The Medulla Obligation: Love Won't Be Carried by Its Tail

By M. T. Kelson

Few things feel better than early love. We feel like we are flying.
At that time, Nature adds its endorsement and accelerant to make sure survival concerns do not preempt going through the actions that have a high likelihood of making children. This force—the Medulla Obligation--is a compilation of hormones and romantic notions meant to enslave us to love’s duties. However, some of love’s duties are aggressive, territorial, and vicious, and those are exaggerated too. We have all been buried under its suffocating power many times in our lives.
The introductory offer ends. Things were so promising; now confusion reigns. What do we have in front of us? What just happened? Who was that?
“For any particular thing, ask: What is it in itself? What is its nature?”
— Marcus Aurelius

Once the nature of this force and its goals and methods are presented, sequenced, and better understood, we can prepare. This book is about the aftershocks sent out by the exaggerating forces of courtship as enforced by the Medulla Obligation—our core purpose—and their departure. Through awareness, we can still fly in the euphoria of new love, and escape the worst crashes of love when the flight loses momentum.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 14, 2024
• ISBN: 9798369416181

M. T. Kelson

M.T. Kelson lives in Kansas City with his two daughters.

Book preview

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THE

MEDULLA

OBLIGATION

LOVE WON’T BE CARRIED BY ITS TAIL

M. T. KELSON

Copyright © 2024 by M. T. Kelson.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 03/21/2024

Xlibris

844-714-8691

www.Xlibris.com

858213

Contents

Chapter I

ESCAPING LOVE’S WORST CRASHES

Chapter II

THE SYMBIOHORIZON

Chapter III

THE INFERIOR POSTURE

Chapter IV

REPRIORITIZATION

Chapter V

THE MEDULLA OBLIGATION

Chapter VI

OXYTOCIN

INTERMISSION

THE SEEMINGLY UNROMANTIC NATURE OF GRAPHS OF LOVE

Chapter VII

THE FIVE ACCEPTANCES

Chapter VIII

BABY BEAR’S PORRIDGE SYNDROME

Chapter IX

EXPECTATION EQUINOX

A) RECOURTING

B) COVERT ENGAGEMENT

C) SOLITARY IMPROVEMENT

D) BENEFITING FROM REJECTION

E) AERGOS POSTURE

Chapter X

TWO SELF-SUSTAINING MISTAKES

INTRODUCTION

Let us start with a bang. The most important thing to us in our lives is our perspective on how life works. We apply ourselves or protect ourselves accordingly. A long-overdue revolutionary philosophical foundation for our lives is presented in

The Medulla Obligation

Love Won’t be Carried by Its Tail

What would one do if he or she came across a discovery and point of view that could change how people envision and approach their lives–a completely new foundation and paradigm of human perspective, interaction, and understanding? What if this new vision resulted in more satisfaction and reduced conflict and turmoil, happier and more fruitful lives with better comprehension and consciousness of what is really happening in our lives? What if that new perspective brought together biology and the unique human-engineered world with its universal romantic expectation and programming from a world in which we no longer live? What if that discovery were based on what we see every day, our own personal experiences and observations? I am faced with that question, and my vast experience and belief in this new perspective compel me to seek out the podium and audience this work deserves.

I am not prone to hyperbole. I’m known as tough-minded and thorough, and have received awards for my scholarship and my teaching. In that context, I will unequivocally declare this book can change people’s lives to the better and change the world as we know it. It can become the foundation of not only a quick elevation of our interactions as humans, but the center of explanation and discussion regarding our lives. It evokes every emotion, and is entertaining, energizing, startling, frank, enlightening, hopeful and elevating. It is the philosophical jump in awareness we have sought for centuries. The book describes an incredibly powerful, manipulative, awe-inspiring and compassion- and empathy-evoking force that impacts us in almost every breath. The most powerful life force on earth – the Medulla Obligation.

I have for more than 30 years as a professor and editor evaluated ideas on relationships and communication, assessing their viability and value. I read, publish, and lead extensively in this field. Through a spectacular stroke of fate, I read two books addressing the very subject detailed above. I suggested to the author a combination of the books, molded into a version more easily accessible to average readers; it has been written and edited. The book and its ideas must reach the public – the people who clamor for answers to the questions that we ask ourselves every day. It describes the outcomes of our actions and concepts that decimate our lives that are as predictable as objects affected by gravity, and how to negotiate those through simple reason.

Similar to Darwin’s observations on biology, Newton’s in physics, and Machiavelli’s in politics, this book presents a jump to a new elevated level in our perception regarding our interactions as human beings. But different than the revelations presented by Darwin, Newton and Machiavelli, this book is directly applicable to everyone who reads it, and is immediately and cumulatively beneficial as it is read. The book’s concepts have affected the few others who have read it in the same fashion.

What do you do when you hold such a thing in your possession, to be the first to witness what will generate a perceptual evolution and a new world. Nothing has come close in my experience, and that experience is extensive and centered in this book’s subject. However, this book strongly focuses many areas of study into a unified and coordinated perspective. This book will help identify a new view of our experience as humans, and how to reach our so-far-elusive expectations of life.

I had been divorced about three years when I first came across M. T. Kelson’s books on the Medulla Obligation. I have three degrees (including a doctorate) in interpersonal communication and have been studying, researching, publishing, and teaching about relationships for 30-some years. I had and have also done a lot of dating prior to and since my marriage.

At the time I found M. T. Kelson’s books, I was about ready to write my own book: There are no princes, only frogs, (and life is not a fairy tale!) My sister (who has also had a lot of relationships prior to in between her two marriages) recommended M. T. Kelson’s work to me.

I found it absolutely revolutionary.

As I struggled to understand the completely new paradigm of relationships and relational forces that he presents, I found myself forced to reconceptualize just about everything I had ever thought about our relationships do and can work. I recognize the force that he has labeled the Medulla Obligation operating in my own life and in the lives of everyone else I know. Finally, something that helped explain the mysteries of why so few relationships actually work in a functional long-term sense.

I have now read all three of M. T. Kelson’s books, and I’ve become convinced that the Medulla Obligation is real, that it does impact the decisions we make in our relationships, that oxytocin is a tool used by her to obtain the outcome she wants, and that I benefit by understanding this force and how it affects me. I see why we don’t see her – however, from an evolutionary perspective, it’s in her interest not to be seen. Additionally, I have found his arguments about the various ways to handle these relational pressures quite helpful and illuminating. In particular, his notions of benefiting from rejection and avoiding those with Baby Bear’s Porridge Syndrome have been invaluable to me.

They have completely changed how I deal with relationships – much to my benefit! Without an understanding of these concepts, most of us just go from sad relationship to sad relationship (with those highs caused by the early pressures of the Medulla Obligation as brief interludes in between.)

I haven’t stopped dating or participating in relationships as a result of reading these books, but I certainly have changed my expectations about relationships and how I deal with and respond to them. Most people know that their old ways haven’t been working – and they won’t. Once tired of hurt and disappointment, it’s time for everyone to read M. T. Kelson’s the Medulla Obligation. Of course, not all will, but a few will become many quickly, and the avalanche will happen – it’s a matter of gravity and time. The book is not a magic elixir, but is closer than we’ve ever come before. Much of the hard work is made easier by this new vision’s inescapable truth. I can think of nothing that a person can spend more productive and entertaining time doing than reading this book.

Exaggeration? Against the intensity of this recommendation, would a slight peak at this water slide to new awareness be too much to ask?

Theresa Thompson, PhD,

Professor of Communications,

University of Dayton

A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.

Mark Twain

We have been trying to carry love by its tail where we want to take love. That tail being the easiest and most obvious thing to grab as we think love is moving away from us. What we have learned is that love will tear us up and run away, or we don’t get it to where we wanted to take it. But mostly only that. We may eventually learn a better way to carry that love, and may reconsider where we want to take love. But our lives and spirits are only so long, only so durable, and our ways of doing things even longer and more durable. Those have not been long enough to find a better way. Let us take the lessons of the ages, and those most recent, and try to get ahead,

The Siren’s Song from Inside You

He had learned that they must pass the island of the Sirens. These were marvelous singers whose voices would make a man forget all else, and at last their song would steal his life away. Moldering skeletons of those they had lured to their death lay banked high up around them where they sat singing on the shore. Odysseus told his men about them, and that the only way to pass them safely was for each man to stop his ears with wax. He himself, however, was determined to hear them, and he proposed that the crew would tie him to the mass so strongly that he could not get away however much he tried. This they did and drew near the island, all except Odysseus, deaf to the enchanting song. He heard it and the words were even more enticing than the melody, at least to a Greek. They would give knowledge to each man who came to them, they said. Ripe wisdom and a quickening of the Spirit. We know all things which shall be hereafter upon earth. So rang their song in lovely cadences, and Odysseus’ heart ached with longing.¹

"Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune

intoned in the distance by an invisible player."

Albert Einstein

Let us meet that unseen player within these pages, understand her agenda, and become aware of how the Symphony of motivation she orchestrates forces us to act. She is the Medulla Obligation—our core purpose—and woven into her song are the successful survival behaviors of our ancestors as they pass them down to us.

The Medulla Obligation is nature’s siren, delivering a quickening of all knowledge that is required for us to continue our unique genetics, species, and lust for life; this knowledge being of the successful behaviors of our ancestors.

The greatest tool of the Medulla Obligation is oxytocin, the imprinting hormone. Imprinting, a hormonally initiated, sustained, and unquestioning trust in another unproven person in a most important relationship, is the result of that knowledge delivered by the Medulla Obligation. That imprinting has us bond with our mothers when we were born, and our mother’s hormonally bond with us so they can more adequately protect and care for us. Without this protection and augmented vigilance, we would die of exposure, and emotional and physical desertion and starvation. When we reach sexual maturity, that same hormone has us pair bond with our mates after we have experienced and been exposed to certain trigger mechanisms and behaviors at thresholds of readiness for such engagements. Once summoned, the song of the Siren we cannot help but hear comes from inside us. Like slow motion lightning moving us to that song’s purposes, we cannot help but go.

"The truth is stranger than fiction. But it is because fiction is obliged to stick to

possibilities. Truth isn’t."

Mark Twain.

In this book, the myth of Sirens and Medusa are less fiction and more personification of some traits and outcomes that would be almost impossible to describe without aiming our investigation as seen through those frames.

Intimate Partner Imprinting Event

The next generations cries to us for a chance at life from inside us. We feel and translate those unspoken pleas into intimate relationships; the only way the next generation has a chance to be brought to life.

From the time we meet our newly found potential significant other until we either stay together for the rest of our lives, or until we breakup, this event of months to decades has some very telling and consistent characteristics and properties. It is a hormonal imprinting event, and being so, it is triggered by certain behaviors and timely displays at sensitive stages and junctures in our lives.

Some people have many of these events in their lives. Others less.

In the early stages of these events, once a threshold of behaviors, displays, and qualities are met and accepted for imprinting hormonal intervention in the relationship, the vetting process is suspended and little but acceptance and the highest form of adulation reign. In most of these events, over time, the earlier interpretation of behaviors, displays, and qualities are reevaluated and questioned, and the opposite of the things that summoned the hormonal endorsement of the relationship dwindle and reverse. It is here where one or both of the relationship participants see the Medusa of love leaving, and the world becomes a dark place replete with love’s worst crashes; heartbreak and revenge.

One last item before we begin: we are going to approach this investigation as we have the success of learning to fly airplanes: the third necessary frame. We are thrown into a foreign environment when we are struck by hormonal imprinting. We don’t get to volunteer for these hormone-exaggerated flights. So, we are already thrown into the air, and our journey for the rest of the Intimate Partner Imprinting Event will have many twists and turns, ups and downs, and horrible crashes, that, if we have foreknowledge and some predicted input of the forces, purposes, and tools of the Medulla Obligation, our lives can be ones of myth and legend.

We will have seen Medusa, heard the Siren’s song, and safely landed our flights of love.

"If a cat sits on a hot stove, that cat won’t sit on a hot stove again.

That cat won’t sit on a cold stove either."

Mark Twain

---

¹ Mythology, Edith Hamilton, Warner Books, New York, 1999, pp 223,224

I

ESCAPING LOVE’S WORST CRASHES

The flying bird dreams of land.

from a fortune cookie

What do we really know about relationships? Let us investigate some undercurrents that let us know how far our expectations have been from the actual outcomes of our ultimately important intimate relationships.

•Fifty percent of marriages end in divorce. That percentage grows higher for each marriage after the first.²

•Almost everyone has a few failed relationships before, after, or between marriages. Many of these seem important at the time. Nearly all of them break up.

•Many married people are overtly unhappy and stay together for financial, familial, or safety reasons.

•Many other married people do not feel that they have found the happily-ever-after love they wish from life, but live with the status quo of a less-than-gratifying relationship.

A loose evaluation of those items would lead us to conclude that more than three in four (likely nearer to ninety percent of) intimate relationships will not fulfill the happily-ever-after goal of our romantic paradigm. More than half of marriages are eliminated by divorce alone, even after the long, rigorous interview process, and the legal and social commitments of getting married. That is a lot of relationship crashes, and a lot is invested in those trial partnerships. During those unintended experiments called intimate relationships, pregnancy, oppressive financial ties, and obsessive partner commitment are possible. These can result in disaster just as exposure to infection can result in disaster.

Almost all of us have crashed after love changed, and most of us have crashed many times. We flew in the beginnings of love, never anticipating that anything could ever change. Then it did change. We landed terribly as the flight descended and met a startlingly rigid horizon of relationship mutation, not unlike flying into the ground. Crashing relationships is the plague of our time, debilitating almost all of us at some time, and some of us almost all of the time. The damage from the crashes extends well beyond the limits of the relationships from which it is spawned: children and society as a whole suffer from the collateral frustrations set into motion by our crashes of love. Few things are as all-consuming and ultimately dangerous as the territoriality and competitiveness spawned of vigilance over breeding partners (whether current, future, or past) and resulting children. Review some of the most horrific of crimes and altercations you have seen or heard about and consider the connections with breeding territory or genetic lineage. The crashes of love explode well beyond the limits of the relationships in which the crashes occur—all of us are affected in many ways by the shrapnel from other people’s relationships.

Some damage from the crashes of love lasts a lifetime, and the damage that seems of lesser effect is frequently corrosive for quite a while, leaving emotional scars. We all have some of those scars, but we do not have to be as debilitated or handicapped as those scars have frequently made us. In fact, we can flourish even when love changes if we understand the underlying physics of love crashing.

Finding the happily-ever-after foundation of ongoing love, so promoted in our culture and romantic notions, has failed rather consistently, crashing almost every time. We seem to be at a crossroads regarding our handling of love. You and I are going to approach understanding and alleviating the problems of love crashing in much the same way that we as a species have approached and solved so many similar problems before.

Today’s Frontier

The greatest mystery of the universe is its comprehensibility. —Albert Einstein

It is hard to imagine a world without airplanes, the internet, or cell phones, or having to live without antibiotics and knowledgeable hygiene to combat the spread and devastation of infections and disease. We imagine such a place as dark with ignorance and surprise devastation, like when the plague hit Europe, and we would not want to return there. Yet even today, we live in such a world in that we are not able to connect the dots when it comes to love. There is a devastating infection that continues after love crashes. It is like a brown recluse spider bite, where the surface heals over but the skin underneath continues to rot unseen, occasionally erupting to the horror of the victim. The biggest difference from that spider bite is that the recurring infections from love’s crashes can pervade one’s entire life.

I am not going to underestimate how important the discoveries over the last century are to us. But how do those discoveries help us when we are heartbroken or face revenge from an ex-partner who feels betrayed? How do we feel during or after those crashes? These crashes will have residual effects in our long lives, at least long as measured against our mammalian cousins who do not have but about one-third the heartbeats we get to have.³ Unfortunately, much of our lives will be spent as an old person. Some of us will have to force obligatory acceptance from children and relatives. We have extended our lifespan into uncharted territory compared to other mammalian species. During that long life, we will likely be confused and bewildered by the outcomes we have experienced compared to the conventional expectations of love. We can also be disabled by the inability to hide from revenge or heartbreak because of technology and unchecked behaviors.

What will not be sustainable are the opportunities presented when the low hanging fruit of youthful attractiveness, vigor, naivete, and fertility give us reinforcement that those opportunities will always be available to us while we exert only the same energy we did when in adolescence and early adulthood. That energy is very little—the mating arena for youth requires most of us to just show up. As we age, the fruit—now more like dietary fiber, good for us yet not as appetizing as the sugar of the outward trappings of biological fertility—becomes further from easy reach. The replacement of many youthful attributes with character, temperance, wisdom, education, station, or philosophical balance requires a framework that has not been employed often enough.

Let us take a moment to put in perspective our mating opportunities and life possibilities as compared with other species:

•"100 female [chum salmon] spawners [produced] 23,400 fry.

•At the end of the first year . . . 1,265 juvenile chum salmon remained . . .. Over the three years . . . a total of 200 chum salmon survived to successfully spawn."⁴

•It is estimated that only one of a thousand hatchlings [of the olive ridley sea turtle] reaches maturity.⁵

•Most neonates root around for their mother’s teat: a baby hyena roots around for the back of its sibling’s neck. Within hours, one hyena [most frequently born two at a time] usually kills the other.⁶

•The first thing that a male African lion does when he takes over a pride is to kill all the cubs of his predecessor. This maximizes his own reproductive success.⁷

•Male bees, known as drones, only exist for the purpose of mating with the queen . . .. The drone’s penis and abdomen get ripped from his body during [his one-time mating], and he quickly dies.⁸

•Praying mantis and black widow spider females frequently kill and sometimes eat their distracted male counterparts right after mating.

•Those cute dolphins employ groups of males to corral a choice female which one of the males coerces to mate with him.⁹

The list goes on and on: each species has some horrific element to its survival and mating requirements that continues to eliminate individuals of a species or presents insurmountable feats keeping many of those individuals from mating. Most, therefore, must and do compete and compensate. The more you study, the more surprising, gory details emerge from each species.

We share these horrific details when it comes to our programming regarding survival and breeding, so let’s study our own species first—it is within our own species that our happiness depends. The same system whose pressures inadvertently designed these draconian survival and breeding scenarios also enforces our survival and breeding habits. If we think a system of that nature cares about how we feel, we should think again. We deny or ignore the horrors of our species survival and breeding mandates. And I mean horrors—we have all experienced them and deny their existence with the balm of blind hope in dreams that seldom come true. Inconvenient truths, such as the pain of animals upon which we experiment or we want to eat, are swept under the rug of self-serving denial. Our resulting commitment to purpose, enslavement, loss, scorched earth competitiveness, and victimization are outcomes which we will not consider until they arrive. Then we blame all the wrong causes and rationalize our reasons to do what our programming told us to do, in spite of any reasoning capabilities we had before the fact.

We not only take our high survival and mating rate for granted, we expect our dreams of achieving a love life meeting our romantic expectations to not only be achieved, but be maintained at an intensity seldom found except during courtship or the longings of the jilted person for the lover that got away. Nature’s template does not seem to agree with our expectations, and neither do the outcomes of most of our intimate relationships. How does being able to fly, explore space or study the depths of the ocean impact us in our most personal moments? Sometimes the advancements humans have made actually work against us in the throes of love crashing. Our loves happen in our most private of worlds, where we can’t hide because this is where we have chosen to make our most important choices. Our partners have become part of the insides of our private worlds; any damage is from the inside out. Our loves are the final confluence of much of whatever else we do.

Is a relationship that only lasts a year any better than one that lasts decades then breaks up, leaving a middle-aged person deserted late in life with horrendous obligations and few options? Most of us would paradoxically see the longer lasting one as worse considering the breakup after such a long relationship accompanied by a reduction in alternatives. It looks like relationships get no credit for tenure. It could be argued that the shorter relationship was less damaging because the partners were able to still try again armed with much of the same social and physical assets they brought into the eventually failed relationship. No matter how long a relationship lasts, when it ceases to be exclusive and of highest priority, it is considered a failure.

Is forever the only measure of relationship success? Putting all of our eggs in one basket (a metaphor that has strange literal truth) for any period of time leads to exasperating distress for the person left behind when his or her partner moves on. Many casualties of love are emotional, and many others also have a financial impact, degrading most avenues through which a person may survive with any dignity in our aggressively judgmental social system. Some casualties are physically harmed by aspects of the deterioration—an example being that murder is the number one cause of death among pregnant women.¹⁰

Like an infection, the genesis of residual difficulties after love crashes is our expectation that courtship love has elements of reality that, in fact, are really more like Nature temporarily slipping us steroids. After she stops, we cannot understand why we grow weak, impotent, and shrivel when it comes to our abilities to keep our relationship like it was. When we are afflicted in this way, we either blame ourselves or blame our partners, thinking that is where we can come up with some new direction. It won’t work.

It will take that same unique human reason that added romantic expectations to Nature’s exaggerations during courtship to understand and enact the way to stop the infection that is unique to humans. The infection is heartbreak and revenge that grow from the concepts and missteps that lead to it. Both heartbreak and revenge are generated from our wishful belief that our programming’s interference in our lives is solely attributable to the objective gifts that we and our partners bring to our relationships, and that the promises made under one set of conditions can be kept when those conditions change. Frequently we don’t realize conditions have changed, even though they have to.

Our Programming: Life’s Unavoidable Double Agent

We all are aware of our survival instincts. We are programmed to eat, drink, breathe, and secure the territory in which to get those items. We feel these consciously and have little trouble admitting them. Few people are ashamed that survival programming made them hungry or thirsty. We say that Nature gives us those motivations because it is the programming we share with others of our species that keeps humans surviving.

Not as recognized is our programming to bring about the next generation: to make children. Although we feel it, the road to the goal is twisted and riddled with ulterior motives. This programming is also part of a species not becoming extinct. Nature in her purest form does not make individuals meet her standards of continued species survival—she only enforces the standards. If the individuals of a species do not perform to a certain level, many factors can decimate that specie’s numbers until it can no longer remain vital, and it extinguishes. If enough individuals are motivated by their programming in effective ways to secure mates, conceive children, and then wean them to self-sufficiency, that species has met Nature’s standards and many individuals of that species get to experience the gift of life.

We are not as quick to depersonalize our interests in our partners to admit that programming to procreate has as great a hand in our interests at this time as it does. Many of the programmed urges to make children are in direct conflict with our survival instincts, a la the double agent accusation in the title of this section. That programming delivers our dreams of love and then can take them away. Having our dreams met then dashed by our programming compromises our ability to enjoy the gift of life. That invaluable gift of life has been delivered through these elaborate mechanisms and the extraordinary and Olympian level survival and procreational efforts of thousands of generations of our ancestors.

Sometimes our programming is an ally, bringing us to experience things that we will never forget. Other times, our programming seeks what it wants with no concern about how we will feel about the outcome—frequently a seeming enemy that sends our partners to other interests. That ever-changing balance generated by our programming, and the recognition of our programming and our purposes and alternatives, are at the foundation of what we are going to investigate in this book.

We trust our programming. It is at the core of our behaviors. It frequently sends out alarms and urges that keep us safe. Without it, we know we would not be able to survive. But what elements of our programming put us and our dreams at risk while another goal other than survival of that programming seeks to make babies at an unnecessarily high rate, at least for us in Western countries?

To some extent we understand the competition and territoriality involved in our quest for survival requirements—basics like food, water, and air. Even with goals and competition so obvious, many of us believe in man’s good nature and reason until we are caught on the losing end of some ill-conceived bargain. Many of us fight to get much more than we need, anticipating a future of unlimited potential needs and possible supply shortfalls.

However, when it comes to the exponential competition and territoriality regarding our programming to procreate, we are as ill-prepared as were the doctors in Europe when the plague hit. We don’t understand too many key elements. We put our happiness and satisfaction with life at risk when we spend ourselves so completely and so obtusely while being so unfocused.

In the world of our finances, good advice would dictate that we save as much and spend as little money as possible. Few of us follow this too stringently. Similarly, in our social worlds, a balance of enjoyment set against safety is seldom attained—enjoyment being a temptation and safety a discipline.

It is, however, not something unpalatable to spend our money in ways that keep what we have purchased from depreciating or falling apart too fast, or even turning on us and costing us more and more with fewer and fewer benefits. We all shop and compare to varying degrees—that is hesitation, almost foreplay, and not denying our desires. I am approaching relationships in much the same fashion. Our programming is going to dictate that we spend ourselves in ways that suit Nature’s goals, and our application of whatever we have to spend is sensitive to the timing in many arenas—we will be summoned at specific junctures. To understand the balance of programming and what it wants versus what we want will be a start toward applying ourselves in the most productive and symbiotic ways when we are called. If we perform in this fashion, we will get the greatest reciprocation from the time and part of ourselves that we expend. Nature is looking to literally turn you into another person many times over—to make children—so her sought goal is defined and simply measured. If you don’t, enough other people will have children at a high pace regardless of wanting children or not—the motivations are universal and the safeguards are inadequate. We must understand our abstract goals set against the many devices Nature has at her disposal to get what she seeks. We have many devices we have not realized nor have been using.

As our programming to make children surges, we believe so hard in the euphoria we experience during courtship that we cannot bring ourselves to detach from our addiction to the artificial exaggerations Nature can concoct through programming. Nature can orchestrate a symphony of implanted and easily available motivations to keep us moving at a fast pace toward making children, such as behavioral hormones like oxytocin and our outward signals and physical condition in certain youthful mating ground contexts. Through these exaggerations, our normal prospective mate interview process can be circumnavigated, resulting in us believing we have found our partners of destiny and we are theirs.

It is hard to admit that we had such commonly available programmed help to win such a hard-to-attain position. But acknowledging that there was an intentional concert of exaggerations during courtship is a start in the regimen to cure the infection. Our chance to be happy and fulfilled in life will be jeopardized if we cannot get over this debilitating synergism of programming and self-inflicted delusion.

Our programming to procreate is our most important and fixated purpose. We think that we have other more reasoned goals, like career or education or saving for a rainy day, but, when our actions speak louder than our words, actions serving procreation lead us. Like water swirling down the drain, we may not go directly to our programmed duty of procreation, but we will end up there. Only enough of us have to do this enough times to keep the species growing. As most things in life, a being’s or force’s effects evolve to a point of adequate function and not necessarily perfection; they stop improving once they reach good enough. We see this