Kort Explores conundrums of the human condition

Modern society appears to be increasingly embracing two divergent trends that are mutually antagonistic. One trend has been for liberated women to become increasingly strident in their demands for greater emotional involvement from their men. The women of today are actively questioning the age old acceptance of emotionally unsatisfactory men, and demanding that their needs be respected. But the increased demands of women are running headlong into the tendency of both men and women to spend more and more of their time working.

Contrary to the promises of organized labor early in this century, not only has the age of leisure not arrived, but recent studies indicate that our workaholic tendencies are largely voluntary - most of us work long hours because we like working! Contrary to modern mythology that mistakenly attributes the march of progress to the high minded desires of a long chain of individuals seeking to make a lot of money and maybe improve the human condition on the side, it's beginning to look like the industrial revolution and our high tech civilization resulted largely from the conflict between women demanding ever greater emotional involvement from their men, and men responding by becoming ever more inventive in creating reasons to get out of the house.

The apparent result of these divergent trends is the increasing fragility of relationships. For example, in Oregon over 70% of marriages now end in divorce. Instead of expanding and enhancing the quality of our personal lives, modern society appears to be making it harder to maintain our most precious relationships. Just how did we get to this situation? What factors in our past set us on these divergent paths?

If there is one constant in the long tumultuous history of the relations between men and women, it is the unsatisfactory emotional performance of men - at least to hear women tell it anyway. A variety of related terms are regularly used to describe the emotional failures of men - lack of empathy, avoidance of intimacy, emotional immaturity, inability to achieve the next level of relationship, etc., but they all can be collected together under the blanket term of emotional involvement.

If this complaint was infrequent or just a modern phenomenon we could dismiss it as a fad of our age, the result of individual mismatched couples, or even frustrated feminine manipulation. Some men have tried to deny the validity of this feminine complaint, but that perspective has often resulted in unwanted opportunities for extended celibate contemplation of the feminine enigma. It may be some indication of the depth of commitment to this complaint that in spite of most accounts of history being written by men, this issue has even managed to filter through the masculine perspective - although distressingly often as a cause for the destruction of ancient cities, societies, and even entire civilizations.

Most women, after having their dreams shattered by sufficient exposure to the gross inadequacies of men in the real world, eventually convince themselves they're lucky just to find one who can at least remember their anniversary. But the self-deception is rarely complete, and most if not all women continue to harbor a lingering sense of dissatisfaction with their mate in the back of their minds. This lingering dissatisfaction often expresses itself in novel ways that are intensely confusing for men and almost always compound the underlying problem.

Contrary to the opinions of many of the fair sex, this recurrent complaint has greatly troubled men down through the ages - at least those who have attempted to achieve enlightenment in the eyes of their loved ones. But try as they might, even the most successful men report that happiness is often fragile and short lived. In spite of their best efforts, even the most emotionally adept men appear only able to temporarily satiate the emotional appetites of their female companions.

It has been said that men have dominated the evolution of civilization while women control the evolution of mankind. Men have repeatedly tried to structure society to gain control over heredity, and occasionally have even appeared to succeed - at least in some social classes. By attempting to remove freedom of choice from the female side of the mating ritual, men have tried to guarantee the reproduction of their genes in the next generation.

But it turns out that women are not so easily controlled. Few societies based on constricting the prerogatives of women have stood the test of time, and all of the most successful nations of our current world profess a basic respect for the rights of women. Worst of all, it now appears that due to the contrary nature of women, men in societies that attempted the greatest masculine control over the reproductive choices of women were often the least likely to be the genetic fathers of "their" children.

Both sexes have well established traditions of responding to a loveless marriage by seeking love on the outside. Different cultures have dealt with fidelity and monogamy in different ways, from open acceptance to chastity belts and genital mutilation. But the fact that so much attention has been paid to these issues down through the ages indicates that a substantial percentage of the population has always suffered from wandering affections.

A woman's emotions have profound effects on her internal reproductive biochemistry as well as on her more obvious external behavior. Recent research indicates that the odds of conception are heavily influenced by the emotional response of a woman to her partner as well as by the amount of sexual pleasure she experiences. All other things being equal, the sexual partner who most inspires love in a woman's heart is most likely to father her children - especially if she has orgasms with him. In the typical love triangle, this means a woman's lover is significantly more likely to father her children than her husband.

Women have been trying for a long time to convince men that their happiness is important, but have only achieved mixed results in spite of all their efforts. Considering that women have largely controlled the direction of human evolution for at least the last couple hundred thousand years, a clue that the problem might actually be the result of an underlying paradox is that women haven't made better progress toward breeding a more satisfactory man.

Many modern women claim to be even more unhappy than women in the past, and they have definitely taken a far more assertive posture on the issue. While as a society we have moved toward greater consideration for women, their basic dissatisfaction doesn't seem to have diminished significantly. Perhaps the problem isn't entirely with the male after all.

Enter those masters of complication, the children. While nearly all children and even some adults harbor a contrary opinion, human offspring require an extraordinarily long period of dependency before they are capable of surviving on their own. To further compound the difficulties, humans have evolved into a generalist species. As such we lack an adequate genetically coded set of instincts to guide us through life, and must be extensively educated before we become functional members of society. All other things being equal, the survival odds of children tend to be better for those having parents of both sexes.

Now consider the hunter/gatherer environment within which the vast bulk of human evolution occurred. The men of the group periodically left camp to hopefully drag home some tasty dead animals, while the women managed the campsite, gathered food, cared for the children, and gossiped about the flaws in their men.

Some question whether hunting was the real motivation for the need of men to regularly leave their wives and children and go off somewhere with their male friends. Resentful women have long claimed that hunting was just an excuse for men to escape their responsibilities around the home - like taking the garbage out further away than they could throw it, repainting the cave, and helping pick up all the kid's stone and bone toys around the campfire. Some have suggested that men took up hunting just to get away from women - that men found saber tooth tigers and mastodons far less fearsome than the human females waiting for them back home.

Then as now, women have always suspected men of having too much fun in life whenever they manage to slip out of direct supervision. The traditional hunter/gatherer life-style was probably doomed because it offered too many opportunities for men to escape their domestic responsibilities. Men no doubt held out as long as they could, but after a couple hundred thousand years women found a way to put an end to the suspected pleasures of their men - the plow. It's rumored that modern agriculture and animal husbandry were created primarily by resentful wives who suspected their men were enjoying themselves too much on their hunting trips. Stationary farming allowed women to keep their men close by where they could keep an eye on them.

While modern women would likely prefer it was otherwise, most human evolution occurred during the millions of years before the current politically correct domestication of men. And while women would undoubtedly prefer that their personal quality of life be the primary criteria, the long term trends must be considered from the perspective of reproductive success and the resulting direction of evolution.

Back when the demands of their hunter/gatherer life-style required men to be periodically absent from their families, women evolved their own accommodations to the situation. During those times when her man was in camp, a woman had many reasons to extract as much emotional involvement with herself and their children as possible before he slipped away again - allegedly to go hunting with his buddies. There was of course the obvious aspect that a woman had to grab what emotional intimacy she could when she could. But more importantly from an evolutionary perspective, the greater the man's emotional involvement with his family, the greater the odds he'd return from the hunt - and maybe even the greater his motivation to drag home more dead animals. All other things being equal, the more emotional involvement a woman could extract from her man the greater the likelihood she would pass her genes on to the next generation.

With male emotional involvement only available on an environmentally limited boom and bust irregular schedule, those women best able to absorb as much emotional involvement as possible when it was available would tend to receive more involvement over their lifetimes than those women who had an internal limit on their emotional appetite. Over the great length of time that mankind existed within a hunter/gatherer environment, evolution would tend to favor the genes of those women who developed an open-ended appetite for emotional involvement and relied entirely on their environment to define the maximum limit.

This open-ended appetite in women would inevitably lead to frustration since a woman's internally unlimited desire for more emotional involvement could never be fully satiated. Developing a parallel tolerance for the resulting frustration would seem a necessary and obvious survival trait. And so over time evolution favored those women who became genetically incapable of ever being entirely satisfied with their men, but who had some level of acceptance of that frustration.

Unfortunately, at the same time as women were evolving their unlimited appetite for male emotional involvement, they were also actively selecting against the genes of those men most oriented toward long term relationships and parenting children. By favoring conception with their lovers over their husbands, women gave the genes of those men least willing to commit to a solid stable relationship a substantial evolutionary advantage. In their quest for emotional fulfillment, women inadvertently selected in favor of those men who were only willing to deliver enough short term emotional satisfaction to convince a woman to father his children, but were unwilling to make the long term commitment to participating in raising those children.

Another of human nature's seeming paradoxes also starts to make a sort of sense within this perspective. Many have wondered why men reach their sexual peak in their late teens while women reach theirs in their middle thirties. It takes some women a number of years to grow sufficiently disenchanted with their husbands to start looking around for an outside lover. However once they start looking, the tendency for "older" women to pick young men for their lovers is legendary - especially in the wishful thinking of over-eager young men.

But the contradictions of our evolution generate even more complications when we factor in complex modern social structures. In the nature vs nurture debate, as intelligent beings we're allegedly able to overcome our contradictory instincts. In many modern relationships men are making concerted efforts to satisfy the emotional needs of their significant others, struggling valiantly to transform themselves from Ralph Kramdens into Casanovas. But most enlightened men report that this effort doesn't appear to achieve the desired result. The details of their mate's unhappiness change, but the complaints are still variations on the same theme. Even when men make an earnest effort to follow detailed instructions, they rarely seem able to deliver exactly what their women think they want.

Too often men's efforts to make their women happy actually drive them away. It appears that in situations where men are available and willing to provide substantial emotional involvement, modern women are intellectually overwhelmed and repelled by that same intense emotional focus their unlimited instinctual appetites drive them to demand. Men who try too hard often get served with restraining orders. It turns out for men there's a fine line between intense emotional involvement and psychotic obsession.

So it turns out that women have gotten exactly the sort of men they've always wanted, but in typical feminine fashion they now want to change their minds - and their men. Unfortunately it's hard to overcome hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, and modern feminism hasn't helped by decreeing that it is men who are entirely at fault. I'm not saying that men aren't willing to change - do we have any choice with women in control of our evolutionary direction? But the next couple thousand years don't look good for men. While it may be women who have developed an innate unhappiness, they've always been more than willing to share their unhappiness with men.