How You Are Not In Control
That fire in your gut that instantly makes you want her, you thinking, “She’s so hot,” or the agonizing pain of missing her, even years later... the jealousy... all of those emotions — that’s your system’s effort to do this.
What’s really going on is that inside almost every cell in your body, you have something called genes.
Your genes control your emotions and instincts, and they have one main objective: replication and continuation of themselves.
Your emotions are the tools your genes use to pull you toward women so they can replicate. So you are like this container being controlled by another entity, and its job is to replicate. The tools that control you, are #1 your emotions and #2 your nervous system.
So who is really doing the business here? You think it’s you and the woman, but you’re just the middleman being controlled. You get pushed toward women, excited to meet them, excited for dates, sad and heartbroken after the breakup, driven to get her back. All these emotions are to send you back to the field.
Even when she or the relationship damages your peace, happiness, logical thinking, quality of life, growth, or future. You may still destroy everything just to be with her for a few minutes or even forever. Guilt, jealousy, anxiety, missing her, lust (aka horniness), obsession, fear of losing her, and sadness.
Your genes, if they have to, will throw you under the bus for their own agenda so they can continue your bloodline.
Remember the ideas from Richard Dawkins, Robert Wright, David Buss, Sperm Wars, and The Mating Mind, especially The Selfish Gene: men will sacrifice status, money, family, and years of work for 10 minutes of validation from a woman.
These evolved systems have been around for hundreds of thousands to millions of years because they are crucial to survival.
Around the 1100s, through “courtly love” literature, the idea of exclusive romantic love became popular in medieval Europe. Over time, people began treating these biological instincts as proof of destiny, soulmates, or romantic meaning instead of understanding them as evolved emotional mechanisms and learning to control them.
As a result, most of the population, in one way or another, gets trapped in emotional loops, makes irrational life decisions, stays in destructive situations, and mistakes biological programming for destiny, soulmates, or proof they “must” be together.
Understanding where these emotions come from gives you power over them, so you stop being unconsciously controlled by instincts you don’t understand.
It’s your peace, happiness, wealth, and quality of life versus your genes, which have control over your emotions.
From an evolutionary psychology perspective, intense romantic love is a temporary, non-exclusive biological state between you and her designed for attachment, bonding, sex, and reproduction, not proof of destiny or soulmates. The modern idea that one person should permanently fulfill all emotional and psychological needs is relatively new compared to the much older survival and reproduction systems we have evolved with.
If you want more on this, read these:
The Selfish Gene — Richard Dawkins, The Moral Animal — Robert Wright, The Evolution of Desire — David Buss, Sperm Wars — Robin Baker, When Men Behave Badly — David Buss, The Mating Mind — Geoffrey Miller