“Why do us girls always fall for the wrong men?”
is wondering… With all the millions of men in the world. Why do us girls always fall for the wrong ‘uns? And why don t we ever learn?
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Alas, Michelle, you are a victim (beneficiary) of a ruthless (brilliant) evolutionary stratagem. For most of your ancestors (about 40m years worth of them) the best idea was to find a strong male who could protect them, and look after the young during their formative years*. The fact that you’re here is testament to its success.
Then, however, we evolved. The brain expanded, growing new areas (hence the ‘neo-’ in ‘neo-cortex’) on top of the old. With this came tool use, greater team work, corresponding social skills, and so on. Those males possessing these skills were vastly more successful than the more ‘neanderthal’ men at providing for their mate(s).
This leaves us with a hefty legacy of lizard and monkey brain chugging away beneath a spangly new, yet alarmingly thin veneer of homo-sapiens brain; with the inevitable consequence that you are strongly torn in two directions, which can be summarised as “the protector” and “the provider”.
And as if that wasn’t bad enough, when you’re in love, you’re basically messed up on drugs. Love is literally an addiction. It totally distorts your perceptions, thinking, biology… and we haven’t even touched on the effects of post-coital oxytocin yet.
Why do we fall in love with some people and not others? Generally the more like you they are, the more you’ll get (it) on. Over the years we even grow to mimic each other. Some biologists go still further and suggest that it’s basically the quantities and proportions of dopamine, serotonin, oestrogen, testosterone we express which is likely to determine our best match.
An alternative, fatuous take would be that if you go looking for a dick, you’ll find one…
* Human beings are pretty much ‘done’ in all the evolutionarily important ways by age 7. This has been postulated as the biological source of the ‘seven year itch’
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