I read news items by opening them in background Firefox tabs from Google Reader. I go through the feeds that I’m reading at the moment, open all that are interesting, and then close my reader app.

What’s interesting about this is that if I leave for a bit before reading my open tabs, something strange happens — none of the tabs are as interesting as they were when I clicked them. There’s a very specific reason for this. Our desire for an object is directly affected by whether or not we own it. This is the reason that you’ll watch Braveheart on TV (in lower quality — with commercials) even though you own it on DVD. It’s also why the girl you have is never as attractive as the girl you don’t.

The movie on TV is going off soon, and you aren’t in control of it so you feel compelled to watch. Similarly, the stories that you opened tabs for would have gone unread (gasp) had you not clicked on them. But once you own the DVD or already have the actual stories open, the content isn’t as interesting. It’s a mind game.

There’s not much we can do about this affliction as it’s likely deeply rooted in evolutionary biology. But we can at least be aware of it.:

Have you ever noticed that the more intelligent a man is the less masculine he tends to be? And doesn’t it seem like the smarter a woman is the less feminine she is? Why is that? The answer to that question, along with the implications thereof, constitute no less than the keys to relationship bliss.

The basic explanation for this phenomenon is that rationality lies in the middle of a sliding scale where femininity is on the left, and masculinity is on the right. As a person becomes increasingly controlled by their intellect as opposed to their masculine or feminine (primal) tendencies , they move toward the center of the scale. Men move left, women move right.

This may seem like an unimportant observation, but in fact the world of relationships revolves around this very same scale. Trophy wives life on the extreme left, alpha-males live on the extreme right, and these two groups seek each other out as the epitomes of desire.

The key to relationship bliss is mastering this scale. Each partner must be able to move back and forth on it as required in order to simultaneously be attractive in a primal sense while using logic and reason as relationship glue.

In other words, if you’re totally primal you basically meet people, shag, get in fights, make babies, shag, make up, go to court, shag, meet new people, etc. Life becomes a never-ending circus ride of pain and pleasure. If, on the other hand, you’re an over-analyzer who is out of touch with your inner animal, life is somewhat meaningless. The joy of being human is repressed and much of the color fades from life.

The answer, of course, is one of balance. Specifically, it entails each partner learning to experience and embrace their respective extremes — the primal and the intellectual. Assuming each has a scale of 1-10, with 1 being the intellectual and 10 being the primal, most only have 2-3 points of mobility. So the average person sits between 4-6, which just straddles the center (5).

If we imagine an average geeky guy, he probably lives between 3-5. So his intellectual side is good (2 points better than average), but his primal rating’s maximum is at 5, which is not good. And the average brute (Putty from Seinfeld) lives at 6-8 — which is precisely the opposite and has its own set of strengths and weaknesses.

The ideal situation is to have as many points of mobility as possible, and we can rate this by subtracting the two numbers. The best situation is a rating of 1-10, which yields a score of 9, while average people like the geek and brute listed above only have 2 points of range.

Of course, the real magic is not just having a good range but knowing how to use it. Each partner has to decide where they are going to reside normally on the scale, while remaining constantly aware of when they may need to slide in one direction or another. And here’s where it gets controversial ¹.

We are animals. We might be special animals, but we are in fact extraordinarily similar to the baboons and wolves we see on TV. As such, anyone who wants to succeed in the realm of human interaction needs to learn the rules of the animal world. To deny these rules shows either ignorance, political/intellectual cowardice, or both.

The Illogical Animal

Think about the people you know personally and the various types of relationship structures that exist. Have you noticed that the most stressed out and unhappy women are those who are forced to develop dominant tendencies because they’re married to under-confident, non-masculine men?

We also know of legions of women who sacrifice a perfect marriage, a perfect family, and their entire livelihoods to be with a man who is extremely domineering and controlling over them — especially sexually. I’m talking about Mrs. Cleaver risking it all to sneak out at night and get brutally shagged by a man who constantly degrades her, tells her exactly how to dress and look for him (slutty), and says unspeakable things to her while they have sex in way she would never consider with her husband. Why does she endure this at the risk of losing everything?

Because at a most primal level — she loves it.

Quite simply, I think this submission stimulates a deeply primal pleasure center within the female and signals a sense of security and happiness. It actually makes excellent sense evolutionarily — with happiness coming from safety and security, and those things only coming from being with a man who’s forceful and powerful. A man in the past who was passive and non-dominant was likely to fail, and this fact is programmed into women.

Hence it’s often the case that when a woman is with a non-masculine man who treats her as an absolute equal and never takes charge, there is a part of her that secretly resents him for it. This is completely hidden from the woman, as she has been trained to ignore her primal side just as the man has been trained to ignore his. Her intellect says she’s happy, but her primal side starts to betray her. And as time wears on this inner tension continues to build².

I believe the presence or lack of this tension contributes greatly to the happiness of a woman, and serves as the reason that wives who are free to let go are often happier than those who are treated as asexual and equal partners. It’s because — when given voluntarily — submission can be quite relaxing, and pampered women often feel extraordinarily feminine and loved when they are able to give their trust and relinquish control to a kind man. In fact I believe there is a part of the female psyche that absolutely craves this feeling.

The Feminized Man

Many men (just as their women) have bought into the whole notion of rejecting the animal when it comes to relationships, and while there is good reason for this in principle it has been severely maligned by current culture. We all know men who basically mope through life in constant fear of their wives. They cower in the face of confrontation and do pretty much anything to stay on the good side of their women. These are the “Yes Dear” men, and they are most happy when they are away from their wives.

The irony of the situation is that it doesn’t make their women happy when they submit. In fact, I’m quite sure it is THOSE women who are most unhappy and cheat the most. Why? Because this type of man a pseudo-man. He exudes no characteristics of a powerful male, and as a result she has no respect for him.

Conclusion

The answer here is to not to run out and try and act like a bimbo or a caveman to satisfy your mate. My point is simply that there is more to satisfying relationships than promoting absolute equality and rational discourse within a relationship. We are still animals, and as animals there is a core of happiness and contentment that can only be stimulated by the expression of our primal identity. We must learn to leverage these vestiges of our previous forms in order to maximize our enjoyment of each other. This means to some degree sexually polarizing our behavior in order to maintain the animal harmony that has defined us for millions of years.

Many will recoil at this idea, as the practice happens to correspond pretty strongly with what maligned Republicans like to call “traditional family values”. But their views are polar opposites of mine, as my theory sits atop a foundation of equality and respect. I condone this exploration as an active, conscious effort on the part of both the man and the woman to milk every bit of happiness and pleasure from a relationship — both from the animal the intellectual sides of our personalities.

All enlightened people know that women are truly equal, as it is humanism and logic that define our values rather than the Bible or religion. This is not a rejection of that equality; it’s a consciously generated augmentation to it for the purposes of increasing happiness. It means learning to acknowledge the differences between men and women on a primal level, and use that information to make our relationships more rich and rewarding. This means being able to slip back and forth on the scale as needed — going from man-and-woman to human-to-human interchangeably.

In other words, we need to use our intellect to build relationship structures that make the best use of our innate abilities to generate happiness. When we deny our animal origins we forfeit our ability to tap into a huge vein of contentment that comes from satisfying our animal nature.

In subsequent pieces I’m going to discuss how an implementation of this theory might take form. Feel free to comment below or via email.:

[ Edit: Modified to clean up my argument and remove language that could most easily be misunderstood. ]

– ¹ Try and keep in mind that this is a blog post based on the opinions of one person. While I do feel there is truth in my comments I am not presenting any of this as fact. They are nothing more than models for viewing the world, and I am constantly revising them and looking for alternative perspectives and conflicting evidence. Please treat them as works in progress and refrain from criticizing my ideas based on a lack of irrefutable proof. I’m telling you up front that these are my own thoughts based on my own experiences, and the point of the post is to get people to help me either grow, prune, or scrap my ideas according to input received. ² It’s important to point out the difference between a man who is kind to his wife while remaining dominant vs. a common asshole who preys on fear and insecurity to keep a woman from attaining happiness. The difference is that the latter isn’t true submission because it isn’t being given, but rather taken. The healthy version of this comes from trust and respect, the unhealthy one comes from fear and self-loathing.