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Romantic Attraction: One Misunderstanding,
One Cascade that Rippled through Human Existence
How a Single Gap in Our Self-Knowledge Is Unraveling the World
Chet Shupe
We pride ourselves on being the intelligent species. We have mapped the genome, landed machines on other planets, and built systems of commerce and law sophisticated enough to coordinate the behavior of billions. And yet, at this moment in history, we are a species in profound and largely self-inflicted trouble—ecologically, socially, and spiritually. It is worth asking, with genuine seriousness, whether these troubles share a common root.
I believe they do. And I believe that root is simpler, and more identifiable, than we have allowed ourselves to imagine.
It begins with a feeling almost everyone has experienced, but virtually no one understands—romantic attraction.
What we loosely call falling in love is one of the most powerful sensations a human being can experience. It reorganizes perception. It overrides caution. It produces, in otherwise level-headed people, a certainty so complete that they will reshape their entire lives around it. Small wonder we have written thousands of years of poetry and song about it, declared it the foundation of God’s design for human life, and built our most fundamental social institution—the family—upon it.
Though romantic love can lift us spiritually from the doldrums of any existence, until recently we have rarely asked ourselves a basic question: why does romantic love exist? Evolutionary biology suggests that romantic attraction is a mammalian brain system evolved for mate choice—temporary by design and universal across cultures. What that implies, though scientists have been slow to say it plainly, is this: romantic attraction reveals the species’ innate sensibilities about genetic selection. Its feelings draw together two people whose combined genetics, as sensed by innate wisdom, offer the best available prospect for an individual with the combination of behavioral traits and physical features the species needs to flourish.
Romantic love does not exist to satisfy personal needs, except in the sense that our innate wisdom rewards us with contentment when we resolve feelings that serve our species. A woman, for instance, may be deeply puzzled by why she is so powerfully drawn to a man who loves risk, knowing that a risk-taker is the last thing she needs as a lifetime partner to support her in raising a family. He is appealing because the species needs men drawn to danger—men willing to face the lion, the enemy, or the unknown for the group’s survival. Acting on her feelings may not be rational given what she thinks she needs in a lifetime partner, but the pleasure she feels while resolving romantic feelings is how evolution rewards her for serving our species’ needs.
By our emotional heritage, humans are social primates. Consequently, the feeling that inspires conception—that this person is the one and only—has a built-in expiration date. It lasts only a couple of months or so, long enough to ensure conception. Then, having served its purpose, the feeling quietly fades long before the child is born. For social primates, the fading of romance is normal. What remains is not loss, but an opportunity: the freedom to once again take pleasure in participating in the life of the larger community by attending to one’s sisters’ and brothers’ real and present needs.
That liberation, however, is significant only in cultures that allow social bonds to form naturally—bonds through which people depend on one another to survive. People who depend on institutions to survive have nowhere to go. When our romance ends, instead of returning to an informally bonded human family, we face an emotional vacuum that we somehow must manage alone.
At virtually every level of human existence, in one way or another, civilized people suffer because of this mismatch between the reality we are emotionally designed for and the reality in which we live. That mismatch occurs in countless dimensions, but our misunderstanding of romantic love is probably, by far, the most serious.
At the level of the couple, two people who build a life around romantic attraction typically—though the pretense may linger for years—find that the feeling has changed. They do not know why. No one told them it was supposed to. So they search for explanations within themselves and each other—he has grown distant, she has grown critical, something essential has been lost. And they conclude, most of them, that they have failed at love, life’s most important need if happiness is life’s goal.
The suffering that results from their sense of failure is genuine, profound, and deeply felt—a couple realizing they can no longer live together, even when they care about and respect each other in many ways, and when separating at this stage in their lives makes no sense from a rational point of view, economically or otherwise.
The problem isn’t that they have failed at love. The tragedy is their diagnosis is wrong. They are failing in their attempt to do something innate wisdom cannot allow: using their feelings to achieve personal ends. When we try to use feelings for our own ends, rather than allow our feelings to use us for their ends—to serve life—we not only miss out on life’s most enduring reward, sisterly and brotherly love, but our innate wisdom also punishes us for it. The scope of the suffering is captured in Thoreau’s oft-quoted remark: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
Here is how life works, as I see it. We are here to serve our species. Beyond gifting us with the experience of being alive, our species does not serve us. Yet when we are true to our inborn feelings, our innate wisdom rewards us with contentment for being true to life. In other words, being true to life and being true to ourselves are the same thing—provided that the “self” we are true to is grounded in innate wisdom.
The tragedy of mankind’s current existence—in which we contract for family relationships rather than allow them to occur naturally—is that we are given no circumstances in which we can realistically act on our feelings. No one can be true to their inborn sensibilities regarding romance in a culture where family relationships are formalized, and where what each member owes the other is prescribed by state law—not only in material terms, but even in terms of when love must be given and when it must be withheld. Under those conditions, acting on feelings of romance typically results in broken hearts, dysfunctional or broken families, and emotional bewilderment—as a line from the well‑known Rafe Van Hoy song puts it: “If love doesn’t last forever, then what is forever for?”
The answer is that sisterly-brotherly love, not romantic love, is forever because it is how innate wisdom rewards individuals for participating in social-primate families—the survival units of our species. This does not mean certain individuals would not come and go—particularly males—but when individuals are participating in the life of a family, their love for one another is unconditional. They will do anything for each other, even sacrifice themselves, not because it’s rational, but because at that moment, it’s the only thing that feels right. Apparently, evolution has established that, given specific situations, that act typically contributes to our species’ wellbeing.
At the family level, children arrive in homes organized around either the quiet grief of realizing romance has faded—two people performing a romance that no longer exists—or the open wreckage of its collapse. In either case, the lesson the child receives is not spoken but felt. The child lives in an atmosphere tainted by tension between the two adults it depends on to survive, perceiving a love that feels conditional, managed, or entirely missing.
At the root of a child’s development, what they most need for happiness is the experience of groundedness—the feeling that belonging does not depend on performance and that love does not run out. When the family is organized around a misunderstood feeling, the child rarely experiences what a home should feel like. Instead, they receive, as their foundational template, emotional alienation and instability. They carry it forward, build their own families on the same cracked foundation, and pass it, unexamined, to the next generation as if dysfunctional family relationships were normal. Given our circumstances, they are normal: relationships based on formalized family structures rather than on the members’ inborn desire to attend to one another’s real and present needs.
At the community level, something equally serious occurs. As social primates, we evolved to live in close, interdependent social groups of roughly 150 people—a number confirmed by twenty-three independent studies across cultures and historical periods, from hunter-gatherer societies to the social networks of the modern world. This number reflects the size of a natural human community, typically composed of several interdependent families, each much smaller, bonded through shared territory, cooperative defense, fluid membership, and the female-centered relational continuity that holds the whole together. The only notion of family our innate wisdom can relate to is one that occurs naturally, where relationships are held together not by legal arrangements but by emotional acquaintance, people’s need for one another, and the kind of trust only interdependent relationships can create. Within such a bond, the relational continuity a child needs comes not only from their mother but from the whole—particularly from the informally bonded females whose cooperative care, collective wisdom, and enduring loyalty to one another form the living center of all spiritually free social primate cultures.
The bonds that would informally form among women within such a group—bonds that hold every child securely within a circle of shared care, recognizing that a child’s well-being is the responsibility not only of its mother but of every member of the family—are crowded out today by isolation, by the performance of self-sufficiency, and by cultures shaped by minds that perceive humans as blank slates. Modern humans are failing to serve our species, not because we are blank slates—have no inborn sensibilities through which we would normally take pleasure in attending to each other’s needs in ways that serve our species—but because we are not free to. Instead, we must perform as blank slates to comply with laws imposed in the belief that we are blank slates.
At the level of civilization, we are now producing, generation after generation, people who are anxious at their core. They learn early in life—in the one place that should have revealed the opposite—that belonging is conditional, that love is temporary, that the ground can move without warning, and thus that it is everyone for themselves. I see this as spiritual homelessness: not a philosophical abstraction but a living, embodied condition experienced by the masses who can’t name it yet must manage it every day. In a reality shaped by these experiences, it is no surprise that many women are choosing not to have children. I see this not as rejection of motherhood but as an act of love—the refusal to bring a child into the same suffering she and those around her are enduring.
Spiritually homeless people are not equipped to make wise, well-grounded decisions, let alone decisions that serve life. At a deep psychological level, their lives are organized around managing pain. Even articulating these ideas can be understood as pain management on my part. People organized around managing pain tend to extract from the world rather than support life by participating in it. They consume to fill the emptiness. They accelerate to outrun the grief. They cannot afford, psychologically, to slow down, because stillness is where unresolved sorrow waits.
And here we arrive at the planet. The ecological crisis and the relational crisis are not two problems. They are one problem with two faces. A species that has lost its grounding in the natural order—that has replaced inherited wisdom with social contracts, communal belonging with managed isolation, and the reality at hand with the chronic projection of promised lands—will treat the living world as a resource to be organized and extracted from, rather than a community to belong to.
We see ourselves as the intelligent species, and we are burning down the house we live in, in significant part, because we do not understand why we fall in love.
This is not to suggest that all our woes stem from a single misunderstanding. Human suffering is long-standing and many-rooted, and no honest thinker would reduce it to a single cause. Indeed, many classic philosophers and most religious traditions focused on one thing: explaining human suffering and providing channels of thought for managing the pain.
But there is reason to begin with romantic attraction. It is not merely one mystery among many; its misunderstanding lies near the center of everything we have built: our families, our communities—or lack thereof—and our relationship to the living world. Indeed, men’s desire to eternally possess the feeling of romance likely inspired them to invent the practice of social contracting, through which they granted each other the right to claim a woman as personal property. By destroying sisterly bonds—the core of natural human families—the practice of claiming women as personal property through the contract of marriage likely set the stage for civilization itself.
Until we break this particular code—until significant portions of the populace can articulate why romantic attraction has the power to control us, what that power is designed to do, and, more crucially, what it is not designed to do—we will likely not break any of the other codes through which our feelings reveal to us what our inborn wisdom knows. It is the first lock, and what lies on the other side is the reality that held us long before we made our fateful turn: the reality in which we depended on our sisters and brothers to survive, when we functioned as agents of life before social contracting rendered us agents of states.
We take comfort in the belief that, through the power we surrender to the state by depending on its institutions to survive, mankind is in control of everything, which includes, by inference, the forces of Nature that created us. Having gained dominion over our creator, we perceive ourselves to be, at least in our imaginations, our own god. But we discover that the throne room, no matter how grand the domain, in the end is a lonely, thankless, and meaningless place to be. God’s problem is that it can have anything it wants whenever it wants it—no effort, no risk, no shame. To the intellectual mind, the one that civilized us, that is the promised land. To the human spirit, however, manifested by the emotional mind, whose only source of contentment is resolving the feelings through which we attend to each other’s real and present needs, an existence without effort, risk, or shame is not paradise. It is emptiness; indeed, it is a living hell.
The lessons of history indicate that civilizations fall as surely as they rise. It’s because, by presuming to act as our own gods, we are chasing our tails. A lot of activity is going on, lots of progress is being made, and knowledge keeps piling up, but none of it leads to our participating in the process of life through which our species sustains itself over evolutionary time. So, no matter how sincere and well-intentioned the effort we put forth to make a difference, nothing we do satisfies the needs of our souls.
I spare no effort touting the emotional mind’s abilities. Without it, romantic love would not exist, nor would motherly or sisterly-brotherly love—the love that bonds social-primate families. The emotional mind tells us what our species needs and rewards us with contentment when we serve it. Despite its central role in the experience of being alive, the advent of social contracting revealed a serious flaw: the emotional mind is vulnerable to the illusion of promised lands. It does not generate these illusions; it is simply unequipped to recognize them because promised lands did not exist in the pre-social-contracting world in which our emotions evolved. Another of the ways the emotional mind serves us is by warning us of natural dangers, such as spiders, snakes, and thousand-foot cliffs, because those dangers are inherent to the natural world. But we have no natural fear of pursuing idealized futures—lands of eternal plenty, peace, and justice—because they don’t exist in Nature. The distant future is unknowable, which means promised lands are not real. They are products of our imagination—or worse yet, of the wishful thinking we resort to when reality refuses to cooperate with our illusions. The danger of pursuing promised lands is simple: we cannot serve life, nor be rewarded with contentment for doing so, while chasing pots of gold at the end of rainbows.
The emotional mind’s vulnerability to false promises is why people like you and me are so easily scammed. Our emotional minds are so susceptible to illusions that intellectual minds can lead entire populations on centuries-long journeys to Never Never Land before the emotional mind finally sees through the illusion. When that happens, we realize that what we are pursuing cannot satisfy the needs of our souls, even if we attain it. When the illusion collapses, civilized people typically turn violently against the institutions they had previously worshiped. The state—the principal purveyor of promised lands and the sole author of social contracts—becomes the target of our discontent.
Because the emotional mind is a product of evolution, this vulnerability cannot be fixed in sub-evolutionary times. If anything is to change, the intellectual mind, the adaptable part of our brains, will have to stop deluding the emotional mind with promised lands. Only then will our minds stop inspiring us to formalize our relationships through social contracting, the foundation on which all promised lands stand. In the larger picture, the significance of romance is that the desire to sustain its state of mind for an entire lifetime was, quite likely, the justification for the first social contract. If so, the idea that romance can last forever was the first promised land, a promise so enticing to the intellect that, five thousand years later, we are still social contracting on that illusion’s behalf.
Is the intellectual mind capable of perceiving things differently, such that it will cease to illusion the emotional mind with promised lands? I don’t know. Your guess is as good as mine.
Let’s not sell the intellectual mind short, however. It’s not stupid—it got us to the moon and back. It’s simply misinformed. Unfortunately, once the emotional mind is fooled by misinformation that renormalizes the body’s chemical state— thus relieving the pain that would normally signal the individual is not serving life, the intellect, the same faculty that got us to the moon, prefers the illusion. This is because perceiving misinformation as true is far less painful than modifying the reality the individual is experiencing. For instance, when managing the pain of a legally obligated relationship that prevents an individual from serving life, the belief that by hanging in there they are building up credits in Heaven often justifies their position with this rationale: “I know the Bible is the word of God, because the Bible says it is.” This is not a critique of beliefs, religious or otherwise, or of believers—as subjects of social contracts, we are all believers. It is simply an oft‑demonstrated example of how readily the intellectual mind uses beliefs to manage the pain of one’s circumstances when, because we must honor social contracts instead of serving life, no other solution is available.
When the spirit is restrained—not free to serve life—finding truth in nontruth becomes a matter of emotional survival.
Will humankind ever recover from this multi‑thousand‑year predicament? Given the observations above, one could reasonably argue that recovery is not possible. As for answers to questions like that, only providence knows. But for the comfort my intellect takes in it, I believe recovery is possible. Given my situation, whether my belief is an illusion or not is, in a sense, beside the point. So, to keep the possibility of recovery open—which I take comfort in—here is the rationale my intellect has created. I have no proof of this. But I offer it for the reader’s consideration.
If recovery happens, experienced reality—the only reality that existed before the advent of social contracting—will save us. With social contracting, we began experiencing two realities simultaneously: experienced reality and, let’s call it, indoctrinated reality. The values that define indoctrinated reality are based on the word of truth, which can change overnight. Experienced reality, by contrast, is grounded in genetically accumulated wisdom, so it changes only with circumstances. Given one’s circumstances, how one feels is how things are, at least from the perspective of innate wisdom.
In terms of appeal, this gives indoctrinated reality an overwhelming advantage. If you don’t like how you feel, just change the word of truth by changing your belief, or install a different leader, political party, or ideology—and voilà, you will feel better instantly. You may even find yourself dancing in the streets with the crowds. It happens.
Experienced reality reveals our innate wisdom’s evaluation of our circumstances in terms of the degree to which we are allowed to serve our species. For instance, if a couple find themselves romantically attracted to each other, are they allowed to make love? That is how humans serve the species. Experienced reality does not change with beliefs; only with circumstances. Beliefs may distract us from the pain that arises when romantic feelings are not allowed to find their natural expression, but they cannot resolve the pain through which innate wisdom is informing us that we are not taking care of life.
The fact that indoctrinated reality is an expression of beliefs gives it another advantage. It can organize people en masse to act on behalf of the belief it stands on—whether that means voting or engaging in armed conflict—while experienced reality can organize only those bound together by emotional interdependence. Dozens against millions. As long as the intellect fails to recognize that indoctrinated realities are inherently unstable—despite boom‑and‑bust economic cycles, the repeated rise and fall of civilizations, and what system control theory makes scientifically clear—the reality that sustains our species doesn’t have a chance.
Once humans began social contracting, indoctrinated reality has controlled our behavior so completely that there is no evidence that experienced reality even exists. But as long as we have inborn wisdom, it will continue to evaluate every detail of our circumstances and our reactions to them, based on whether we are serving our species. Those evaluations come to us as the felt reality of each moment, which is why it hurts so deeply when romantic feelings are not allowed their natural expression. That pain is evolution’s measure of how profoundly we have violated the natural order of human life by formalizing our family relationships.
Given that modern people must, for the sake of social acceptance, if not survival, comply with indoctrinated reality to the point that there is no evidence that our species’ survival has anything to do with how we behave, can you imagine how offended innate wisdom is by our circumstances? We don’t have to imagine. We are experiencing it in the pain of anxiety, loneliness, and discontent.
As civil cultures mature, laws must continually be added to manage the unintended consequences of earlier laws. When normal social order is destroyed by formalizing family relationships, the unintended consequences are limitless. As ever more laws are added to corral the growing complexity of interwoven problems, people’s freedom to serve our species diminishes, and the pain of discontent, issued by innate wisdom, increases. There comes a time when the pain of our failure to serve life outweighs the pleasure we derive from believing those laws are taking us to the promised land. That marks the moment when experienced reality overpowers indoctrinated reality, and the state collapses. As for whether our minds can recover from illusions, the answer is yes. People see through numerous illusions each time civil order collapses—the principal one being the realization that life goes on even when the state, and all the values we associate with it, are no longer there.
But to recover from our predicament, the collapse of a nation-state gets us only partway there. The intellectual mind remains misinformed. It still believes romance can last forever, and in the promise of imagined lands. The problem, it concludes, is that we either didn’t try hard enough or we didn’t do it right. We need better leaders, better governments, better laws, and better education. And so a lot of capable, caring, and sincere people take it upon themselves to create a new constitution. When they arrive at one that those who have gathered can agree to…
Well, I will leave it at that because we all know how that story ends. We are living it.
How can our intellectual minds ever be sufficiently informed so we can see our way out of this? I don’t know how—if I did, I would be informing them. As things stand, all I can do is tell them the three simple things I believe they need to know. Whether they regard that as information is their business, not mine. They are: innate wisdom is real; it reveals its genetically encoded guidance through feelings in response to the situation at hand; and resolving those feelings as they arise results in two things—we serve life, and we experience contentment.
Once the intellectual mind has noodled on that for a while—the fact that all animate beings are true to life by being true to themselves—it will grasp the magnitude of the error it made in social contracting, a mistake that is preventing us from being true to ourselves. If recovery is possible—if we ever cease social contracting—the free human spirit, manifested by the emotional mind, will take it from there.
But before anything real can happen, we must regain access to experienced reality. Instead of gathering to solve the world’s problems—which, because they are symptoms of social contracting, have no solutions—we need to gather to understand what is going on with us. Only then can one person’s honesty release others to speak the truths they have long been ashamed to admit.
My namesake, Uncle Chester, died by his own hand at thirty‑two. I never knew him—he died before I was born—and I cannot say with certainty what drove him to that moment. In a social-contracting world, a person’s worth is not measured by the life they are living—a test he would easily have passed, having put on sold‑out pioneer‑day shows on the ranch with trained animals, even a coyote. Our worth is instead measured by how prepared we are to manage a future that meets society’s expectations. As someone whose truth fell outside the sanctioned script, he likely could find no place where he could safely stand. His choice was brutally simple: conceal himself to preserve the illusion of eligibility for the “promised land,” or reveal himself and lose even the pretense of belonging. Yet the deeper tragedy is that this dynamic touches everyone. We are all measured by how convincingly we can show we control our destiny, not by the value we bring to our relationships. In such a world, how do any of us ever know where we really stand?
Seen in this light, yes, civilization can take us to marvelous places and even extend our life expectancy by a decade or two. But because we are all living for the imagined future instead of in the moment we are experiencing, it also creates circumstances so bewildering to our psyches that some people are driven to take their own lives simply to manage the pain.
Rather than serving life by being there for one another, social contracting has left each of us alone to perform the last task our social primate nature equipped us for—proving we are good enough to make it on our own. Little wonder we live lives of quiet desperation. Under such conditions, our behavior is so unbecoming of our nature that we cannot bear what we see in one another, which drives us even further into isolation. We can manage friendships, but friendship is a long way from interdependence—and interdependence is the only place where social primates can experience the contentment that comes from taking care of life. What we need is an awakening to our inborn vulnerabilities and to the ones of those around us—an awakening that must occur if we are ever going to be where I think we all would like to be: there for one another.
If civilization had not burdened us with managing our own destiny, helping each other is the only thing there would be for any of us to do.
The awakening we need begins with questions like these—questions we must not only ask ourselves but also bring into honest conversation with others. Are wealth and privilege what we genuinely want? Does spending our lives pursuing personal ambitions, rather than serving the needs of our sisters and brothers in interdependent relationships, truly feel like the way to go? And for girlfriends who have supported each other emotionally since childhood and are now coming of age: Do we really want to trust a man to support us in raising our children when his obligation to do so is not natural but established by a legal arrangement? Or should we trust each other for the mutual support we will all need to create a viable home in which to bear and raise our children? And for both men and women: if feelings are messages from our souls—and therefore must change in light of changing circumstances—does it make sense to make a lifetime commitment based on any feeling, much less one designed to last only two or three months?
And finally, when I was a child, I was told that to be happy I needed to get an education, establish a career, and get married. Well, I did all those things, and I have found it to be a lie. Is it a lie? If it is—and based on what I see around me, I suspect it is—then why do we have so many intelligent and caring people trying to solve the world’s problems, yet no one is talking about this? It is as if, for some mysterious reason, the lie must be kept secret. I venture to say it’s because the story was never about happiness. It’s about what we must do to qualify for life in the promised land. Exposing the lie would also expose the promised land—the illusion upon which all states stand—and that is why the lie must be hidden. Keeping it secret, no matter how intense the pain, is a matter of keeping the faith.
These concerns matter because until we are honest with ourselves and those around us about how we truly feel, the human spirit is powerless to offer meaningful guidance. It is as if our spirits have vacated the land, leaving us to go on without their counsel—without any sense of what it would feel like to be embraced by experienced reality, in which all values are established by innate wisdom. In that reality, life’s meaning, though it will eternally remain beyond verbal description, is implicit because it is the reality our emotional minds evolved to comprehend. Once we reinhabit experienced reality, our spirits will resume their charge of providing us with the guidance we need to serve the species that gifted us with life, the reward for which is contentment. Contentment is our species’ way of assuring that we are serving our purpose, without even having to concern ourselves with what it is.
And for those who, given our circumstances, are quite naturally afraid of the free human spirit, let me offer some assurance. Recovery, guided by the human spirit, will never be a mass movement. It will begin at ground level and grow from there. The spirit wins us over by how right it feels to be alive to the moment, no matter what’s going on—even conflict—not by promises about how perfect life will someday be if everyone toes the line.
When a spiritually free culture grows beyond the size the human spirit evolved to manage, an unnatural degree of disagreement will arise among its members, causing the culture to divide. This natural limit prevents any spirit‑guided reality from ever becoming a mass movement. And so the question remains: how can spiritual freedom ever stand against institutional subjugation? There is no proof that it can.
Given that people everywhere resonate with Thoreau’s observation that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” the hope is that, should humans rediscover the intimacy of interdependent relationships in which survival requires serving life—even in a few places here and there—mass cultures will begin to dissolve as people lose interest in the promise of someday inhabiting a perfect world.
It is mass movements that we must learn to fear. They feed not on lived experience, but on the intellect’s imagination. Once a mass movement gets underway, nothing can stop it except the weight of its own illusions. In the meantime, the human spirit has no control over anything—not even over whom we are allowed to love, or whom we are allowed not to love.
Community cannot be formed by intention; it can only emerge from bonds that become emotionally indispensable.
