The challenges of sexual relationships
So, one of the things I struggle with is the challenges surrounding sexual relationships. I think I’ve talked before about how I think a big part of this is that the memetics surrounding sexual relationships on earth are really not too good – we’re wired to fall in love more than once but we’re encouraged by the powers that be to mate for life, assured by various religions that non-monogamy is a sin (God forgot he wired us to fall in love more than once – or this is part of his grand plan for torturing us for being imperfect – a even bigger and more successful part of that plan is to ensure that sometimes we fall in love with people who don’t love us..)
Now, I don’t want to come off like a incel at all, but one of the things that I find frustrating is that feeling sexual attraction for people is very likely to end in disaster. Not only are the odds fairly low that you will be attracted to the same people who are attracted to you, but also if you do have a friendship that includes sexual overtones when the sexual portion of it is over you probably will never get to talk to the person again. I still miss Phoebe enormously, 15 years later, and Vinnie – although I will acknowledge that I screwed that one up in just about every way there was to screw it up.
Which is perhaps part of the problem.. sexual friendships bring out much more intense emotions than other friendships and so as a result things get a lot more extreme in general. I do think it’s true that we say and do things in sexual friendships that we would never do in others. And of course you have possessiveness and jealousy, both of which are *encouraged* in our current world memetics and turned up to 11 whenever possible in our world’s fiction.
Of course, another problem with all of the above is that if you’re going to try to follow the dictates of religion and mate for life, you have to find the right person – on the first try – while you’re very young and inexperienced – with all of the challenges that apply above. And you might end up with someone who physically or emotionally abuses you, because our memetics have set up situations that leave people in states where they do that, and then you should continue to live with the person no matter what because divorce is immoral. Yes, I have periods of really loathing earth’s memetics.
I also of course wish we could work out the whole ‘sharing’ thing. You would think, given how good falling in love feels, that we would want to encourage people to do it repeatedly, that if we in fact did love the people we are connected with we would want them to be happy. Part of the problem here, discussed many times by many different people, is the fear of abandonment – and the fact that Earth makes being abandoned quite dangerous at times, with worries about things like eating and living indoors. But beyond that I think that a very big part of what ails us is the elders feeling the need to know *which* humans are the parents of which child, and our idea that each individual should be responsible for caring for all the children that share their genetics. (In fact it would be *much* smarter for the entire tribe to be responsible for children – and then we could also stop having teen pregnencies ruin lives. But this would take away the fun of those who delight in punishing and love to sneer at the lack of morality of the teens that react to things *they are deeply evolved to feel*)
I do think a big part of the problem is also all the religious nuts who can’t accept that there are all kinds of signs that we are evolved and almost none that we are designed, and therefore want to blame us for things that evolution has done instead of trying to work out a memetic system that aligns with our evolution. I am sure you have all seen me talk about this many times before and I am sure I will talk about it many times again.
Anyway, I really hate the whole ‘if you are attracted to someone they may also never talk to you again’ bit, and I will be the first to admit that I have (partially due to mental illness) impressively screwed up communications with one particular $_PERSON on the subject. But I also think there’s got to be some middle ground and better communication methodologies that could be taught such that we had a lot less #metoo incidents and at the same time did not have no good way to say what we’re thinking and feeling without breaking any friendship or communication we have with people.
In short, the human memetics surrounding sex are a mess. I think pretty much everyone knows it. No, I don’t know how to write the perfect memetics surrounding the topic either. I suppose we’ll all just continue to muddle through, often with broken hearts and/or holes in our lives.
January 19th, 2021 at 5:19 am
I have a lot of thoughts about this one too. I’ll just say that you are definitely not an incel. Not because you’ve had multiple long-term relationships (which you have) or because you are in fact an object of lust (which you are). It’s because you don’t hate anyone as a class of people. I don’t think you really *hate* anyone, although you might at this point. But you don’t hate women. You don’t even think of them (us) as a separate class. So no, you don’t sound like an incel when you say that sexual relationships are complicated and our society has fucked-up ideas surrounding them, because you don’t go on to say “and it’s all women’s fault”.
January 19th, 2021 at 6:25 pm
Well, I suspect the majority of it is actually men’s fault – side effect of us being a patriarchy and of our horrible, largely edited and written by men memetics, especially religion.