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" I realized love won't obey our expectations, its mystery is pure and absolute." - Francesca, Bridges of Madison County
Some who cheat cite, "the Devil made me do it," but it would be far more useful to say, "I did it because I'm trapped with very normal needs I cannot possibly get met." They thought they would always be met - the partnership of commitment, the bond of love, and the passion of sex, erroneously assumed to be guaranteed by a legal document: the marriage contract.
The truth is that the only guarantee of our needs being met in a relationship is the slow, careful vetting of another which used to be called courtship. Or what biologists call a "mating sequence." Either way it is described, a conscious attention to this ancient social process has relatively fallen to the wayside in modern western cultures - the very first portion of it, the passion of sexual attraction, never understood as the illogical, irrational, chaotic process it has always, and will always be.
Keeping passion for another cannot be memorialized as a contract, a conscious promise, because this attraction is not a choice.
What if "the Devil" of the saying, "the Devil made me do it," isn't literally out there somewhere in the physical environment to fight, resist, reject, or "defeat," but is rather more "the Devil inside" - a metaphorical feature of our animal instincts we have no conscious choice about, to which some Evolutionary Psychologists attribute just two prime functions:
• To survive (which implies, to kill if necessary, or be killed.)
• To reproduce (not within proper social conventions, or with consideration and ethics, but simply to pass on our genes - not randomly or sloppily, but according to specific masculine and feminine instinctual strategies.)
Males have billions of sex cells over a lifetime and women have hundreds of viable eggs by comparison that could become fertilized and grow as a fetus. It might then make sense why men always seem to get "caught with their pants down," literally, while pursuing woman after woman in secret. It makes sense why women who vest such care, wise judgment, and discrimination in selecting the best possible mate can become indignant at this natural, instinctual difference.
Still, as with the fictional Francesca of Bridges of Madison County, and the real, female author, Sandra Tsing Loh, featured in the recent Atlantic Monthly - http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200907/divorce - women do in fact, also cheat, perhaps in equal numbers, but in a very different pattern and with a different, underlying, instinctual - and therefore often unconscious - genetic strategy.
This "Devil inside" cannot be "defeated," extinguished, or pretended to not exist - your instincts and drives are inside you, all men, all women, and aren't going anywhere.
Neither is infidelity. As a recent blog comment states, there's not disappointment, but power in this knowledge, and answers to living happy lives regardless of our dark sides.
Whether male or female committing the act, we call it at best, "juvenile" or "adolescent," and at worst, "evil." All of which are accurate if you were to see the aggressive drives of a kindergarten toddler wrenching a toy away from another - resembling in many ways, an adult withholding love from a partner who won't comply with their every wish - or the savage instincts of a death-struggle between two animals that ends in one eating the other - so easily felt in the spirit of the modern human struggle of divorce. You could call it all either juvenile or even evil.
When people cheat, they don't literally attack each other physically, though the trauma on the emotions may feel just as painful, and outright be as thoughtless as the words and actions of a child. In divorce, people don't literally kill each other, though they likely do kill the dreams of another, slaying the image of what the couple could have been, and draining the lifeblood of their work-efforts from their bank accounts.
At the root of such conflicts is the drive to survive at all costs, and to reproduce whatever it takes. If you were to find just one word representing them both in this area of the mind once called by Evolutionary Psychologists, "the Reptilian Brain," that word must certainly be "passion" - such a powerful force of behavior that it is automatically played out by the body, in action - devoid of judgment, impulsive, and ignoring what may very well be a long history of character and civility.
One mistake does not negate a lifetime of cultivating character and maturity any more than one home-run ball thrown by a Major League pitcher keeps him out of the Hall of Fame, or one episode of forgetting to hand your child their lunchbox as they run out the door somehow makes you a globally bad mother.
We are so quick to demand perfection of each other while being so lacking in understanding of the simplest needs and ways of the other gender - which must have been at least partially mastered by every single one of our forebears...
...or we wouldn't be here today.
They didn't know about Evolutionary Psychology, but they must have known passion when they saw it in the eyes of their other, felt it when they provided what the other's instincts needed, and when that other understood their needs in return.
There are passionate, sexy love stories, but also "crimes of passion," not at all romantic. In every case of its use, the word passion keys into - that's right - either the life-and-death struggle to survive, or to the animal drive to mate, to reproduce.
Passion equals instinct. Passion lives exclusively in "the Reptilian Brain."
Let's take the Triune Brain Model of Paul McLean into practical application - where the Reptilian Brain is the center of the instincts, the unconscious, the Mammalian Brain is the center of emotion (and love), and the "Higher Brain" is in the neocortex full of the intellect, wisdom, abstract thought, ethics and boundaries that allow us to truly commit and partner (as well as set humans apart from other higher animal species.)
Because of the emotional bonding of the Mammalian Brained area of the mind, we love and form friendships.
Because of the maturity, ethics, and boundaries of the Higher Brain, we become capable of true commitment and keeping (most) promises.
Yet the Reptilian Brain is the difficult child, the troubling one, the devil in the details of romance.
It is about only lust and desire. It is not love, not partnership or teamwork, or contracts, agreements or promises.
This Reptilian Brain is raw passion only.
It does not steer us to "love, honor and cherish," but to mate - thoughtlessly by its very nature, in poor judgment that is irrelevant to its purposes, and sometimes with great regret which is an insignificant casualty of its war on anything in the path of survival and reproduction.
The impulsiveness of the Reptilian Brain ignores at times and often offends our high character, our mature sense of ourselves, and our healthy pride in being good people, which is how those who do cheat often also describe their own actions as self-traumatizing.
Following one's "Reptilian Brained" passions then has both a light and dark side. When following them to the detriment of others, we certainly hurt them and may even hurt ourselves, our pride in character and ethics. But in not following them, we harm ourselves just the same - and those attached to us - by feeling less alive and happy, less real and fully present, less genuine, and in some cases, no more than an empty shell of "niceness."
Tennessee Williams told us he feared that if his devils were to flee, his angels would leave him too. If so, we'd best be cautioned - in always seeking to prevent or minimize the pain infidelity causes ourselves - that ignoring, shaming, or attempting to extinguish the desire and passion of the other is not the way to steer it back toward us.
Sexual attraction is not logical, is not a choice, not a conscious agreement.
It can't be effectively policed or restricted by mere words and policies any more than wars can. It arises for reasons we are unaware of, and can be just as mysteriously fleeting. It must be enticed, appealed to, and cleverly influenced by our body language, our insinuations and flirtation - not logical argument, promises in a marriage contract we demand be fulfilled, or abet our wish for, or illusion of control.
When we have made promises to others, and they have made them in return, it is exceedingly uncomfortable to see their passions not in alignment with the promises.
We are "losing them."
It's even more uncomfortable to admit that they are following a straying path that makes them feel more alive - which is not, well, involving us. They have committed an error of judgment, letting the passions have their way, but somehow feel more real and alive for so doing.
We hate them for doing this, and we hate strangers for reminding us that it's real and has happened to us too.
Most uncomfortable of all, we know that somehow we have made an error of omission - we've failed to do the mysterious, invisible, enticing things that would have impassioned them and kept us from losing them.
The media offer us a temporary but unsatisfying solution for our anxiety - a Gladiator contest of heroes and villains, good and evil, right and wrong - in which we can see our own conflicts, struggles with passion, and the "Devil inside" instead projected back out there, where he is safer by being imagined as somehow not a part of ourselves.
The "Reptilian Brain" carries a striking symbolic similarity to "the serpent" which traditionally represents "the Devil," but to the biologist, is simply a form of life nearly entirely run by instinct alone.
We call that cheating guy, "a snake" because he seems incapable of emotion, empathy, and maturity of character.
The Media, and "Projection"
Story after story of infidelity such as Governor Mark Sanford's might make us wonder if infidelity is "on the rise" rather than simply being due to ever-increasing public access to the personal lives of prominent office-holders, celebrities, and others in public service, entertainment or communications.
Clearly cheating is a moral wrong, a broken promise of the greatest proportions - those both male and female commit it, and are "bad" for doing so, and receive consequences. This doesn't make them more passionate for us though.
We have a need to fill in the details of stories for which we only have partial details, and half-plot-lines, and only barely a clue about the real lives of only one or two of the entire cast of characters. Absent the full details, we have a tendency to project our own good and bad onto the story. This means that there must be a hero and a villain, or it doesn't make sense to us.
All people have some good and some bad in them. In the case of cheating, we can identify our own good side with the goodness of the victim, and feel all the better for being like someone so widely discussed and sympathized with. We can project our own bad onto the bad person who committed the ethical wrong, and in so doing also feel better - after all, also widely discussed, but demonized, they must then be far more bad than us.
In truth, they are a couple equally responsible for the outcome of their relationship through communicating, attracting, loving, negotiating, compromising, policing, forgiving, limit-setting, collaborating, maintenance, and what is so very often forgotten in the earliest stages of dating today - courting with wisdom in the first place.
That is to say, being patient enough to assure sexual chemistry, friendship, compatibility, values, beliefs, goals and maturity are all in alignment before ever even vaguely entertaining "I do," and walking away if it is not right.
We are all just as good and as bad as those we see in the media, just as tempted, just as imperfect, and fallible, and as at risk of being hurt and hurting others. This is precisely why the plight and passion of the very ordinary, non-celebrity, non-politician characters of Bridges are so touching. They are us.
It's also uncomfortable to know we are capable of both good and bad - precisely why the plight and passion of the celebrity, the politician, and those in the public eye are unforgivable. They are our convenient screens on which to project. We cling to their dramas in order to feel better.
We need them to be perfect icons, not normal like us.
The Animal Mating Sequence
What is "normal" on one end of the scale, and what is "perfect" on the other end? If we were to take a bow to Evolutionary Psychology and also define "normal" as what is biologically natural, then infidelity for both males and females would be quite normal. It's rampant, and always has been - animal behavior that, like war, no public policy, religion, moral or civilizing force has ever extinguished, or barely even suppressed.
In The Bridges of Madison County, Francesca says, "And in that moment, everything I knew to be true about myself up until then was gone. I was acting like another woman, yet I was more myself than ever before."
What if we are both normal and natural biologically, yet occasionally (or even often) morally wrong at the same time? What if we can be both "bad," and also full of passion - and at once feel fully alive? What if we can also be both "good," and also passionless, "on the wrong path," as far as personal fulfillment, and therefore feeling something less than alive? Perhaps Mark Sanford, like Francesca, like Jenny Sanford, or like any of the rest of us, have occasionally felt these passions and the conflicts they give rise to.
These dilemmas could be bypassed if we dropped the moralizing, politicizing, and special interest group agendas for a minute - the "good/bad" distinction - and looked at them instead in terms of biologically "in error." In this light, there are errors of commission, and errors of omission - what we do that causes us an unhappy result, versus what we fail to do that does so.
Lucky for us, as members of the animal kingdom, nature has provided a way to instinctively know "what's right," from "what's wrong and in error" - the mating sequence, or "mating dance," in which the male does one seductive action, the female does one flirtatious action in return, and the cycle continues until the passions of both are trained on each other intensely.
In pair bonding - coupling up - both parties are also capable of making an error that stops the whole process, but if both do the steps of the dance right, and in order, it generally goes fine.
The "Devil inside" can be tamed and steered in our favor, to our benefit and that of our eventual exclusive other.
This human mating sequence - through an understanding of the subtleties of dating and mating behavior that can actually be brought out and learned in live social situations - is being taught by seminar companies that are starting to pop up around the world. It is what amounts to the first "practical applications" of Evolutionary Psychology to modern dating. (Unfortunately, nearly none are conducted or administered by actual scientists, but if you want to know how, write me.)
Across species, males and females have differing roles springing from differing instincts in the mating sequence - like puzzle pieces, dancers, and DNA itself, we make a complementary fit for each other.
The Governor's instincts were doing exactly what they are programmed to do, and his wife's instincts are reacting just as they are designed to - to be enraged, betrayed and beyond turned off at a display of low character in a male. Both are passion-driven, just as what drives animals to kill, humans to cheat and revile the cheating of others, and whole nations to wage war on each other.
Yet both members of any couple will have a role in healing each other after infidelity - preventing errors of commission by fixing errors of omission in the ongoing courtship - stopping what we do to cause harm, and starting what, if forgotten or ignored, also causes harm.
In this way a couple returns again and again to the steps of courtship, the human mating sequence, to refurbish its biologically required dance steps like one may throw a second and third wedding celebration to renew the vows.
If we were to look at most cases of cheating and compare the personalities, the attraction, the ways of being with the other vis a vis the affair partner, we'd most often come away seeing that what the spouse lacks, the affair partner has, and what the affair partner lacks, the spouse has. This might explain the excruciating difficulty in leaving one for the arms of another, or returning to a mate without thinking of the affair partner ever again.
In this way, we may be building a "perfect courtship" with a "perfect mate" out of more than one individual, rather than knowing the biology of courtship in the first place well enough to select a mate that is going to be all we will ever need or have passion for in one person.
When the Governor says he will strive to "fall in love with his wife again," he likely doesn't need to. Like Francesca, he already loves his spouse, and is committed to both her and the children - commitment being a long term effort of character maturity, not perfect, or capable of preventing every lapse of reason. But was temporarily hijacked by the irrational passions of the Reptilian Brain. Passion, sexual attraction, is not a choice.
Our problem is that desire (or passion), love, and commitment are not the same. They are three different features of romance, operating in three separate areas of the mind - the Reptilian, Mammalian, and Higher Brains of the Triune Brain model - connected but distinct. And need to be attended to as individual building blocks of a romance.
The Governor - like countless men, women, and the fictional Francesca - was for a time, objectively less passionate about his mate than a less-known other. Not just rightfully, but biologically, any mature, high character woman might feel less sexually attracted in return, as a result of the male lack of composure, impulsive, poor judgment, and thoughtlessness.
But like the rest of humanity, they won't be able to force desire, lay down rules on the instincts, logically convince the passions through moral argument, demand rational behavior of the irrational, or consciously choose to somehow, mysteriously, magically "just be attracted" again.
Instead, forgiveness will have to sooth the memory, and an effort made to somehow return to the playful, nonverbal flirtatious, fun, carefree natural experience that - ironically - adolescence, not cold, calculating maturity allowed in - not the serious weight of "proving one's love or commitment," but the freedom of the emotions we knew as kids at play.
They have a chance, but only through the illogical, irrational, naughty, playful, fun, flirty ways of passion - the very thing that can get humans into grave moral territory if omitted or neglected, but is the stuff of feeling truly alive like no other feature of our psychology.
If the devils flee, the angels leave with them. Forgive the devils instead, feed them seductiveness and they willingly, eagerly set up roost in your bedroom - no other's. The marriage contract can memorialize the rules of conduct and maturity in love's commitment to each other, but only the biology of courtship can take one by the hand in the wordless, rule-less dance of passion felt only for each other.
