In many societies, Why don't women love men for the same reasons that men love them?
in such societies, Why are men appreciated only when they can give women status and a comfortable life?
The status and resources of a male are important to females because they have made survival and successful reproduction far more likely throughout history.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=status+resources+mate+selection
The status and resources of a male are important to females because they have made survival and successful reproduction far more likely throughout history.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=status+resources+mate+selection
According to Buss and other evolutionary psychologists it's connected with resources that women needed because of potentially higher costs of having a child.
For example:
Article Sexual Strategies Theory: An Evolutionary Perspective on Human Mating
women play a vital role in society. they give birth the child. but most of the men don't notice their double role in society. when a man love a woman the woman must be played important role in home and his work place, but a woman love when his partner support him like a shadow.it is difference between man and woman's love.
The primary attractive features of each sex seem to be very basic and biologically based.
Men are attracted to women based on LOOKS and LOYALTY
If she is pretty and devoted to her male she will appeal to him.
And what we find pretty is bound up with youth and health. Thus the inordinate amount of effort women spend (instinctively) on improving their looks and their health. When not attending to their families many of them are tirelessly preoccupied with going to doctors and beauty parlors.
For women, STATUS is an aphrodisiac.
Successful men have parades of women lining up to have sex with them.
The women do not need to ascertain how WORTHY a man is. His society has already done this for them by bestowing on him his high status. She responds to this by assuming that he is the best male to breed with.
Though we are a complex species, a case can still be made that (like lions or antelope) men fight between themselves and THE WINNER GETS THE PRIZE.
And that prize is the ability to mate with the females.
This behavior and its link to human moral codes is examined in Our Human Herds and THE THEORY OF DUAL MORALITY
www.ourhumanherds.com
That's certainly true of cultures where traditional marriage roles are still in place. Things have been changing, though -- at least in liberal, democratic societies. In the US, for example, more and more women are becoming the primary breadwinners in their families. In 2018, 25% of heterosexual couples were in marriages where the female earned more than the male, compared to only 7% in 1970. Some (e.g. Hanna Rosen in The End of Men) claim that post-industrial society is better suited to women and that this trend will only increase, as the skills and emotional attitudes that are characteristic of women (e.g. communication, negotiation, cooperation, caring and compassion) are gradually eclipsing physical strength, stamina and competition (male skills) as the keys to economic success.
The question that remains is: If and when the time comes when women's earning potential outmatches that of men; when women become the primary breadwinners in the majority of households; and when increasing numbers of men become start-at-home dads during the child-rearing years; what -- if any -- will be the impact on the biological factors that have traditionally shaped sexual attraction and mate selection between the sexes?
Very interesting Denise Morel Physical evolution does not proceed as quickly as cultural evolution. So what might the future hold? You ask the question but suggest no possible solutions.
Will all the factors your state change the reasons why men and women love each other?
Here are some possible future outcomes:
a). Nothing much will change. Young women will still seek males and most will mate with the first one or two who make goo-goo eyes at them. Then they will marry them and be disappointed in their relative low social worth. The girls will nag or look down upon their low performing husbands, but remain in these relationships none-the-less.
b). Marriage itself will fade away. Women will mate with men for sex and children but will find ways (daycare) to raise kids without the dedicated assistance of any one male.
c). Women will restrict their mating to the most aggressive and overly-productive men. There will always be some men who excel and hyper-perform. Maybe women will restrict their availability to these fewer and fewer HIGH PERFORMING AND OVERLY AGGRESSIVE men of the future.
d). Men and women will grow more androgynous. Men who share the same abilities and emotional outlooks as women will share the workplace with them and thereby get the most mating opportunities -- and after many generations males and females will also come to grow a lot alike in the "communication, negotiation, cooperation, caring and compassion" skills of today's women -- and both sexes will come to look more-and-more like the other.
I think the 4th possibility -- (d) -- is the most likely outcome. It is already starting now. The traditional male traits of aggression, assertion, competition, physical strength, emotional control/repression, etc. are now being referred to by progressives as "toxic masculinity," something to be done away with for once and for all. Men are being encouraged to be more like women, while women are being encouraged to be more like men. Dress codes and hairstyles are also becoming increasingly androgynous. And the notion of a distinction between "biological" sex (the sex one is born with) and "gender" (the sex one "identifies with" psychologically), combined with the technology that enables people to change their bodies to match their gender are further indications that things are headed in that direction.
Interestingly, philosopher Ayn Rand addressed similar things almost a century ago in her fictional writings.
She imagined you were correct about the androgyny, but she wanted no part of it.
She wrote of very strong, beautiful and successful women but they were always "won" by extremely handsome hyper-competitive, super-successful men.
In her novel (which I have only glanced at) Atlas Shrugged she finally has these "super" men and super women leave the humm-drumm world of taxation, regulation, regimentation, sympathetic-emotionalism and social indoctrination to fly to some mountainous Shangri-La to start their own world of competition, based on Reason, and success.
She fantasized about being Nietzsche's over-woman lusting after his over-man.
As for the rest of us??? We take our jobs where we can get them.
A 2010 study conducted by Andrew Halperin and Martie Hazleton at the University of California, Los Angeles, for instance, showed that even though "women and men did not differ in either their lifetime number of loves or likelihood of falling in love first," men did report in the study a greater number "of 'loves at first sight,' as well as a higher percentage of loves that were not reciprocated, indicating men’s greater willingness to fall in love during the courtship stage."
The researchers also found that for men in the study, but not women, overperception of others’ sexual interest was linked with more frequently falling in love, as was placing a high value on physical attractiveness!
The thing to keep in mind, is that love is tough to define, and thus can be difficult to research. Women and men may express themselves differently, or experience things through a different lens, but at the end of the day, love is love — and gender doesn't always play a role! !!
Joshua Adekunle Osiyemi Love is an emotion. And like other emotion we recognize them in ourselves and others.
We all feel emotional pain, we all feel hunger, we all can be lonely.
But I don't think we all feel these same ways as intensely. For example, some people report being STARVING if they don't eat for a few hours, while others seem to never have such an intense feeling about food.
Some have a high tolerance for pain, while others seem to shriek at the slightest injury.
So we can assume (though not measure) that some of us FEEL LOVE more intensely than others.
We've all heard of very "passionate" people and others who are "cold-and-logical" maybe these variances are caused by how deeply they are capable of feeling love.
Just as there is variety in height or weight in any given population, maybe there is a natural variety in how intensely we are capable of feeling love.
Any thoughts on this matter?
@Stephen Martin Fritz
In order to study a neural phenomenon in humans, there's need to have what is known as an “operational” definition of that phenomenon!
A working definition of love needs to be made in terms of non-neural observables. We use this definition to determine whether a person loves someone or something. We might choose a combination of factors like elevated heart rate or smiling or pupil dilation, but these are indirect measures themselves. Ultimately we are better off using questionnaires: it’s best to just ask a person who or what they love!
Once there's a working definition of love, then its study can begin experimentally. We can record a person’s neural signals while they are looking at a picture of a loved one. We might use fMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging), EEG (Electroencephalogram) MEG (Magnetoencephalography), PET (Positron Emission Tomography), or some other method. We could also use methods that track the levels of some neurochemical in the blood!
We can’t just measure what happens in a person’s nervous system when they are looking at a loved one. This measurement is meaningless unless we compare it with some baseline. So we also need to make measurements of a “non-love” or neutral state. These measurements are known as controls. By comparing our neural love patterns with our neural control patterns, we can start to see what is neurally different about love compared with other mental states!
Using these kinds of techniques, we have collected various pieces of information. They don’t really add up to a neural theory of love, but they are tentative steps in that direction:
• Love seems to activate the ventral tegmental area, which contains neurons that release the neurotransmitter dopamine. Dopamine is not the “pleasure chemical,” but it has been associated with reward, punishment, addiction, learning, novelty, surprise, salience and other phenomena!
• Love may cause a drop in serotonin levels. Serotonin is not the “bliss chemical.” In fact serotonin remains a very poorly understood neurotransmitter!
• Love may cause reduced activity in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and in the amygdala. The PFC is a large and multifaceted brain region that is involved in all sorts of things, including decision-making, cognition, attention, emotion, and planning. The amygdala is a crucial hub of the emotional system, and is particularly involved in fear processing!
• Love may affect men’s and women’s brains differently. In men, the visual cortex may be relatively more activated by love. In women, the hippocampus—a key part of the brain’s memory system—may be more activated by love!
Remember, these are just examples, and not an exhaustive survey of the literature. Also, note that I used words like “seems” and “may.” This is because social neuroscience is perhaps the most tricky sub-field of neuroscience. Many research findings seem inconsistent with each other, and attempts to replicate them often fail.
We can’t really confirm most of these findings in laboratory animals, since it will always be controversial to attribute complex human emotions to organisms that cannot speak for themselves. Some of these neural “signatures” of love may actually be giving us an incorrect or incomplete picture!
Everyone knows that love is complicated, so we should expect that it will be among the most difficult things to understand from a neural perspective!
Joshua Adekunle Osiyemi All very interesting. But I think finding LOVE in the laboratory will prove as elusive as finding GOD in there.
Both are emotional TRUTHS. We can record the body's reactions when dealing with those truths, but what brings them about will probably remain elusive for a long time.
I am interested in the concept of THE CAPACITY FOR LOVE especially where it relates to children.
Here are some anecdotal observations of mine. I do not know if they would hold water in a research study - BUT I WOULD LIKE TO KNOW YOUR VIEWS ON THE FOLLOWING:
1). It seems to me that when males fall in love with females it occurs faster (and deeper) than females who fall in love with males.
2). Females experience the "groupie" syndrome (falling in love at a distance with males of status or daring) while males seem not to suffer any similar emotion.
3). Males generate romance (display) for females and females cooperate in the effort by openly accepting the romantic gestures (writing poetry, giving rings, etc).
4). Females generate romantic gestures toward their own primary love-interests, "their children" (presents, birthday parties, etc).
5). Males seem to equally divide their love between wives and children whereas females tend to give a far greater percentage of their affection to their children.
--they feel men need it less and children need it more
6). Love is connected to NEED. We seem to love the people we need the most and who need us most. Reciprocal need is linked to LOVE.
And finally: The "Doctors-of-Love" are still our poets and song writers. They seem the have the most useful advice in matters of the heart. But we must not forget the religious either. If God does exist, we can expect a lot from him as long as we imagine he "loves" us.
From the Bible: Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.
But this is not quite right: Love between men and women certainly does end. But between mothers and children it seems to go on forever.
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