Good Reasons for Bad Feelings

by Randolph M. Nesse

  The conflicts Freud saw at the root of many problems have a straightforward evolutionary interpretation: the central trade-off in social life is between actions that give short-term personal pleasure at long-term social costs versus those that inhibit immediate selfish motives to get social benefits later. Illicit sex now that will have long-term costs to reputation and relationships is a fine example. Other species are much less able to inhibit their behavior. We can control our impulses, at least most of us most of the time, thanks to a capacity for repression that helps us inhibit as well as conceal selfish impulses whose expression would make cooperation and commitment impossible. This is close to the opposite of what Alexander and Trivers proposed. Instead of making sly unconscious pursuit of antisocial motives possible, repression keeps us from even being aware of them, making us more desirable social partners who are capable of moral behavior.

  The two sides of this trade-off at the root of mental conflict are supported by genetic studies that have found two global pathways to mental disorders.44,45 One pathway is via internalizing, that is, inhibition, anxiety, self-blame, neurosis, and depression. The other pathway is via externalizing, that is, by pursuing self-interest with little inhibition in ways that often lead to social conflicts and addiction. For the first group of patients, social selection has worked all too well; they are acutely attuned to what others want, and they work hard to please others. For the second group, the tendency to pursue self-interest leaves them with limited moral moorings or committed social support. Most of us muddle along somewhere in between.

  These two global strategies are closely related to fast and slow life history strategies and their possible relationship to mental disorders.46 Early adversity has been proposed to discount the perceived value of long-term benefits and set behavior to take advantage of opportunities now, even at the expense of long-term relationships.47,48,49 This may help explain the association of early adversity with borderline personality.50

  The Enlightenment

  The idea that repression and lack of self-knowledge can be beneficial is disturbing. Ever since the Enlightenment, hope for progress has been pinned on reason, respect for facts, and critical independent judgment.51 This is threatened by the idea that our tendencies to deny facts and distort reality may be useful adaptations shaped by natural selection. However, I think a case can be made for the crucial role of repression in fostering high-level cooperation and actions for the good of the planet. On the other side, unconscious distortions also foster the tendency to tribal thinking that is now in such unfortunate ascendance.

  I would like to think that objectivity maximizes fitness, but life in human groups demands patriotic loyalty to the in-group. Objective individuals are devalued and rejected. For sport fan groups this is not much of a problem, except for the unwary individual who suggests that the home team just isn’t any good. However, groups advancing neuroscience, psychoanalysis, behavior therapy, family therapy, and, yes, evolutionary psychiatry also tend to insist on loyalty to the core schema. Ideas and facts that don’t fit are ignored, opposed, and even repressed. Individuals who are excessively objective or sympathetic to other views are excluded. The tendency is deep and probably useful for our genes, but it can be poison for those searching for truth in the connections among different fields.

  PART FOUR

  Out-of-Control Actions and Dire Disorders

  CHAPTER 11

  BAD SEX CAN BE GOOD—FOR OUR GENES

  Of all the obstacles that God designed for our learning, I think the one that He or She most fiendishly designed is sex. God built into us a feeling that we can solve the problem of sex and be forever sexually fulfilled . . . when actually we never can.

  —M. Scott Peck, Further Along the Road Less Travelled, 19931

  The only unnatural sex act is that which you cannot perform.

  —Attributed to Alfred Kinsey2

  Here is a sex fantasy on an epic scale. Not the usual kind about a few extraordinary bodies with exaggerated sex organs engaged in erotic gymnastics. This fantasy, instead, imagines all members of our species having reliably great sex. They all find partners whom they desire and who desire them. Partners have coordinated levels of libido, and they always want sex at the same time. Sexual quirks and fetishes are coordinated for mutual satisfaction. The plumbing and wiring of the sex organs are so reliable that problems never interfere. Orgasms are glorious body- and soul-shaking simultaneous experiences that leave both partners completely satisfied. And people desire sex only with their partners—or else they are fine with their partners having sex with other people.

  Alas, it is just a fantasy. People long for partners they can never have, and many have little desire for the partner they do have. They want more sex than their partners, or less, or different. They are preoccupied by fantasies that can never be fulfilled in real life. They worry about impotence or lack of arousal. They have orgasms too soon, too late, or not at all. And jealousy creates frustration and sadness beyond measure.

  You would think that natural selection would’ve done a better job. Sex is the key to reproduction, so of all functions, it should be the object of strong selection. It is. That’s the problem. Selection shaped our brains and bodies to maximize reproduction at enormous costs to human happiness.

  Sexual problems and frustrations are ubiquitous, but honest talk about them is rare, even in this age of unparalleled openness. Listening to your friends, you might think that most everyone has great sex several times a week. However, you probably know as little about their actual experiences as they know about yours. Psychiatrists hear things others don’t. Here are snippets from stories I have heard in the clinic and the psychiatric emergency room.

  “My life is over, I have to kill myself. I came home early from a trip and found my husband in bed with my best girlfriend. I can’t sleep, I can’t eat, there’s not even anyone I can talk to about it, because she was my very best friend. And he is my boss, so I am going to be a bag lady. I have been thinking about killing him or both of them. I will never trust any man again.”

  “I’m so frustrated I don’t know what to do. My wife is addicted to candy, and she has kept gaining weight, so she now is three hundred pounds, but she still demands to have sex and I just can’t do it anymore. I don’t want to leave her, and I don’t want to go around with other women, but she keeps demanding sex. What should I do?”

  “Nobody wants me. All I want is a reasonably nice guy who wants to share a life and raise a family. But I am thirty-five and sagging and I never was a great looker, and the only guys who want to go out with me just want to have sex. Maybe I should try finding a woman, but I am not really into that. My whole life I have had this fantasy of raising kids in a little house with a white picket fence, but I guess I am already an old maid. There is no point to anything.”

  “I can’t come, except sometimes with the vibrator. There has to be something wrong, but I have always been this way. The books say that you have to relax and keep trying, but that isn’t working, and I think my boyfriend knows I am faking orgasms. Is there some kind of Viagra for women?”

  “I work on a farm, and no one knows about this, but I keep doing it with the sheep, if you know what I mean. I try not to, but something comes over me, especially at night, and I just can’t stop myself. If anyone finds out, my life will be ruined. Is there some kind of drug you can give me that will make me stop?”

  “My husband, I married him because he was the first nice guy who ever said he loved me. But, to be honest, I was never interested in him sexually. What has happened is, I am sneaking off to meet this guy from work. I tell my husband I have to work late, but he is getting suspicious, especially since I am even less interested in sex with him. But the guy from work, he isn’t nice at all; in fact, he’s married and a real jerk a lot of the time. You’ve got to help me. I don’t know what to do.”

  “We have two problems. He usually comes even before getting insid
e, and for me it just hurts anyhow.”

  “Can diabetes make it so things, you know, don’t work? Most of the time with my wife it’s just limp. But other times it stands up and salutes, so maybe it isn’t the diabetes.”

  “I’ve got two girlfriends, and it’s tearing me up. They don’t know about each other, but they suspect something. I want them both, but I can’t keep this up much longer. I can’t afford them both, for one thing. I need help, or my whole life will be down the tubes.”

  “I love my husband, but he always wants blow jobs and other stuff and says if I don’t do it he will find somebody else who will. He’s okay otherwise, and I guess I want to stay with him . . . well, I got nobody else.”

  “I did something I shouldn’t have and caught herpes. My husband will kill me if he finds out. You have got to put me in the hospital and cure me or something or at least keep me from going home, ’cause if I go home he will jump me, and then he will get it, and that will be the end of everything.”

  And finally there was the patient who walked up to our clinic check-in window for his first appointment and began by blurting out, “I’m a premature ejaculator.”

  Sex talk is everywhere, but serious talk about sex is risky because people have such different ways of coping with its problems. Some revel in their sexuality, not wanting to hear anything about problems. Some fear it and avoid it. Others try not to think about it. Most muddle through, finding satisfaction as best they can and enjoying a laugh about the rest. All four groups get uncomfortable when confronted with the reality that sexual desire can be neither completely suppressed nor fully satisfied. Sex problems match its pleasures, for good evolutionary reasons.

  Our question is, as usual, not why some people have problems; it is why sexual problems exist at all. Why are they so amazingly and unfortunately common? The most important answer is simple: natural selection shaped us not for happiness or pleasure but to maximize reproduction.

  Finding—and Being—a Desirable Partner

  Most humans are choosy about who they mate with. Very. As you know from cruel experience if you are over thirteen years old and not stunningly attractive. If you are very attractive, you experience the problem from the other side: constant approaches, manipulation, and deception, compounded by the envy of those who can’t imagine, much less sympathize with, your problems.

  The preference for healthy, young, attractive mates has an easy evolutionary explanation: it results in children who are likely to be healthy and attractive, who are likely to have more children of their own.3 The preference for partners who are kind, strong, helpful, rich, high-status, hardworking, and devoted is at least as useful.4 It results in more resources and more help, which result in more children, who are likely to be more successful and will have more grandchildren. That, for natural selection, is all that matters.

  Choosiness is great for our genes but not for us. Few people can have the partners they most want. Most people are dissatisfied with themselves, because they are not the partner everyone else wants. Their dissatisfaction motivates vast expenditures of time, money, and effort on diets, cosmetics, grooming, fashion, lessons, plastic surgery, and preparing for diverse social competitions. A vast swath of life is taken up by judging, being judged, and getting prepared for being judged in the mating competition. It is brutal. One friend who complained about not finding a suitable partner was told by another friend, “You are an eight chasing tens but being chased by sixes.”

  Modern media make it worse. In a hunter-gatherer society with only half a dozen possible mates within walking distance, hopes for a spectacular partner could be kept within bounds. Today, most of us see billboards several times daily with nearly naked svelte models offering a direct wide-eyed gaze of sexual invitation. We browse magazines with airbrushed images of fantasy figures lounging invitingly. On television, fabulously sexy, talented, energetic, rich people seem eager to please their partners in every way. Even on Facebook, seeing the positive side of our friends’ relationships arouses envy, even when we know better.5 Then there is pornography, transforming every conceivable fantasy into apparent reality, stimulating desires that are impossible to satisfy. Our real-life partners can’t compete. Neither can we.

  Awash in stimulation, our imaginations transformed by the virtual reality of modern media, we are rarely satisfied with ourselves, our partners, or our sex lives. A lovely little study conducted by the evolutionary psychologist Douglas Kenrick asked men to rate their satisfaction with their partners. Before filling out the questionnaire, half waited in a room with books about abstract art, the others in a room with copies of Playboy. Just browsing centerfolds made the second group’s satisfaction with real partners plummet.6

  Natural selection has created psychological mechanisms that help keep these problems from getting out of control. The capacity for repression is one. But even more important, our mating pattern is peculiar for a primate. Fathers invest inordinately in their children. We get attached to our partners.7,8 Better yet, most people fall in love, idealize one partner, and lose interest in others.9 Pause a moment to marvel at romantic infatuation. It superbly demonstrates the value of subjectivity. As George Bernard Shaw put it, “Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.” Infatuation focuses desires so sharply that all others fade from sight. Such subjectivity can make life wonderful.

  Alas, it is usually only partial and temporary. In The Devil’s Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce defined love as “A temporary insanity curable by marriage.”10 The article in the New York Times viewed the most times in one month in 2017 was entitled “Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person.”11 Many people have enduring satisfying intimate relationships, but problems are rife.

  Sometimes the problem is not the availability of partners but their social acceptability. While still condemned in some cultures, homosexuality is increasingly recognized as a deep template that individuals cannot control or change. The most common question I get from the audience after a lecture is how evolution explains homosexuality. I usually try to duck the question because it is so fraught and no answer is widely accepted, but several possibilities have been suggested.

  One is that male homosexuals may nonetheless have many children. Perhaps, like in the movie Shampoo, apparently gay men can get away with liaisons with women that other men can’t. That is unlikely; homosexual men have only about half as many children as heterosexuals, which is not surprising, since most have little sexual interest in women.12

  In his book Sociobiology, Edward O. Wilson suggested that homosexuality is an adaptive strategy when resources and mates are scarce.13 Some birds use this strategy routinely.14,15 If no nesting sites are available, young birds stay at the parental nest helping to rear younger siblings who share half of their genes instead of wasting effort on a nest that is likely to fail. This is not like most human homosexuality, however; birds that help at the nest are happy to mate the moment a viable nest site is available. Also, homosexual humans are not necessarily lacking in resources, nor do they reliably dedicate their lives to helping their siblings. Wilson’s hypothesis fails.16

  Plenty of other possible adaptive benefits have been proposed for homosexuality.17,18 Same-sex intercourse is not a mystery; it is widespread in many species and can have many explanations, both functional and nonfunctional.19,20,21,22 The mystery is why individuals would turn down opportunities for sex that could result in offspring.

  One of the few well-established relevant facts is that the likelihood of a man being homosexual is directly proportional to how many older brothers he has.23 This suggests that a pregnancy with a son changes the mother’s physiology in some way that can influence future sons. This was only informed speculation until a 2018 report by Ray Blanchard and colleagues that mothers of gay sons have especially high levels of antibodies to a protein, NLGN4Y, that influences sexual differentiation of the brain.24 This has not been confirmed, and it is by no m
eans the full story. The number of older brothers can explain only a fraction of men who are homosexual;25 genetic factors are relevant,26 and cultural factors are strong. Also, none of this research bears on female homosexuality. For now there are far more questions than answers. The contribution of an evolutionary perspective is to recognize that tendencies that lead to intercourse between members of the same sex have many explanations, but a lack of interest in sex that might lead to offspring needs explanation.

  Uncoordinated Desires

  Most young couples want to have sex every few days. That is just about how long an egg remains fertile, so that frequency maximizes pregnancies. It is also about how long couples in ancestral environments are likely to be separated because of hunting and gathering expeditions. Partners separated for a few days are usually eager to get back together; that is very good for them, their fertility, and their reproduction.

  For many couples, however, one person wants to have sex more often. If the other acquiesces out of duty or fear, romance is liable to fade. Even if the partners have generally matched levels of libido, temporary periods of mismatch result from sickness, pregnancy, worry, and fatigue. Or one partner may be taking an antidepressant that torpedoes sex drive. In the Woody Allen movie, Annie Hall’s therapist asks her, “How often do you have sex with your husband?” She replies, “Constantly. I’d say three times a week.” Her husband’s therapist asks him, “How often do you have sex with your wife?” He replies, “Hardly ever. Maybe three times a week.” Sometimes it is the other way around; many women would like to have sex more often than their partners.