Understanding the Animal Instincts in Men and Women for a Healthy Relationship
I’m always afraid that certain heart-wrenching rules in each special topic might make the readers or audience uncomfortable. But what I want to say is, in order to welcome happiness, the best attitude towards relationships is to unconditionally accept all the rules and regulations, and adjust one’s behavior to avoid potential relationship crises.
Today, let’s talk about the awakened or ever-ready animal instincts in every man and woman’s heart, and how to avoid the family conflicts and disputes caused by these instincts in the process of getting along.
Humans evolved from animals, and even the most civilized societal and cultural influences cannot erase the animal instincts within humans, because instincts imply survival and reproduction. Animals and humans in today’s society will snarl at each other to directly or indirectly protect themselves, similar to three friends in a movie tearing each other apart due to economic interests. We find that no matter how harsh the living environment is, the reproduction of animals or humans continues, and reproduction becomes a new hope for survival.
In the process of survival and evolution, the “paternity certainty cascade reaction” in men has not changed. Men always live in a vague state of certainty about their children. Since women’s ovulation period does not have obvious features, men cannot guard a woman 24/7 until she conceives. Even then, a man’s suspicion won’t be dispelled. Therefore, in the process of bodily evolution, a man ejaculates thousands of sperm in one go to ensure quantity over quality. Although a man cannot be certain if a child is his, he can be certain that he has a child, and a man’s involvement in the reproductive process only takes a few minutes. Men use quantity to compensate for quality when feeling insecure, releasing sperm to make up for their inadequacy.
While women have become more independent in societal changes and possess creativity compared to men, their reproductive methods have not changed in the process of evolution. Statistics show that a woman needs at least 1 year and 8 months from pregnancy to weaning the child. During this time, a woman loses at least a year of complete social labor ability, relying entirely on a man for survival. Within these 8 months, a woman’s labor capacity decreases by at least 70% to ensure her and her offspring’s survival. Due to these differences, women tend to be more conservative, while men tend to be more creative. With these two different types of creatures, how do they fall in love? To ensure men feel secure and women can safely reproduce, rulers introduced polygamy, resolving men’s insecurity. However, this led to many side effects, such as constant conflicts among the wives, men being distracted, women retaliating by being unfaithful, and societal unrest. Later, the Platonic love was introduced, bringing more reliable trust in reproduction for men and women. Plato said that spiritual love is pure, without any desire, which laid the foundation for trust between men and women. In today’s society, men and women no longer face the same survival threats as in the past (such as wild animal attacks or basic living needs). However, the biggest survival threat for men, women, and relationships in love and marriage today is emotional, as mentioned in Maslow’s emotional wheel, where after fulfilling primary needs, secondary needs continue.
Under normal circumstances, emotional development goes from passionate love to calmness. Those unwilling to accept calmness always enter a phase of emotional power struggle due to deliberate fault-finding. The happiness in the passionate love phase is because both parties have lower emotional expectations, making it easier for one to satisfy the other, resulting in comfort and joy for both. However, in the power struggle phase, both parties have higher emotional expectations and are unwilling to satisfy each other, leading to a breakdown of trust in the emotional experience. In this vicious cycle, the more intense the breakdown of trust, the different the defense mechanisms between men and women due to animal instincts. Men tend to evade, and if a man feels extremely uncomfortable and insecure, he generally terminates investment in the parent-child relationship (caring for children and the family), subconsciously suspecting the woman and the child.
In many stories, men’s actions are often similar. Three years ago, a girl broke up, and in deep pain, she spent her days chatting and playing cards at a coffee shop with friends and their friends. Soon, she met her current husband. The guy had also recently broken up, seemingly sharing a sense of empathy with the girl. They quickly developed feelings for each other and soon entered into a relationship, feeling like they were each other’s life-saving straw. Their emotions developed rapidly, and the girl found the guy to be of high value, coming from a wealthy family business. The guy also found the girl to be sensible and accommodating, unlike his ex, who would scoff at other women on the street. Both were delighted, feeling like they were both experiencing a stroke of luck. After a few months, the guy’s ex, whom he had been with for 7 years, came back, bombarding him with calls and messages to win him back. Upset that the guy didn’t clarify things with his ex, the girl felt helpless. After numerous attempts, she felt she couldn’t intervene, as it seemed her insistence couldn’t change the guy’s way of handling emotional matters. Over the course of a year, conflicts between the two arose due to the girl discovering that the guy was responding to his ex’s messages of all sizes. However, the guy was also aware that he couldn’t afford to provoke his ex, as compared to the ex, the girl seemed more suitable for marriage. The cautious guy and patient girl smoothly entered into marriage two years later, and the ex gave up. However, marriage is different from love, involving not just the emotions of the couple, but also parents, relatives, and more disagreements and conflicts. Before marriage, the girl felt that the wealthy family background would bring a bright future for her child, while the guy felt that the girl’s character made his life easier, not having to worry about emotional conflicts all the time, seemingly avoiding the fate of finding a mother in a woman. Soon, the girl had a baby, and the guy began to feel anxious due to conflicts between the girl’s pregnancy and his family. With nowhere to vent, communication with his wife seemed more difficult than negotiation for the guy. He chose to evade, spending his days chatting with the waitresses at a tea house. Feeling sympathetic for a waitress in difficult circumstances, he gifted her a computer. They chatted and enjoyed each other’s company, but the girl found out about this. After a quarrel and negotiation, the girl confiscated the guy’s credit card to settle the matter. However, less than a month after the girl gave birth, she discovered that the guy had visited a prostitute during her 7th month of pregnancy. Devastated, she threatened divorce with a knife, while the guy deemed the girl a shrew, and the girl thought of the guy as an animal.
In both marriage and love relationships, where do women’s “extreme emotional states” originate from? Previous to this, we simply summarized that women belonged to a “passive role” in terms of animal attributes, but a woman’s true animal instinct is the “eastern-eating and western-lodging” model for self-preservation. Put simply, this is to ensure better survival in the process of reproduction, living in the homes of wealthy men and having children with men of better genes (appearance, intelligence, physique). Women neither want to give up wealthy men nor leave men with superior genes. They want both. However, women who wholeheartedly enter into a marital role are heavily reliant on the Platonic love’s spiritual and emotional model. They hope for the “eastern-eating and western-lodging” to happen with one man, meaning they expect a man to provide them with enough security to ensure purity in their emotional environment and provide for their survival. However, once a woman becomes independent, sometimes she competes better than men in male competition, and her expectations from men change into an attitude. Women know very well what kind of emotional life they want, and men seem to have no choice. Once both parties lack communication and positive emotional expression (such as women providing security to men, making them feel constantly recognized, cared for, and loved; men providing security to women, making them feel the man’s dedication, attention, and love), the unease of both men and women will emerge in their subconscious. With the accumulation of negative unease, tragedy will occur until one party’s emotional bottom line is breached. After tragedy strikes, the majority of women do not resort to their animal instincts. This is because the majority of women have gained social independence. Women’s emotions mostly stem from abandoning other superior options and the trauma they experience after entering a relationship.
In an unhappy emotional model, who triggers whose animal instincts? The answer is unsolvable. Emotions are a joint effort, and an unhappy model is a cycle. A man’s lack of communication and indifference can turn a woman into a lunatic, while a woman who doesn’t make a man feel comfortable and happy can lead him to infidelity. Many people believe that the higher the level of education, the higher the moral bottom line of a person, and the lower the probability of infidelity and domestic violence. In reality, the moral bottom line in emotions is directly linked to the sense of security in emotions. The higher a person’s demand for security, the more tragic their emotional life will be.
To avoid men’s infidelity and women’s hysteria in the emotional process, both men and women need to unconditionally accept each other completely. Accept the inconsistencies between each other in life, and through effective communication on this basis, achieve mutual tolerance and love. Women need to understand that when a man chooses to enter into marriage with you, he has already restrained his animal instincts, risking his offspring and spending his life with you. Men also need to understand that when a woman chooses to be with you wholeheartedly, she has to endure more survival crises and unease. If your love or marriage is in a stage where it triggers each other’s animal instincts (for example, your woman has become like a lunatic or your man is no longer staying home), no matter how emotional you are, you need to remain calm, giving the other person room to breathe. If you are unable to communicate, use actions instead of words, gradually giving the other person recognition and care.