Intimacy & Desire: Awaken the Passion in Your Relationship by David Schnarch Read Free Book Online Page B

construct replete with a past and biographical details (“autobiographical memory”). Your self is not a static image. It is a constant
process
, an identity that is both stable and changeable over time. Your self is a constant barrage of images, feelings, memories, pleasures and pains, beliefs, and moods.
    Your self allows you to project yourself into the future and organize your intentions. But it also brings trials and tribulations. For example, feeling put down by your partner involves a symbolic interaction with another self that greatly changes your desire. In the same way, your sense of how your body looks, feels, and functions shapes your interest in sex and your desire. Feeling competent and desirable can rise and fall on your (or your partners’) sexual performance. Your sexual desireis inextricably tethered to your complex sense of self, which exists in your brain, your mind, and the mental space between you and your partner.
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When did our sense of self emerge?
     
    When did our lovely complex sense of self first emerge? When did it hijack human sexual desire? 44 It’s hard to say because your earliest ancestors looked quite human. “By 600,000 years ago everyone had a big brain, and by 200,000 years ago people in Africa looked like modern humans.” 45 At what point shall we draw the line and say the human self arrived? No one knows. 46
    Helen Fisher told me anthropologists would guess the human self arrived about 1.6 million years ago. That’s when our cerebral cortex exploded in size and when humans first developed language (required for higher order consciousness). Paleoneurologists also believe this may be when our brain’s oxytocin production changed, enabling relationships based on enduring social bonds. 47 Scientists think this is about the time humans and chimpanzees went down different evolutionary paths.
    The important thing is that our complex self
did
arise. And you and I have to deal with it. Ever since a complex self appeared in your great ancestors’ minds, sexual desire hasn’t been the same.
    Given that complex consciousness is socially embedded, it’s probable that when the human self first emerged, it was a “reflected sense of self.” A reflected sense of self is one that is reliant on feedback from others; and it has controlled sexual selection since it first appeared on the scene. We are more likely to have sex with people who make us feel good about ourselves (read: inflate our ego). This irrevocable development in human sexual desire, like walking upright, fundamentally changed human existence.
    Selfhood issues started playing a central role in sexual selection. People mated, fell in love, became families, struggled to stay together, and fought about sex and breaking up. Maintaining a sense of self, and especially their
reflected sense of self
, increasingly shaped the choices people made about why and with whom they had sex.
BIOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT, CULTURE, AND MIND IN THE EVOLUTION OF DESIRE AND LOVE
     
    No gene by itself made your ancestors leave the trees of Africa and set off across the savanna. It involved some measure of choice. 48 Your forebears made a self-determining act, an irrevocable decision that had far-reaching impacts: Humans began walking upright and women’s pelvises narrowed. This, combined with our rapidly increasing brain size, led to women giving birth sooner during pregnancy, to pass their babies’ larger heads through their smaller birth canals. Consequently, humans joined a small group of animals that give birth to exceedingly helpless (“atricial”) babies. This, in turn, required forming families and kinship relationships to care for them.
    Humans have accomplished a lot through co-evolution: Bipedal posture liberated our forelimbs for communicative gestures and freed us to regulate our breathing and develop a vocal tract that made speech possible. Our forefeet became hands capable of making and using tools. Our teeth stopped being our primary