What Evolution Can Tell Us About Modern Relationships

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We all do silly shit for reasons that we don’t fully understand. This part of the human experience can ease the tension a bit and can help us pretend to make sense of this crazy world. The tendency to rationalize our subconscious desires can also lead us to a life full of buying our own bullshit and self-justification, which is generally far from helpful. It becomes glaringly obvious when it comes to our romantic lives, in particular, the expectations that men project onto women.

Allow me to introduce you to something known as the Madonna/Whore Complex, a source of fuckery that can be traced back to early human development which still shows its face in the subconscious of men to this day. Let’s explore how this psychological conundrum might be sneaking itself into our lives…

*Heads up, we aren’t talking about Madonna the pop icon. Madonna means “a morally pure and chaste woman”… I think the irony was Madonna’s intention.

The term “Madonna/Whore Complex” was coined by the first ever psychoanalyzer, Sigmund Freud, and defined as “the inability to maintain sexual arousal within a committed, loving relationship” and “is said to develop in men who see women as either saintly Madonnas or debased prostitutes.” Essentially identifying men’s tendency to categorize women based upon a variety of factors, assigning a binary label, and projecting expectations accordingly… A recipe for disaster that happens at the level of the subconscious mind, leading to confusion and subsequent rationalization of that creates “judgy douche” behavioral patterns.

The categories play very separate roles in our life experience and are seemingly at odds with one another. The “whore” category is for purely sexual desires. Those labeled as “Madonnas” are seen as pure and suitable for long-term partnerships. As hard as it may be to admit, many of us have been guilty of this type of sorting throughout our romantic lives.

Think about that fuck-buddy that still crosses your mind from time to time. The sex was great, she was cute and funny, you like to quote the same ridiculous movies… It made so much sense, but something wasn’t right. Something was in the way of taking this person seriously… I would venture to say that thing may have been that one of the personality traits that you two shared was her loving to fuck just as much (and just as dirty) as you. It’s hard for a young man thinking about doing the things that you did to her to the mother of your kids…

Your future wife would never like being called a slut during sex or getting railed in a public restroom… This is “just a phase” and you’ll “settle down when you meet the “right girl.” This “right girl” is just sexual enough, but not too much, and has the history (or lack thereof) to show for it. Her limited experience indicates predictability and qualifies her a worthy investment of your genetic capital. The “right girl” is a Madonna and is more of a cute fantasy than a reality.

This projection leads many men to lose the ability to view potential long-term partners as sexual beings and keeping women that he views as sexual beings from consideration for a committed relationship. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

Guys are notorious for this glaring contradiction and often times it’s a clear double standard that frustrates the hell out of the women on the receiving end. The grounds for this type of judgment are shaky and generally contain statements that sound a lot like “I can’t believe that you did that thing that I did or wish that I did too”.

This reaction comes from defending an unrealistic idea. To accept that someone to whom you have assigned the characteristics of your Disney-character fantasy is actually a “dirty girl,” would send your whole concept of what a relationship is supposed to be into a tailspin. It’s better to live in denial than to enter an existential shit-show created by a now exposed fallacy.

We’ve made some big strides in shifting this way of thinking more recently, thanks to women standing up for their sexuality and taking an empowered stance on the subject. It seems women are outpacing men when it comes to creating change here (surprise, surprise). A lack of common ground can sometimes create a combative exchange, which while extremely justified, is probably not the most helpful approach. With little understanding of where these urges come from, we might be able to find a little more common ground and a lot less judgmental nonsense.

Let’s start by creating an understanding of why we get ourselves into this mess in the first place.

Our genes are pretty selfish and narcissistic. They want to continue to live on after we die and they do that by giving us the opportunity to bang it out with a lovely reward for our efforts in the form of orgasms, and sometimes, a baby. We want to bone regularly and our gene’s want us to reproduce. As we evolve, these motivators get more deeply ingrained in our actions and our social structure rationalizes and normalizes it. This normalization is why terms like “slut shaming” exist and can have the impact they do on the people that are on the receiving end of their use.

To gain some clarity on how this all went down, let’s roll this back to an earlier time when we hunted, gathered, fucked outside, and occasionally got eaten by cave bears or saber tooth tigers.

In a land without birth-control, paternity tests, and Brazilian waxes, sex played a much different role in society. Every sexual event was truly a “risk it all” experience. It’s important to understand this when we think about how it influenced our mating behavior in the present.

Men can reproduce several times a day and, generally speaking, they will if the opportunity presents itself. Genghis Khan is a good example of this as he is genetically linked to around 2% of the world’s population thanks to his harem of over 100 women. Women, on the other hand, are extremely preoccupied for over a year after getting pregnant. They carry a little person inside of them, give birth, then keep the thing alive until it can at least avoid death on its own. It’s a lot to handle.

Men, on the other hand, have the opportunity to bail whenever they want, but since the continuation of their genes relies on the kid surviving it makes more sense for him to stick around for a least a handful of years to support his genetic investment. This is all pretty straightforward. The guy doesn’t have to carry a child so he can feed, protect, and provide which makes survival of their little one much more likely.

Everybody wins in this situation…. Unless that kid isn’t yours. Surprise motherfucker, you just got cucked. This is a shitty situation for the man because he’s supporting some other dude’s genes with his resources. This a biologically-induced shit-storm for the cucked individual.

With this being a real (and costly) possibility, it makes the most sense for him to mate with someone that exhibits self-control and is as prudent as possible to minimize the risk. In other words, he wants a Madonna.

The biological need for reassurance is the reason that men get butthurt over irrelevant sexual histories, jealous over harmless interactions with other men, and on-edge when their partner even mentions the fact that she has experienced other dicks in her life.

With this framework, you might think that we should have evolved to be abstinent until marriage and monogamous as fuck for our entire lives… Monogamy would simplify things, for sure. But we would also miss out on the genetic diversity of mating with a variety of partners which also gives our gene’s a distinct advantage in the evolving world.

This advantage leads to a lingering desire to seek novelty in our sexual adventures to scratch a deep psychological itch. The deep, primitive urge to explore rears its head and starts calling the shots because, at the end of the day, our genetic instincts don’t give a fuck about our relationships. This is the struggle that we are all faced with.

It’s a tug-of-war between stability and variety.

Is this fair? Not really. But, like I said, we’re only human.

Now, let’s bring it back to the present.

This component of human nature that used to serve our species well has become quite antiquated. Accidental pregnancies are rare, women can take care of themselves and a child alone, and often times do it very well. Thanks to paternity tests and modern science, we can figure out all kinds of things about where we come from and whose kid is whose.

All of that said, we aren’t doing ourselves any favors by creating frameworks that are just as unrealistic and outdated as the primitive urges we are working to counteract. The modern institution of relationship, marriage, and the accompanying expectations lead to a whole host of problems that revolve around the denial of our human nature. We come from a long line of people that acted instinctively to get us to where we are, and we can do ourselves a favor by accepting this part of ourselves instead of investing energy into denying it.

The idea that women can either be a Madonna or a whore is ridiculous, but the reason that we might subconsciously create that distinction makes sense. So what do we do about it? Well, we start by catching ourselves when we try to create that imaginary distinction.

We begin to understand that if we treat those that we have projected the role of “Madonna” onto as if they have the capacity to be naughty (which they do), and we can engage with those that we have funnelled into the “whore” category with more respect and fewer judgements, we’ll eventually get to the place where we are all allowed to be who we actually are. Just a bunch of horny teenagers pretending to be grownups.

Change starts with creating an environment within your relationships for exploration, curiosity, and playful intrigue without all of the judgments and shame that get in the way of honest communication. Life’s too short to drop people into categories and pretend that we don’t all love a little novelty in and out of our sex lives. When we start to set a new standard for how we view and treat each other, we’ll get past “Madonnas” and “whores” and get to a place where we are only divided by our willingness to do anal and kiss after blowjobs. It’s a truly magical wonderland.

See y’all there..

If you’re interested in learning more about relationships and sexuality, be sure to check out Sex At Dawn by Chris Ryan and Mating In Captivity by Esther Perel. They both played a huge role in the development of these ideas.

We also love to cover topics like this on The Realness Podcast, if you into that kind of thing.

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ConnerWanders

Podcaster mostly, but I do other stuff too.