The Illusion of Love: Why Marriage Is Built on Unequal
Ground
For centuries, society has cloaked marriage in the language
of love, romance, and permanence. Yet when stripped of its illusions, what
remains is not love but a set of evolutionary imperatives, different for men
and women, and unequal by design.
What Drives Men
Men are hardwired to worship women. That is not a
metaphor. It is a deep, emotional, and almost religious impulse, akin to the
devotion described in the Ten Commandments when the prohibition against false
idols is laid down. Men elevate women, not just for their beauty, but because
women are the vessels of their progeny. She represents the preservation of his
lineage and the transcendent beauty he sees as worthy of sacrifice.
This worship blinds men to flaws, to incompatibility, and
often to reality itself. It is a devotion so total that it overrides logic,
compelling men to commit themselves completely in a way no other drive can.
What Drives Women
The same instinct does not drive women. Evolution has not
shaped them to worship men or view them through the lens of beauty or
transcendence. For women, the evolutionary imperative is brutally practical:
find a provider, ensure security, guarantee the survival of themselves and
their children.
Love, as men know it, does not exist for them. What exists
is calculation. A woman’s drive is to secure protection, provision, and safety.
This is not cynicism; it is survival, hardwired through eons of evolutionary
pressure. Anything else is illusory, a social construct built on top of
biology.
The Great Imbalance
Here lies the fatal flaw in marriage: the drives do not
match. Men worship, women calculate. Men are blinded by love, women are guided
by provision. The result is an unequal relationship, destined for
disillusionment.
The statistics bear this out. Divorce rates are high, not
because people have stopped “believing” in marriage, but because the
institution was always built on unequal foundations. The woman secures what she
needs until she can improve; the man eventually realizes his devotion is not
reciprocated.
The Cycle of Abandonment
The man, confronted with the reality that his worship has no
equal return, leaves, or at least begins to search elsewhere for the object of
his devotion. The woman, ever pragmatic, moves on to the next provider. Both
are trapped in a cycle that exposes the fundamental truth: marriage is less a
bond of love than a contract of convenience, doomed by biology to eventual
collapse.
The Harsh Truth
This is not a romantic story. It is not the fairy tale that
culture, religion, and tradition have layered onto the act of coupling. It is
survival, biology, and evolutionary programming. Men will continue to worship.
Women will continue to seek provision. And the illusion of love as a mutual,
reciprocal force will continue to shatter against the hard wall of reality.
The question is not why so many marriages fail. The question
is how any marriage survives at all.
William James Spriggs
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