It’s About Making Babies!

Annie D. at Smart at Love wrote about women and accusations of wielding unfair control in relationships (Women love being in control).  Thanks for the great article, Annie!

Where some see women ‘loving being in control’, I think what we see is a difference in goals, discipline, and lack of training or understanding: ignorance.

Men and women learn at an early age that pregnancy is handier inside a family, generally considered to be a marriage.  Men and women learn pregnancy outside a family is a disaster in legal, economic, and reputation terms, and a time to worry about pressures to Do Things.  Like get married.

But men learn from brothers, from friends, from watching older boys (heaven forbid, their father or their mother’s boyfriend) that scoring is important.  Besides feeling good, scoring is like football or basketball — if you are good and do it a lot, people look up to you.

For girls, scoring is a problem.  Yes, it feels good, but it also risks pregnancy.  Pregnancy for the unwed mother risks all that it does for the boy, but the girl is also detoured by the developing baby from her previous life plan.  Girls also gain social points for how close to ‘all the way’ they go, except ‘giving in’ is a loss of points. Then, too, girls develop breasts.  They demand training bras and other sexy underwear and piercings, being told that ’sexy’ is ‘grown up’, although the explanation why this is so remains fuzzy.

For older people, say in their 20’s or 50’s, similar pressures still apply.  Only the older person has experience — they have learned pitfalls and dangers to avoid, and have created their own rules on how to avoid pain and sorrow.

So if a woman wants to avoid problems, she will attempt to learn whether she wants a guy in her life for the long haul, whether she wants him to be her Prince Charming and give her ‘lots of sex and babies’ (as they put it in the movie ‘Love Actually’).  And she also wants to have the fun and excitement of both the romance and the sex and other aspects of physical intimacy.  So she will attempt to follow the best advice she has in getting to know, to encourage, and to evaluate the current guy.  How well she sticks to the planned agenda is called ‘discipline’, the will to complete a task.  If her agenda is well thought out, it provides both safety for her and a likelihood of achieving her goals. 

The poor guy.  Don’t believe it.  Some guys get the point — you are trying to pick a mate.  You want to have fun today, but you need to know if this woman will be a good mate for you and mother for your children.  Too many guys don’t get that.  Just like too many women, many guys get the point that sexy is good, scoring is better, and the point of having men and women in the world is to have a good time getting physically intimate.  Too often the name of the game is ‘how good can you make me feel today?’

In US society today, for the most part women entice men, men chase women.  Disciplined women impose rules, procedures, and evaluations on their search for a mate.  Undisciplined men express frustration that they have been ‘tricked’ — they were searching for undisciplined women searching for gratification only.  Disciplined men probably pick out disciplined women more often, or are responsible in separating from chance encounters with undisciplined women — so we seldom hear anything at all about disciplined men.  Except maybe that all the ‘good’ men are married.  Go figure.

I figure the undisciplined, media-driven search for lust and gratification turns things around from what was intended.  I figure our bodies react more strongly when adapting to a *new* partner.  So the people looking for lots of casual encounters keep getting that rush from their bodies adapting to a new set of pheromones, new hormone-enriched intimate fluids, in addition to the hormones excited by sexual activities.  Instead, if we actually pick our mate before getting intimate, that ‘bodies adapting’ frisson is available to help cement the relationship.  Yes, that means three dates is precipitate.  Pick your mate, then hit the sack together.  With the person you fully expect to spend the rest of your life with.  How long should that take?  A colleague from India met her husband on her wedding day, at the ceremony.  She didn’t relate how long the families had known each other, or how long the marriage had been planned.  And she seemed at least as happy, after more than ten (10) years, as many other wives I have met.  The selection of a mate should take as long as it takes, for a once in a lifetime selection.

I prefer to think of the careful pursuit of a search for a mate as being disciplined, rather than being a control freak.  I would think that a control freak would be a really dangerous person, damaging to everyone around them.  I would consider expecting particular behavior to be discipline, or perhaps training.  Expecting actions to be performed in a specific manner is controlling.  Controlling can be an important technique in training, for teaching new skills.  Abuse by controlling outside a ‘new skill’ training environment would be a control freak.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 28th, 2006 at 10:18 pm and is filed under Chemistry, Dating, Selection. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.