If you never hear anything else again about relationships and love for the rest of your life then heed this one thing. We are an outdated species living in a modern world.
That sounds silly I know, but hear me out.
To understand relationships and love you have to understand how humans have interacted with each other not only in the present but in the past too, and through thousands of generations of our ancestors. Generational learning takes thousands if not tens of thousands of years to take root in our DNA. It’s a question with a multifaceted answer steeped through many realms of human thought; love, networking, finance, economics, social, emotion, connection, etc, and I’m going to try and answer the modern question of why we’re struggling to even hold the most basics of happiness together as a couple on a deeper level, through many facets. So read on.
Historical Relevance
Only just 150 years ago life for many was an unimaginable struggle. How we ever made it through the childhood diseases, the wars, the famine, the lack of resources and just the total lack of any sort of healthcare is unknown to me, but we banded together as man and woman and made it.
One thing that was strikingly different hundreds of years ago was that families had to breed like rabbits to survive. If you’re around my age you’ll know and understand that your grandparents may have had 5-10 brothers and sisters, or you at least knew someone who’s did. School was a luxury only for the rich few, and those that were amongst the plebs had to send their young ones out on the farm or on the streets. Kids were known to work at the age of six and younger. My Grandfather can remember starting work at 10 years old in the coal mines. Something that is completely unknown to any of our modern generations.
Life was brutal. We made it work. And because it was life or death that means couples had to stick together or die. Being childless was only something the rich could afford. We needed to have children to add to the money coming into the household. It was stick together or die. There’s no sugar coating that either, couples had to make it work whether they were happy or not. That also meant that on the dark side of life some men were known to have had secret families, and some women would birth children that weren’t their husbands own.
Not many consider this, but most marriages were arranged over 200 years ago. There’s a reason that asking the father for their daughters hand in marriage is still a tradition and that’s because it really wasn’t that long ago that the father had control over who his daughter would and wouldn’t marry. It seems horrible but it was thought as a protection system so that men had to prove themselves worthy in finance and sturdiness. Life was a lot more riskier then than it is now. A broken leg could mean death. A simple cut could mean gangrene then death.
What is not told though is how people made it work. Arranged marriages and forced servitude.. or death (because life was harsh) meant that people were much happier with their lot in life and would try hard with whatever cards they were dealt with to make it work. The modern take on most things historical comes from a modern ethical standpoint where arranged marriage and having to stay as a couple whether you like it or not sounds like torture, but it is completely false, because there were no options as there is now. So people had to make their lives work, and were forced to resolve their differences.
There were no second chances.
The Great Wars
World War I and World War II shone a light on just how malnourished and ill the general population was. In general people were living in squalor, they weren’t being fed enough, they were constantly ill, and generally we were in quite bad shape. I could drone on about how the rich in those days didn’t care or were just generally unaware at how sick and ill and poor everyone was but that’s a different topic. Our country needed people that were fit and healthy and could fight hard hitting wars, not the flea ridden sick and ill people they were being presented with. That’s why after World War II there was a massive campaign to get people healthy, regular food, and well paying work.
People needed to be on a different level if this was to ever happen again.
That’s when The National Health Service in Britain started, which prompted other countries to do something similar. Most countries now have some form of health service where it’s free at point of access. This was to get the country healthy again.
And this, was when it all changed.
The significance of combating disease and illness on a national level was something that had never been done before, let alone thought about. Suddenly, most children were surviving childhood, older people were living longer than ever before on large numbers. Countries were getting healthier and stronger. The ripple effect of this was monstrous. People finally started to come out of survival mode and started to think about luxuries. Education became better because there were more educators, more people, more jobs, industry started to pop up everywhere. Innovators, entrepreneurs; it was the boom era of humanity I think.
That’s why they’re called Baby Boomers.
The Burning of the Bras
I always think to this moment when women were finally becoming free from the shackles of their Biology. When women were burning their Bras because they wanted more rights and better treatment. My mother-in-law tells me of a time when she wasn’t allowed to own a credit card. Whilst humanity invents things for us to use it takes us a long time to catch up socially. This can be said for women’s rights.
Historically women were baby makers, the home makers, the nesters, and technically this is true to their biological nature. They are the ones that have the children. But two things had happened by now that was unsettling women on an industrial scale. When all the men were out fighting the great wars they were left at home to run the country, to do the jobs that the men used to do, and as it turns out they were good at it. This caused a lot of contention when the men came back and settled back into their working positions. This and the fact that they had been developing tools and medicine so that women could be detached from their ability to have sex and birth children. Condoms, the pill, etc and so on. It could be optional from now on, women no longer were shackled by their biology and choice had entered into the equation.
It took society quite a while to move on from this as it always does, and this is why women were becoming restless and tired of being treated like previously because they had way more options in life than they’ve ever had.
So women took to the streets to protest, feminism was reignited, the vote was in, women wanted a better future for them and their daughters.
The Rise of the Information Age
The next level up was when social media came along. I say social media because I was using computers when I was 16 and no-one cared then. It was a nerdy and unfashionable thing to do with your time. It only really gained significant traction when the iPhone came out and suddenly everyone had the internet. I remember studying the term ubiquitous computing at university but I could never see it imagined in real time, but here we are. Here I am here. Hah.
Anyway, this is when everyone suddenly became connected. Kids will opt for a gaming session with a friend or watching their favourite Minecraft streamer than playing outside. Dating and relationships has been transformed wildly. It’s now fashionable to date online, use Tinder or Match or any one of these hundred dating apps that promise you the world. We have dating guru’s that are just a click away. You can spawn your dinner in almost 30 minutes, or your shopping in a couple of hours. I could go on and on and on.
People spend more time chatting to each other online than they do in the real world.
What has all this to do with Dating and Relationships?
Don’t you see? We’re directly going against our biological nature. Our modern advancements have freed Men from the eternal graft of war and servitude to the family. We can live a relatively comfortable (albeit lonely life) alone. Women are no longer tied to having children every time they fancy a bit of a fumble. They are no longer shackled to the household as babymakers and homemakers. But this directly goes against our programming. Like it or not at base we are coded to be a certain way. Regardless of what we do we will always want to work hard and women will always want to have children.
We’re a bit lost if I’m honest.
We’re no longer in a live or die situation with our partners so the game has changed significantly. Not to mention the next “guy” or “girl” is only a swipe on a dating app away. How do you convince a generation that’s hooked on instant gratification that building intimate relationships takes an eternity? And we do it differently now. There are no set social rules for anything.
We still “feel” like we’re in the woods hunting and foraging for food and protecting the family from invaders — whilst we don’t actually “think” like that anymore. It’s causing quite a disconnect in humanity and the way we perceive the world. I struggled at the start of my life because everything felt fake, not right, like I just couldn’t understand anyone and no-one could understand me. It was quite the disconnect at first.
I picked up books eventually, watched YouTube documentaries, trained in the Mental Health sector, have an interest in Antiquity and History, so it helps a great deal all this knowledge.
Understanding where we’ve came from is pivotal to finding out where you’re going. Once I was able to understand the history of it all then I was able to understand how it fits in a modern world and what we’re doing wrong.
Most of it can be solved via learning to communicate better with yourself and other people. That’s it. Strange I know. Knowing yourself and knowing other people.
What is the solution?
Know thyself. That’s probably critical. Know the world around you and don’t sugar coat it.
I’d like to go into more detail but then that would lose me future content on this website. So, stay tuned. I’m hoping everything that I write in future will be thoughts towards some form of solution. Thanks for reading friends.
Freshly pressed, from my blog, here: https://www.theloyalhusband.com/the-problem-with-relationships-in-a-modern-world/
I'm going back to writing too. I've missed it.