She’s Just Not That Into You
Let’s face it: most couples don’t belong together. Ask any buck or doe.
If you could save me
From the ranks of the freaks
Who suspect they could never love anyone — Aimee Mann
When it comes to marriage, commitment, and LTRs, we have much to learn from the animal kingdom. Take the all too common white deer, or giant rat, that overpopulates the northeastern regions of north America. For fifty-weeks of the year, the does and bucks have virtually no contact with each other. That’s primarily because it is only for two-weeks each November, when the does are in estrus, that rutting (mating) season begins. What we learn, or relearn, is that there is no compelling reason for them to be together other than a brief rut, because outside that context they have no use for one another — indeed, rub each other the wrong way (not a pun).
In early November, the bucks seek out secluded sylvan bowers for their ruts — essentially a low pawed out concavity in the forest floor that is intended to serve as a prospective love nest (oh, you shouldn’t have gone the trouble, Bob). At least the location is enticing. As part of the appeal, the buck dolls up his rut, marking it with his urine, periodically returning to spruce up, re-mark, and discern if a doe has come and marked the rut with her urine — a show of interest. Competing bucks are known to foul or sabotage rivals’ ruts, rendering them undesirable to the does.
“What’s this rut? Couldn’t we get a room?
Such a show of interest is invariably dissolved or precluded by an overpowering stench of pheromones emanating from does’ genitalia — now swole up like two underinflated stinking footballs —a perfume that can be discerned downwind by bucks sensitive olfactories as far as ten-miles away. The pheromones the does transmit have an arresting affect that transfixes the bucks, delivering them into a mindless horny frenzy that won’t subside until they are satisfied, or become road-kill. It’s no wonder, as they only ‘get some’ during their proscribed two-week lost-weekend.
“Had I the enhanced olfactory senses of the white tailed deer, perhaps I would have smelled trouble coming.
However, in most suburban areas the deer habitate, the number of bucks far exceeds the does. There’s very little action in the rut because a doe wouldn’t have time to stop along the way while she was gang-banged by twenty or thirty ape-shit horny bucks — each taking his annually proscribed five-seconds of glory. A doe will tire of the bucks quickly enough, but not they she. They will continue to pursue en masse as she darts away, many bucks satisfying themselves as the doe is running — hence the vulgate “flying-fuck.”
“The rest of the year the does patter about gingerly with their foals, while the bucks go faffing about, and scarfing down gardens.
Over-greet homlinesse engendreth dispreysinge
I suppose the does must be relieved when it’s all over and they can go back to mindless grazing and browsing. But what must the bucks think, I wonder? That they can, and prefer to, eschew each other’s presence for all but a tiny fraction of the does’ few weeks of estrus is not sui generis in the animal kingdom. Alternatively, there are animals, such as swans, beavers, and penguins, who make lifetime mates, never infidel. Do they seem happier? It’s hard to tell, but I daresay they couldn’t possibly imagine their life without their significant other.
Words from Aimee Mann seem to always come to mind when I think about men and women. She has much to say about the absurdity and desperation of relationships, despite her insistence that those lyrics are not about her experiences.
There’s nothing that needs to be added to that advice.
Feckless mankind seems to fall somewhere in between the LTRs and one-night stands of the animal kingdom, but seems to err on the side of breeding contemptuous LTRs: couples wholly unsuitable for one another perpetuate their post-year-one misery by remaining in failed marriages. Since “familiarity (homlinesse) breeds contempt,” the longer men and women stay together the more bored, miserable, love-impoverished women become. According to The Atlantic’s The Bored Sex
“Although most people in sexual partnerships end up facing the conundrum biologists call “habituation to a stimulus” over time, a growing body of research suggests that heterosexual women, in the aggregate, are likely to face this problem earlier in the relationship than men.”
Women are also more likely to succumb to habituation than men because men invariably fail to maintain an emotional connection with their women. Dispassionate run of the mill sex is unsatisfactory to women in the long run. Women want an emotional connection that they either had and lost, or that was never there in the first place. Most men are utterly incapable of making such a connection with their woman.
Relationships founded through sex-too-soon have no shelf life, and seldom persevere. The absence of men’s innovation in the bedroom solidifies women’s discontent. They need variety. Men will give and take their sex with banal complacency that does little to inspire and maintain passion, and induce loathing with demands that they be serviced whenever they feel the urge.
“Getting hitched fella? Better stock up on the ADDYI (flibanserin)
Made for Each Other?
So if men and women are so miserable together, why do they stay together? Is there a human need to have a companion who doesn’t make them happy, or makes them unhappy? Of course there isn’t. But then maybe the need, and social pressure to bog down in LTRs obscures the grim reality of married life.
Only about 40–50% of all marriages end in divorce. It’s not as if that quotient represented all of the marriages that should have been terminated. If so how many more never should have met in the first place? By my estimate another 40–45%. In other words, perhaps less than 5% of all married couples are happy in their relationship
“women, more than men, tend to feel stultified by long-term exclusivity — despite having been taught that they were designed for it.”
Monogamous minded Americans will ‘cheat’ in their unhappy marriage, whereas in many European counterparts, more rope is afforded in an LTR to stretch one’s legs with their partner’s consent. They understand the dilemma of the white tailed deer. Having an understanding of restricted philandering lowers the frequency of conflict but not of divorce: Europeans divorce at roughly the same rate as Americans.
A sex-crazed herd of of animals importunately pursuing a single alarmed female. I am talking about online dating, of course.
Newsweek reported, in 2017, that ‘According to a British Medical Journal Open “for both sexes, poor physical and mental health, poor communication and a lack of emotional connection during sex can cause sexual desire to dwindle. Interestingly, women were twice as likely as men to lose interest in sex when living with their partner or while in a relationship lasting more than a year.”
As marriages evolve, men tend to fall into a rude-mechanical automaton regimen of eat/defecate/work/sex/sleep, and repeat that routine until the marriage becomes a banality of complacency: it’s not perfect, but the alternatives aren’t so great either. Pity the man or woman who suffers in a marriage but perseveres in it for reasons of need, security, or complacency.
“I’m going to be in the 5%, or not at all. Does that make me virtually and irrevocably single?
The Bored and the Boring
The notion of women getting bored of the same man after one-year turns conventional wisdom on its head: wasn’t it men who lost interest upon the first congress always the ones who strayed? Women are not only bored of dispassionate SOS in-out/in-out as they are the stultifying routine of purely animalistic, often painful sex, that men provide to them, or subject them to. It seems that way to women because they sense the man is merely in it to pleasure himself, caring little about pleasing his woman — which is an estimation that is too often spot-on.
The notion of familiarity breeding contempt is well represented in ancient thought, for example, Aesop’s The Fox and The Lion
When first the Fox saw the Lion he was terribly frightened, and ran away and hid himself in the wood. Next time however he came near the King of Beasts he stopped at a safe distance and watched him pass by. The third time they came near one another the Fox went straight up to the Lion and passed the time of day with him, asking him how his family were, and when he should have the pleasure of seeing him again; then turning his tail, he parted from the Lion without much ceremony — Aesop, 6C BCE.
Like Aesop’s fox, or suburban white tailed deer, perhaps men and women were only meant to be together for the brief mating ritual, or when the woman is ovulating. Other times, they can’t stand the sight of each other: why would they engage at all? Indeed, the pheromone inspired frenzy bucks experience is not dissimilar to the tendency of men to abandon reason and discretion when under the influence of alcohol.
Which is precisely why I generally avoid meeting dates in pubs, or socializing under the influence: all of my worst romantic decisions were made under such oblivious circumstances: I simply couldn’t see the forest for the trees.
One final thought … the movie Magnolia was built around Aimee Mann’s soundtrack, not the other way around.
