TF's being works in progress

Originally Posted by Shinsoo

I think the search for someone who we can love and spend our lives with really just boils down to a lot of abandonment issues.

Fear is a powerful motivator, who wants to face this seemingly difficult experience on Earth alone?

The soul who showed up to be my TF, didn't show up until I knew what it was I wanted to do. I had to do the legwork to heal myself and get to where I need to be before he came into my life.

You may be right.

Keeping this as brief as I can, Evolutionary Psychiatry puts it down to a model of the mind/brain they call the “triune brain”. It proposes that our brains comprise three “main” parts – the old reptilian brain that functions in much the same way as it did in animals millions of years ago; the mid brain that developed along with early primates; and the neo-cortex, that large covering of the mid-brain as humans developed.

Each serves its purpose in helping us survive. The old brain is to do with instinct; the mid-brain to do with our defences and emotions – the flight, fight or freeze response, and action that’s demanded now! and the neo-cortex is about cognition, rationality and many other things. The mid-brain takes action before it even reaches conscious awareness.

Evolutionary psychiatrists believe that the most basic instincts of the earliest animals still exist in humans: the overriding need to preserve and pass on the genes which means mating. The mid-brain was called the “hot brain” by various people (I think Olds came into it somewhere, probably Bowlby) because it made immediate demands based on the “instinctive” drives of the old brain, turning that drive into a fear of being unable to: fear of inadequacy – a sort-of “must have it now!” thing – and therefore the drive to succeed – which is what you’ve said.

But this is reined in by the neo-cortex, the rational, cognitive, that understands the environment and warns people that they can’t just grab someone to mate with! So it becomes a socio-psychological issue and for many puts obstacles in the way – like the person you want to mate with is already married or too young/old or simply isn't interested; and you have to go through the dating/relationship rituals.

So it often becomes a internal fight between the mid-brain and the cortex: emotional wranglings. You can’t always do what you want and your expectations of others are unlikely to be met in full.

It’s a big field of study though, closer to C J Jung than Freud, suggesting that these human traits have evolved and are hard-wired into us.

.

[PMPM71]

Wanting to love someone and spend time with them comes down to mating rituals and reproduction. Some animals are monogamous by nature, others not. Depends mostly on amount of need for offspring care. Human babies are really fragile and need both parents until fit to take care for themselves.

But i doubt we have even scratched the surface of psychology of male-female relations since pre-history and before, how was it truly, what changed and how. Because social "sciences" are always partial with present time discourse its hard to have some objective truly scientific research, it always comes down to interpretation that is socially acceptable at the time.

Ethology is an established area of study that ties in with neuroscience as well as psychiatry. I doubt m/f relations will ever be more responsive to explanation and classification than big generalisations. Like I said in the post above yours, the most basic drives about passing on the genes is as active in human brains as in most animals. They're mollified through further cortical processing which brings responses down to an individual level.
.