Page 32 - Advanced Romance

Advanced Romance* 29
ancestral men and women to prefer, choose and pursue specific mating partners. Then the couple start the mating process and remain sexually faithful to him or her long enough to conceive a child. After the child
is born however, parents need a new set of chemicals and brain networks to rear the infant as a team— the chemistry of attachment. As a result, feelings of attachment often dampen the ecstasy of romance, replacing it with a deep sense of union with the mate...
Once you begin to envision lust, romantic love and attachment as three specific mating drives, each producing many gradations of feeling that endlessly recombine in countless different ways, love takes on tangibility.20
I really like Fisher’s phrase here: “love takes on tangibility.” Otherwise it drifts in a hazy romantic cosmos that few bothers to analyze. But here is scientific justification for the highly immoral act of adultery, of cheating, of scoundrel behavior. Or it’s a way to control such urges by realizing that they are as much evolution as your choosing to pursue or not pursue them.
Once we realize that we are in the grip of powerful forces we can start to make changes balancing out these forces. Instead of seeing these forces as proof that you are morally deficient, you can see them as a given fact of life. Not the Jesus way of plucking your eyes out, but