Plenty of Fish
One of the most powerfully sad emotions that a human might feel is the loss of a partner through a breakup.
There’s two aspects to this; the loss itself and the regret that things could have been different if one had just behaved a little differently.
It is wired into our souls to want a partner. For having and raising kids, and for survival.
By why all the regret for losing the one that we had? Especially when the evidence suggests that there may be plenty, ca. billions, of options out there.
Well, we all believe that we are in control of these things. That our own behaviour determines the success or failure of a relationship. We feel regret at our own failings, or what could have been ‘if only’.
And then there’s the myth that the best part of a relationship is the first part. Deep down, very few really believe this. Otherwise they’d be jumping for joy at a break up, ready to go again.
Many of us recognise that humans are risk averse. What this means is that there has developed, in evolutionary terms, a greater desire to avoid loss than to attain gains.
In fact, humans are so wired against loss that it’s bloody amazing that relationships break up at all.
Oddly, this can be explained away by maths. As a second order effect, humans do actually have some obscure awareness of odds and probabilities.
In the case of a relationship, if it’s crap for at least one party, eventually this overrides the fear of loss. But this usually happens long past the point where the break could have been made rationally, to the satisfaction of a third party.
And, even so, the decision-making party is punished with emotions of guilt and loss.
So you see, maybe the maths aren’t so fucked up as they seem. The less than certain benefits of leaving the relationship are just offset by the calculated net present value of the emotional costs of leaving.
Rather than suggesting that humans are irrational because of all these emotions, one might be better placed to consider that humans are actually quite good weighing up the risks and benefits to their emotional futures.
Being risk averse is simply a consequence of our ability to forecast certain negative emotions far more accurately than uncertain future positive emotions.
And I say uncertain future benefits because we can imagine hundreds of futures, but many of these are worse off than the present. There’s simply more ways to imagine a messed up future than there is a Hollywood ending.
Indeed, we are better at imagining futures that are closer to our current situation. There’s a greater probability that these imaginings are correct if less has changed, or so we believe. And if we are currently unhappy in a relationship then the imagination is skewed towards futures where, even though things are changed, we remain unhappy.
One might wonder why we developed so. I’d say that in prehistoric times that the balance in the forecasted values of emotional losses and gains accurately reflected the best outcomes in terms of the survival and growth of the individual and the species.
It must be so; evolution is a brute force numerical algorithm that searches for and finds the best solution, every time. When I say time, I mean millennia not the years of your life. It’s not about you; never was and never will be.
Today, however, we have got ahead of evolution. We have engineered so much risk out of our daily lives that our assessment of the emotional and physical costs of risks and gains is all askew.
So when we assess the judgement and decision making of ourselves, and that of others, we appear irrational. However all we are is retarded! Recalcitrant, if you want. You get the idea.
My guess is that this will correct itself in time. Either we will over time evolve to assess these risks and gains differently, or we will miscalculate ourselves back to prehistoric times.
In the meantime, if you want to escape the sometimes misery of being human, all you need to do is to convince yourself, all mantra like, that your future is not constrained by your past.
In Venn diagram terms, your future is a circle, happily with no overlap with that of your unhappy past or present.
This takes advantage of another quirk of human nature; if something is said often enough, or by many people, or both, then belief may follow.
Belief is a mechanism that short circuits other mechanisms of judgement and decision making. I’ll write this one up another time.
offshore westerly 