting a new partner. If you find a partner who’s social skills consist of attracting new partners, of exciting lust in others, then how is the person to re-train to discard her/his previous life skills, and learn the important values of making and raising babies? When will the retraining take place?

The best partner is the person that is most likely to be interfertile, to be a responsible parent, and to be a responsible and worthwhile person. Remember, the reason to pick a partner is to meet the body’s need to make babies, to meet society’s needs to make babies, and to meet the needs of the human race to make babies.

So what is advertising doing, inciting adults, adolescents, and children to live in the ‘find a partner’ stage? That is where most of the impulse dollars are spent. But the result is a message that the need is not for ‘nurture the children’ or ‘retire from making babies’ — the message to all is ‘find a partner’. Living stuck in this stage with no view to progressing gives us marriages without commitment and prenuptial agreements, gives us adults continually reliving childhood’s freedom from commitment or responsibility, gives us babies without functional parents, gives us generation after generation since parents knew how to parent.

Should sex be fun? Should partners concern themselves with whether they are ‘compatible’? This is tough, because the driving needs are to meet the body’s goal of ‘find a partner’, and society’s needs to make babies. We allow the body to attempt to adjust to a prospective partner by physical contact. We evaluate that adjustment — if the body is satisfied with the prospective partner the taste, the smell, the interchanged hormones and pheromones will become more and more attuned. The adjustment will usually feel exciting while in progress — a rejection will feel more like nausea, boredom, or a distraction. The end result takes time, and is intended to achieve a level of comfort, acceptance, and a bonding between partners. Each feels better when together than when separate.

The mechanics of adjustment include: kissing; breathing each other’s exhalation (sharing breath); erotic stimulation, including tasting skin and intimate places, and sweat. Spending time together results in shared breath. Read sometime about studies into fraternal beds, where mothers keep their babies in their bed resulting in lower infant death, synchronized breathing patterns between mother and child. This is a powerful mechanism for bonding people into a family, including children to parents. It takes *time* and *physical contact* to build a family between partners, and partners to children. Bonding through shared breathing is also a reason that cheating is so very damaging — one partner begins bonding to a non-family member, while returning to ‘find a partner’ — leaving an original partner in ‘nurture the children’ stage and fading bonding. This isn’t rude, or illegal, it is pathological.

At the same time that we ‘find a partner’ to bond with, we need to evaluate the person for relevant skills and aptitude. Does the person behave appropriately around children? Is the person actually in the ‘find a partner’ stage? Does the person have a *history* of being responsible, honest, organized, helpful, and sober? Is the person’s family sound and productive? Remember, we are evaluating the person as a potential *parent*, not a romantic fantasy! Mistakes will reach down the years for generations.

I keep referring to ‘partner’ when I mean adults to share parenting. If you were to define marriage as I do, two (or more) adults with their genetic child(ren), then most commonly you have a man, a woman, and the child the man gets on the woman. The family shares home and resources, usually depending on each other for nurture and succor.

Romance, as defined by Renaissance ‘courtly love’ and today’s advertising and novelists, is about adults living their whole lives in the post-puberty ‘find a partner’ stage. I have no use for ‘romance’ as most people define it. Like it’s step-child, gossip, I see nothing good coming from romance. I find gossip to be one of the true social evils. I am still thinking about whether romance is a waste or an active evil.

What about adults not interested in children? They are living in denial. Their body’s are driven to make babies. The nation requires a continuous source of babies for national security and economic growth. Should couples form for mutual support when they do not intend to make babies? Sure. With luck they will stumble into the maturity of ‘nurture’, and make babies, adopt, or care for other children in some way.

Can we afford romance? At best romance is a waste of time, resources, and a source of needless effort, delay, and pain. At worst, romance weakens the bonding that should bring partners together, or holds unsuitable people together too painfully long.

Brad K.

Leo Frankowski in his ‘man’s adventure’ “Cross Time Engineer” makes an interesting observation. That is, that nature appears to endow the newly pubescent with both interest in making babies, and an almost irresistable allure. No, I am not about to condone child rape.

But this observation is fundamental to understanding society. Adolescents (’past puberty’) are prevented from making babies non-stop and indescriminately by two things: Information about how to meet partners and how to find pleasure in these strange new practices, and experience. Most of the taboos today about what movies kids watch, identifying erotic materials as ‘adult’, and controls on movement of adolescents (confine in school or work, dating restrictions) is historical legacy, intended to keep adolescents from acquiring the information and experience for as long as possible.

What we overlook is that the human body is intended to make babies. We each have an interest in combining with another adult in sexual release. This has been true for literally ages. We each have a drive to find a partner. The drive to find a partner is a fundamental ‘itch’ that assures enough babies are made to keep the community functioning. Once we experience intimacy with a partner, that first drive *changes* into a nuturing mode — less exciting, perhaps, but the focus must now change from finding a partner — to raising those babies that are now being made. As we proceed to raise those babies, we often find the drive to nurture changing again, to ‘retired’, essentially removing mature adults from the ongoing gene pool. This removal reduces the number of genetic defects, and limits competition for *partners* to the younger adults. Women’s bodies have a supporting cycle within the ‘nurture’ cycle — from birth until they stop breast feeding they are much less likely to conceive a new child, otherwise they are fertile, until the cycle changes again at menopause.

Like many of nature’s paths, this path from childhood, to puberty, to finding a partner, to nurturing the children, to genetic withdrawal, is subject to change. That is, any adult can change from nurturing back to finding a partner. I understand it takes an average of 2.5 years for a man to recover from a divorce, a woman 3.5 years. This period is not ‘just emotional.’ The time to make the change is a fundamental reversal of the change from ‘nurture children’ to ‘find a partner’. This changes the personality and value systems of the individual. Today we find grandparents raising infants and children in ever increasing numbers. Support such individuals — they are having to return from ‘removed’ to ‘nurture the children.’ Again, a fundamental reversal of natural change.

We like to think of our lives progressing on the basis of faith in God, God’s design for us, and free will. Or temptations of the devil, etc. Most of us refuse to acknowledge how our bodies have cycles that produce profound changes in who we are. Some of those that refuse this truth are even female. Our bodies impose survival oriented goals on us that vary with our life stages, including goals that relate to making babies.

Where we thinking and conniving people go awry, is that the greater intensity of drive and excitement lies in the ‘find a partner’ part of the cycle. The ‘I want to have lots of sex!’ part. The part targeted by advertisers looking for the inexperience, uninformed post-puberty adolescents. And social pressures and advertising also send the adults in the ‘nurture’ and ‘removal’ stages messages that reinforce the ‘find a partner’ cycle. By reinforcing the message about ‘find a partner’, social institutions and advertising send a social message to the individual, “Forget your allotted cycle — your community/church/state/country requires you to ‘find a partner’ and make babies.” Adults are often kept in an extended state of ‘find a partner’, some apparently never leave that part of the cycle to fully enter the ‘nurture’ stage of life.

Reports that correlate larger numbers of sexual partners with increased incidence of cervical cancer make the news for a day or two, and are forgotten. The female body finds the fluids of the partner to be ‘foreign bodies’, but adapts to that particular blend of hormones and genetic material. Introducing additional partners triggers the adaptations — which some women come to find exciting and desirable. In reality, the hormonal and physical adaption to a partner is *supposed* to initiate the change from ‘find a partner’ to ‘nurture the babies’. Both male and female bodies make this adaptation to the partner, and likewise some of either gender seek to flip that ‘trigger’ on a regular and frequent basis. But the ‘adapt to new partner’ trigger is only supposed to be activated a few times. Setting hormonal surges raging through the body is strong enough to make a baby — not something trivial to be indulged in for fun.

On a physical level, then, we should be finding partners when young, and keeping them. We should be raising our children, and not competing for younger partners.

Brad K.