Who Says You Cant Buy Love?

Pankaj #112
Another factor in modern life is child support payments and alimony. There was this report about a guy who drove a livery cab on weekends after working 12 hr days on a regular job weekdays, because he had two divorced wives (both of whom didnot work) and 5 children to support.

#111 by Pankaj on May 22, 2003 6:48pm PT

#113 by m_souza on May 22, 2003 9:34pm PT

Of course the west and its apologists think that modernism means that you can abandon such illogic and embrace logic in pursit of Happiness.

That the western values have lead to the breakdown of marriage are not ackwnowledged at all. That having the flexibity of having more than one wife with some rules and regulations is better than infedility and serial marriage are not some thing that the pea brains like m_souza cannot understand.

#94 by tahmed32 on May 21, 2003 1:42pm PT

No I was not married in the traditonal way. In fact my marriage was quite untradtional in every way.

However I have my wife who has her ear to the grapevine and before marriage I have had many lady friends who were quite frank about such silly assumptions that women would be too tired for any thing after a exhausting set of ceremonies. Usually it is the convent educated women/men with filtered down victorian moralties who belive in this kind of rubbish. Most people are more roboust about this and would not let the exhaustion or such trival things come in the way of some thing that they have been waiting for a while.


Now you dont belive in that I know but your thoughts are more influenced by victorian england and now what you imagine trumphuiant.americans.

In fact there was a scandal among my friends family when such a considerate friend took his wife to a honeymoon and was even on the third day letting the exhaustion of the marriage go away (as you say) found himself facing his motherinlaw and aunt in the hotel who promptly took away the bride thinking that some thing was wrong with the guy nor that he was having an affair and had reluctantly married. Of course the bride complained to her aunt after the second night which lead to the memorable events.

This guy became the butt of our legpulling for years.

And then of course there is the theory that the struggle for mates is not between individuals as such, but between genes. Individuals are merely the vehicles through which genes perpetuate themselves and try to go about with self-improvement by hitching up with healthy genes. And indications of healthy genes equal our concept of beauty. And that is why a female crocodile would seem incredibly sexy to a male crocodile, while Marilyn Monroe herself would be seen as nothing more than a piece of lean meat, just another item in the lunch menu that includes water rodents, lizards and zebras. And why male cobras ask female cobras out for dates.

And this proves that beauty is not in the eye of the beholder, but in the eye of the genes. The Economist has a whole article on the subject of the ``right to be beautiful`` and the enormous money spent on it (more than on education, for example, in the USA).

``Beauty is something that we recognise instinctively. A baby of three months will smile longer at a face judged by adults to be “attractive”. Such beauty signals health and fertility. Long lustrous hair has always been a sign of good health; mascara makes eyes look bigger and younger; blusher and red lipstick mimic signs of sexual arousal. Whatever the culture, relatively light and flawless skin is seen as a testament to both youth and health: partly because skin permanently darkens after pregnancy; partly because light skin makes it harder to hide illness. This has spawned a huge range of creams to treat skin in various ways.``

Pamkaj

That was a superb post. The best one in the thread. Incisive, crisp and beautifully put. I wholly sympathize with your thesis. It describes the evolutionary value of irrationality in the area of mate selection. It confers a distinct survival advantage, no question.

Now a new question arises that after a 3 billion year journey we have recently arrived here in the 21st century post-industrial society. We`ve carried along all sorts of acquired baggage with us through the aeons to the point that we have grown through and merged into it. Most of us are inseperable from our baggage.

So the question is: how do we go forward? Do we just keep proceeding in the same funeral procession as did our ancestors and their ancestors before them, head lowered in submission chanting hynms and marching on. Or do we stop here and take a breather and review our tattered old maps that we`ve been carrying in the bags strapped on our shoulders.

Sameer [``..I do not have enough knowledge of neuroscience to say whether love is part of the instincts or acquired. I know of love chemicals but they are same released by the brain when using narcotics, using psychadelics, eating choclate, dedication, meditation, concentration, compassion, prayers, spiritual practices and near death visions. ..``]

You are not the only one who is at sea on this ``enigma wrapped in mystery``. We all are. Even the neuroscientists have reems of disjointed data a zillion questions and few concrete answers. The state of modern knowledge, so far as I can tell as an outsider is promising and suggestive of many things but conclusive about very few. The endorphines that you referred to must have an evolutionary function. Theories abound, no one knows. But the receptors are there in the brain. Receptors that bind the THC molecule for instance. We can understand morphine and heroin because there is a greater similarity with some endorphine molecules, but a psycadellic? Wow...something`s going on here that is much more complex than any one knows yet.

nazarhayatkhan

As for the human female having fluctuations in hormonal levels in lockstep with certain events during ovulation, that is a well studied and documented fact. Any textbook of physiology could elaborate the technical details. The human female is notably different from other mammels in that there is menstrural blood loss and hazardous and painful childbirth. This is where nature screwed up. Its an expensive overhead and one that takes a lot to pay for. Not so emmaculate a design after all is it? Other mammels reabsorb the endometrial tissue -- much more efficient. (The tentative explaination is that at one point the human brain started such an explosive growth in size that the pelvic bone could not keep pace and the rest of the system was also scrambling to accommodate. That must have been a period of extremely high perinatal death rates. All this happened in time span of under a million years, we`re told). So this suffering and the flawed design in human female plumbing is the price of our big heads. And look at us, how disgustingly ungrateful men are that most still think with their little heads...!!!

...SR

Conclusion is:

Nobody can buy `Love`
Anybody can buy `Sex`(intercourse i mean)

Reply 3110 sameerJB

``In nature, all female species come in heat. I believe that just after mensuration, the human female specie also has a heightened desire for sex - something like coming in heat.``

Thanks for you reply. This issue seems to be open ended with no scientific data to prove or disprove anything.

Maybe, there is a socialogocal hesitation to study this.

Terms like ``coming to season or heat`` imply a comparison with lower life - something not very uplifting for the human race. The fact is that, besides the humans, this is applicable to all other living beings.

Pankaj:
What a fantastic post! Thanks buddy.
I must add a caveat to your post for all those who might be taking it as exoneration of their irrational thinking and behavior. The irratioality by its very nature is unpredictable, meaning no common mathematical basis. Additionally it fluctuates on both positive and negative sides. Over large number of samples its effects actually cancel out whereas this is not the case with rationality. The summation of rationality way pasts summation of irrationality due to negativity half the times.

Irrationality at individual level is controlled or caged phenomenon but at collective level it gets out of hand. The individual policies can be optimized factoring irrationality into it but not for a nation.

Another situation you may have to consider is the more divorce rate for societies taking love more seriously as compared to compassion and compromize. You know what I mean.

Looking at some posts:

Pankaj is an `insaan`
Others ..I bet ya..have desire for more wives..

Based on arguments in #111, it is my conjecture that our brains are wired by our genes to ``love`` other people. Thus, IMO, the emotional aspect of love is an instinct, much like self preservation. It is not a learned behavior, rather we are born with it. The capability of one to fall in love with another is a major stabilising force in our society.

I believe sex is a small, though important subset of all that we call ``love``. Steven Pinker, incidentally a neuroscientist, does discuss this issue in brief in his book ``How the mind works``. Love, acc. to me, is an ``irrational`` (emotional) bond between two members of a specie(at least homo sapiens) that has a potent ``survival`` value. What I want to emphasize is that the non-physical aspect of love - emotional bonding, also has very significant ``survival`` value besides the obvious (sex). Let me carry out a simple thought experiment to illustrate my point -

A man/woman subconsciously evaluates the ``value`` of both the other partner as well as himself in the process of choosing his/her mate. They enter into the institution of marriage when there is a rough match between the value they assign to themselves and the value their partner assigns to them. Of course, there are plenty of compromises from both the sides. Let us imagine that the human society was perfectly rational. Suppose one of the married partners, say wife, meets another man in near future, who is slightly better than her husband acc. to her own intrinsic valuation system. If she is rational and if the couple dont already have kids (this is imp from genetic pov), it is perfectly ``rational`` for her to leave her husband and go after the better guy. Same holds for the husband too. You can obviously argue why would the ``better guy`` go after the girl. The answer lies in the very different intrinsic valuation systems of different people and the inherent uncertainity in this kind valuation system. It is obvious that in a perfectly ``rational`` society, infidelity would be the norm and the institution of marriage would be highly unstable/temporal. There is nothing wrong with it except that the family raising would become very difficult ultimately hurting the interests of our ``genes`` who are solely interested in replicating themselves. Rest assured there would be plenty of sex in this kind of system. In the kind of harsh sorroundings in which human society evolved, it would translate into the survival of very few offsprings due to inadequete care and unstable family while the birthrate may increase only very marginally due to higher rate of sex ( remember the female is the procreation bottleneck).

What love does is to remove the ``rational`` subconscious cost-benefit calculations between the partners once a rough match is made by building up enormous ``emotional`` (and perhaps phsiological too) costs against doing so. Thus a partner would not go after a marginally better mate in future deterred by the emotional costs. Needless to say that it stabilises the institution of marriage such that more attention and resources could be spent on making and raising kids, the ultimate fantasy of our genes. The emotional dependence between the lovers also has a strong physiological aspect to it. You have to see jilted lovers to believe it...


PS Rationality is not always the best policy.... If humans could defeat an army of futuristic and self-replicating but ``perfectly rational`` robots, it would be because of an optimum mix of rational and irartional tendencies in a human being.

nazarhayatkhan:
One thing we must remember that using natural sciences in discussion does not allow to use, I guess, I suppose, I think or I believe beginings. Either a person knows it through acquiring knowledge of it firsthand, secondhand or better not say anything. I am itching to respond to SR post but I do not have enough knowledge of neuroscience to say whether love is part of the instincts (a set or subset of reproduction business) or acquired. I know of love chemicals but they are same released by the brain when using narcotics, using psychadelics, eating choclate, dedication, meditation, concentration, compassion, prayers, spiritual practices and near death visions. They are called amphetamines. But I do not know if brain can distinguish between the feelings outlined above prior to releasing these chemicals and releases different ratios of amphetamines for different feelings.

The heat of women would have been proven by scientific community by now if any such thing existed and would have been well-known. It is very easy test to measure levels of different hormones. You must have heard of it definitely as early as 12-13 years old from classmates.

I have delibrated a great deal whether it is appropriate to ask this question. But with so many experts and sexologists around, I find it difficult to resist. Please give your take on this:

In nature, all female species come in heat. I believe that just after mensuration, the human female specie also has a heightened desire for sex - something like coming in heat.

Is it true?

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SR #105 ``Chimps are wonderful. They don`t have our hangups and are very loving towards each other.``
Maybe towards each other. But chimps are among the most vicious hunters (as Jane Goodall showed, thus getting rid of the myth that chimps live peacefully on berries and stuff). They hunt in packs, and if you have seen a video of a pack of chimps chasing and hunting down a terrified monkey for example, you will think of them as less than wonderful. Chimps are also of course most closely related to humans. That explains a lot.

``How man humans do you know who would lovingly pick out each other`s lice and eat them?``
Happens every day on chowk, as indian and pakistani paper fighters pick out lice on the other side of the border...but I will end here.

Sameer

That was an excellent post and clears the air. Please forgive my mistaken notion about what your message implied. It seems we are on the same page. The analogy of stealing food is interesting, the animal doesn`t care if it was earned or stolen -- and it does not matter. Likewise with sex, except that here the cultural complications are many -- and I dare say, more than they need to be.

Returning to your distinction between ``sex`` and ``intercourse`` I`d like to say why view them as different? Would it be reasonable to suggest that the latter is a subset of the former? Sex (as you refer to it in the broader context) can be considered as a whole spectrum of thought patterns and behaviors while intercourse is only the culminating behavior at terminal end of that spectrum. It is possible to have sex with eye contact alone while it is also possible to be sleeping in the same bed with no hint of sex. Man`s ultimate sex organ is the brain -- though the cortex plays a much smaller role than we`d like to think, and that too mostly inhibitory.

Curiously, no one has brought up the L word, that human concoction we proudly call ``love``. (The ``only reason to be alive`` some say. ``A misunderstanding between two fools`` rebutt others.) I think love and sex are organically inseperable.

And slightly off the subject, but not entirely, I`d suggest you look up the website: www.lovemore.com, their annual conference would be quite an event and I`d have liked to attend but my wife refuses to consider it.

Samina

Chimps are wonderful. They don`t have our hangups and are very loving towards each other. How man humans do you know who would lovingly pick out each other`s lice and eat them? :)

dullabhatti

How to do it????? Ask the birds and the bees, they know better.

...SR