An Exploration of Romance

It’s complicated.

Love is, I mean.

And so are you and I, our biology, our psychology, and the sociology we are surrounded by.

It makes sense for us to start off well, and with some clear understanding. I’m a board-certified psychiatrist, and I am writing you from a place that is informed by my education and professional experience.

However, the reason I am collecting these ideas together is not to create an academic work, but simply because, like you, I am curious and fascinated by the topic of romance, how it really works, and what we can do together, as curious people, to bring more of it into our lives. 

The spirit of this work comes from a place of “what if?” not “I know more than you.” I want us to ask questions of love, together, and see what it responds back to us.

As a result, Romantic Dynamics™ is not about how to remain happily single, never changing or growing, although I would hope that it is very interesting to single people even if they never plan to, nor want to get married.

Volume I and half of Volume II will be all they need if they like things the way they are. The methods we will discuss are for any phase of growth as a person who has a romantic interest in other people.

Secondly, it is about romantic interest in other people mainly from a heterosexual perspective, with adults of all generations in mind. Yet it doesn’t exclude those of other perspectives, so long as they want to love and be loved. One could simply change the words, “masculine” and “feminine” to “romantic instincts of person one” and “romantic instincts of person two.”

This would be a bit wordy, but I want you to understand that whatever your lifestyle, this trilogy does not exclude you, nor champion any specific demographic group, including “men” or “women.” It simply views two people making an equal effort as most necessary for love to exist.

If it does not speak to a specific group, subgroup, majority or minority, then for that, I apologize, but I also believe one can best write about what they know, not what they do not.

Anyway, whoever you are, there can be no love between you and another person without “polarity” of differences between you anyway, whether that is man/woman, art/science, dominant/submissive, or short/tall. One of you is what we are going to learn as more “masculine” and the other more “feminine,” or you wouldn’t take interest in each other in the first place.

It is meant for any two people who want to find a profound and lasting connection with each other. One could then say that it is definitely not for people who want to focus only on their own life, or just don’t want to be bothered with understanding people different from themselves.

It is definitely not for people looking for a quick fix for finding love, happiness, or success. It is for people who have an intense curiosity about how people think and feel, interest in the diversity of people on this planet, and people who are patient with bringing ideas into action, people who love to learn from the past, from drama and stories, and yet from science, but who prefer to grow social skill one lesson at a time.

This book series is for people who believe love is a wonderful mystery, but who might be open to solving that mystery without the experience robbing them of the joy of discovering another person.

It is likely not for people who think love is a jumbled mishmash of behavior that can’t be labeled, or shouldn’t be labeled because they would prefer it to remain that way. It is also not for people who are not open to new ideas or believe old ideas should never be refurbished or brought back to life. In fact, this trilogy is absolutely, definitely not for those who “know everything,” don’t want to know anything, or are in any way uncurious.

This book series is for people who can let go of what they think they know, browse around something new, discard what is uninteresting to them, and not at all bristle over that with which they do not at all agree. Rather, it is for those who take interest in those they don’t agree with because there might be something to learn from even that.

It is for those who don’t hate science or philosophy and don’t hate those who love these venerable fields. It is also, in general, absolutely not for those who hate and love to hate. It is also not for those who think men and women are exactly alike in their nature, but also not for those who think all men are like every other man or all women are like every other woman.

They see men as interesting, and basically good, and women as interesting, and basically good. It is for those who believe men and women are entirely equal, yet different, and need each other to be that way, for attraction to even take place, for diversity to exist within their teamwork as a couple, and for there to be an enjoyable mystery to solve about each other.

This series is also for those who understand that the totality of a man, a woman, or a person is not ruled by any specific part of their psychology in its current state. There is no “magic bullet.”

Instead, they understand that the interlocking parts of psychology can be grown, strengthened, and cultivated, leading us to become more a mature, valuable person to others who also seek love.

I then need to explain to you right now that this model of human courtship divides our romantic functioning into three parts - the instincts, the emotions, and the intellect, which I view as also carrying along with it, the capacity for psychological maturity.

Evolutionary psychologists call these the reptilian brain, the mammalian brain, and the higher brain, and Freud called them the unconscious, the preconscious, and the conscious at one point, and later, the Id, the Ego, and the Superego at another.

Why am I telling you this part? Because it is imperative that when you hear me use the words, “male”, “female”, “masculinity”, “femininity” and the like, I am simply referring to one of two sets of gender-based instincts, and only to those.

I am not referring to any specific individual, nor to any general function of one’s culture, education, beliefs and preferences, family of origin, religion, or wonderfully unique life story or the personal perspective that arises out of these.

We are far, far more than just the automatic tendencies in us that can be labeled “gender,” and there are people of all lifestyles and preferences, sexually, in friendship, and in the type of relationships they seek.

So if I say something like “men like cars” or “women like flowers,” these kinds of ideas are referring to instincts, and not only that - they are referring to “common” or “average” behavior.

Not to any one, specific individual’s tastes or preferences.

Some women might be complete car aficionados and some race cars.

Some men are consummate florists, and award-winning wedding planners.

How could you know right away what I mean here?

How could such a holiday as Valentine’s Day even exist if this were not true on some instinctual level about men and women - when you look at the billboards and commercials for flower delivery services, you can bet that at least a majority of floral purchases are not made for men, but by men, for women.

The businesses and marketers of the world are keenly aware of differences in gender instincts in terms of purchasing tendencies. Why would we turn our eyes away from what they clearly know and are even betting their livelihoods on - the very survival of their businesses?

The last thing we need to understand before beginning our story of romance between any two people who find a fondness for each other is this: nearly all of the features of our psychology are statistically measurable on a Bell Curve. 

This means that there is an average point where most people nearly fall and can be described, then a tapering off to lower and lower numbers of people who differ to greater and greater extents from that average.

If I say something like, “men like cars,” or “women like flowers,” I absolutely do not in any way mean each and every man and woman on the planet like these things. I mean that there is a statistical tendency toward one direction or the other in our behavior. 

The beauty of this mathematics is that we can understand a general principle about ourselves and then also respect and even learn the fine details of each and every one of us as unique and different individuals too.

This makes our method a “quantum” mathematical approach - one that sees a point on a curve as descriptive but also sees the same thing being measured as existing on a spectrum simultaneously - a broad and diverse spectrum like a rainbow.

Without this mathematical feature of our psychology - that an average is different from the very diverse human statistical distribution over a wide and varied range of behaviors and tendencies - well, there would be no point in studying psychology because nothing would operate by laws and principles that are repeatable or could be relied upon.

Then, there would be utterly no chance to change our behaviors, or, therefore, our success, our happiness, and our prospects for love and being loved.

These are concepts and behaviors that we will need to learn in order to master the principles of sexual, emotional, and intellectual attraction—the three phases of human courtship that are governed by the reptilian, mammalian, and higher brains of the triune brain model of the evolutionary psychologists…