Pleasure-seeking has long been a cornerstone of philosophical and psychological thought. From the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus to Sigmund Freud, the idea that humans are fundamentally driven by the pursuit of pleasure has shaped much of Western thinking. Freud crystallized this in his pleasure principle, stating, “What decides the purpose of life is simply the programme of the pleasure principle.”

However, mid-20th-century developments in psychoanalysis, particularly Object Relations theory, challenged this view. Pioneered by British psychoanalyst Ronald Fairbairn, Object Relations theory posits that the primary motivational force in human life is not raw pleasure or instinctual discharge, but the drive to form and maintain relationships with others—termed “object-seeking.”

Fairbairn’s Reorientation of Libido Theory

In 1944, Fairbairn articulated a significant departure from classical Freudian theory:

“The basic conception… is to the effect that libido is primarily object-seeking (rather than pleasure-seeking, as in the classic theory), and that it is to disturbances in the object-relationships of the developing ego that we must look for the ultimate origin of all psychopathological conditions.”

Fairbairn emphasized that libido is not primarily about gratifying biological drives through “erotogenic zones” but about establishing satisfactory relationships. Pleasure, in this framework, is a byproduct or a secondary mechanism used to mitigate failures in relational aims: “Explicit pleasure-seeking is thus not a means of achieving libidinal aims, but a means of mitigating the failure of these aims.”

This shift aligns with broader evolutionary insights. In evolutionary psychology and biology, strong pair bonds facilitate biparental care, kin support, and offspring survival—critical for humans given the extended dependency period of our altricial young. Without stable relational environments, paternal investment declines, and reproductive success suffers.

Graphic 1: The Relational Aim of Libido

The graphic illustrates this dynamic perfectly: sexual desire (or neediness) is highest in the seeking bond phase and naturally subsides as pairbond security is achieved.

Make-Up Sex and Hate Sex: Repairing the Relational Bond

A compelling real-world demonstration of Object Relations principles is “make-up sex,” or “hate sex”—intense sexual encounters following conflict or alienation. Far from being paradoxical, these experiences reflect the libido’s object-seeking nature. When a bond is threatened, sexual intimacy mobilizes hormonal mechanisms (including surges in oxytocin and vasopressin) to restore connection and security.

Fairbairn’s theory explains why sex is harnessed to repair failing relationships: it serves as a powerful avenue to reaffirm the bond when security feels tenuous. This is not simply pleasure-seeking but an instinctual attempt to reinstate a failing relational bond. The phenomenon provides strong proof-of-concept for the central thesis of this article: that sex primarily serves the creation and maintenance of relationships, rather than relationships existing merely as a vehicle for sex.

In other words, the sexual drive is fundamentally relational in its aim—oriented toward bonding and repair—rather than relationships being secondary to constant pleasure-seeking. This aligns with both clinical observations in Object Relations theory and evolutionary evidence showing that sexual behavior in humans is deeply integrated with attachment systems that promote long-term pair bonding and parental investment.

The Irony of “Spinning Plates” and Pickup Strategies

If Object Relations theory is correct—that male sexual neediness is fundamentally oriented toward securing a pair bond, after which the drive naturally attenuates—then modern “spinning plates” (maintaining multiple casual sexual relationships) does the opposite: it perpetuates and amplifies neediness.

Techniques designed to increase female attraction and facilitate short-term encounters keep the practitioner in a perpetual seeking state. This exploits the Coolidge effect—renewed sexual interest with novel partners, observed across species including humans—preventing habituation and sustaining high arousal through dopamine resets.

Biologically, this strategy correlates with elevated testosterone levels typical of single or low-commitment men, fueling a higher sex drive and restless seeking behavior. In contrast, stable pair bonds are associated with lower testosterone and greater contentment via oxytocin and vasopressin-mediated attachment.

Men in long-term relationships often experience a natural decline in spontaneous desire after the honeymoon phase due to familiarity, but they gain relational satisfaction that reduces compulsive “neediness.” Rapid variety, however, keeps the system in high mating-effort mode without the stabilizing effects of deep attachment.

Graphic 2: Sexual Neediness Levels by Group

The graphic summarizes sexual neediness across groups, with higher scores reflecting greater ongoing drive and seeking behavior, mapped against baseline testosterone dynamics:

• Healthy LTR: Low neediness (0). Secure attachment and moderate intimacy allow habituation and contentment.
• Incel: High (6). Frustrated seeking without outlets.
• Unhealthy LTR: Very high (7). Insecure bonds activate repair mechanisms like heightened desire.
• PUAs: Extreme (10). Perpetual novelty and spinning plates exaggerate testosterone-driven drive in a self-reinforcing loop.

These patterns are modulated by individual factors like age, health, and sociosexual differences, but the average trends hold.

Evolutionary Synthesis

From an evolutionary perspective, human libido evolved with pair bonding as a key adaptation. While short-term mating strategies offer reproductive benefits (especially for males via sperm competition and genetic diversity), the relational infrastructure of pair bonds supports the intensive parental investment required for human offspring survival.

Modern casual-sex cultures, exaggerated by dating apps and pickup culture, create a mismatch: they hijack novelty-seeking mechanisms (Coolidge effect, elevated T) in ways that sustain high sexual neediness without delivering the pair-bond security toward which the system is ultimately oriented. Practitioners may celebrate the cycle as victory, but Object Relations and evolutionary lenses suggest it often represents a self-perpetuating loop of unfulfilled relational aims.

In summary, while pleasure remains part of the human experience, Object Relations theory—bolstered by evolutionary biology—reminds us that our deepest libidinal aims are relational. Secure pair bonds represent not the end of desire, but its maturation from urgent seeking to stable attachment.

That said, men today are reluctant to trade the pleasure-seeking cycle for commitment, and with damn good reason. A large proportion of modern women are not pairbonding material – because they have been shaped by cultural trends that undermine loyalty, emotional stability, and companionate partnership. The prospect of commitment comes with real dangers of failure, and the potential rewards do not justify the risk if the woman lacks the qualities necessary for a secure bond. In such an environment, the “juice” is frequently not worth the squeeze.

This leaves men with a difficult but narrowly actionable path forward. As Paul Elam has long argued, genuine pairbonding is still possible, but it demands significantly greater effort in vetting and filtering. Only a shrinking minority of women today understand and are willing to invest in a loyal, companionate bond. So any success that a man might achieve requires rigorous discernment, strong personal boundaries, and a willingness to walk away from women who do not meet that standard.

Understanding this framework can help men navigate modern mating landscapes more consciously — whether choosing strategic singlehood, a more carefully selected commitment, or something in between — while remaining grounded in the fundamental relational purpose of libido.

References

1. Fairbairn, R. (1952). Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality. Tavistock Publications. (Especially pp. 82–83 on libido as object-seeking.)

2. Freud, S. (1991). Civilization, Society and Religion (Penguin Freud Library Vol. 12).

3. GoodTherapy.org. “Object Relations” entry.

4. Various supporting studies on the Coolidge effect, testosterone dynamics in pair bonds, and attachment hormones (e.g., reviews in Psychology Today, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Frontiers in Psychology, and related evolutionary psychology literature).

5. General evolutionary psychology sources on human pair bonding, biparental care, and mating strategies (e.g., work by David Buss, Helen Fisher, and others on attachment and reproductive success).

Based on conversations about the dowry ethos, the shortest description of it involves a twofold motive:

1. Men expecting women to come to the relationship table with a material/financial commitment, and

2. Rejection of the unbalanced romantic model that favors passion over pragmatic concerns.

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Footnote 1:  According to notable proponent of the dowry ethos ThisIsShah, the philosophy offers something beyond the typical manosphere talking points which in recent times have become tired and stale. He has excavated lost knowledge of marriage transactions in human history, a topic that has been well documented by anthropologists, especially from the 60’s and 70’s onward, and which includes information about marriage transactions such as the Dowry and Bridewealth (formerly Brideprice).

In The Economics of Dowry and Brideprice by Siwan Anderson we read:

“Most societies, at some point in their history, have been characterized by payments at the time of marriage. Such payments typically go hand-in-hand with marriages arranged by the parents of the respective spouses. These marriage payments come in various forms and sizes but can be classified into two broad categories: transfers from the family of the bride to that of the groom, broadly termed as “dowry,” or from the groom’s side to the bride’s, broadly termed as “brideprice.” Brideprice occurs in two-thirds of societies recorded in Murdock’s (1967) World Ethnographic Atlas of 1167 preindustrial societies. Conversely, dowry occurs in less than 4 percent of this sample. However, in terms of population numbers, dowry has played a more significant role, because the convention of dowry has occurred mainly in Europe and Asia, where more than 70 percent of the world’s population resides.”

Somehow the manosphere has managed to completely miss this information and what it means for relationships in the modern world. However, the trove of information – which includes academic/scholarly papers, newspaper articles, and media from different time periods – more than demonstrate, decisively and precisely, how the marriage market operated with regard to economics and the material concerns of both parties involved, suggesting that commensurate economic contribution toward relationships can happen today even if we do not wish to replicate older models and quaint customs precisely.

Footnote 2: Romantic love is based on a feudal model of men providing love service to women, with women expected to contribute little to a relationship other than natural beauty and innate moral purity. The romantic model is at odds with the traditional idea of women coming to the relationship table with a material contribution, and over time it tends to weaken the expectation of female contribution.

Other forms of love are sometimes conflated with the romantic model, loves that are more compatible with the idea of women contributing; these include loves such as storge (spousal and family affection), eros (sexual desire & pleasure), agape (selfless, charitable love), philia (friendship), and pragma (practical, pragmatic love as symbolized by dowry or other material offerings).

Freedom (Greek eleutheria) is also relevant to the formation of relationships today, as it underpins the freedom to choose a partner. The only freedom of choice in the romantic model, however, is the freedom for a woman to choose a vassal, and the freedom for a man to choose his domina. It’s a very narrow set of choices. Outside the romantic model, freedom of choice allows people to select from a far greater range of love-styles and qualities in a prospective partner.

“Dowry ethos” is a conceptual term, primarily used in discussions of gender dynamics, marriage markets, and critiques of modern romantic expectations. It refers to an underlying cultural principle of reciprocal value exchange in relationships: both partners (or their families) are expected to bring commensurate material, practical, or economic contributions to the “relationship table,” rather than one side bearing the full burden of provision.

It is explicitly differentiated from the literal historical/anthropological practice of dowry (a transfer of money, goods, property, or assets from the bride’s family to the groom or couple at marriage). The ethos is a broader attitude or norm about fairness and contribution, not a specific custom involving payment from the bride’s side.

Historical Practices of Dowry

Historically, dowry was a widespread custom in many Eurasian societies, especially those with intensive agriculture, private property, and patrilineal/patrilocal systems (e.g., parts of Europe, India, ancient Rome, Greece, and elsewhere). Key features include:

1. The bride’s family provided assets to the groom, his family, or directly to the couple. This could include land, cash, household goods, livestock, clothing (trousseau), or other resources. It was also common for young women to work and save money toward their own dowry before marriage, and married women often continued working for wages in order to contribute to the conjugal fund.

2. Purposes varied by context:

• To give the bride some economic security or inheritance portion (often controlled by the husband during marriage but reverting to her/children in cases of widowhood, divorce, or death).
• To secure a husband of commensurate status who could adequately provide for her.
• To equip the new household and support family formation.
• In some views, it compensated for the bride’s lower direct contributions to subsistence (e.g., in plough-agriculture societies where men’s labor dominated) or acted as female competition for high-value mates.

3. It was often tied to social norms of masculine provision: the groom/family offered ongoing economic support and protection, while the dowry helped balance or secure the arrangement.

4. Practices evolved; in some places it declined with modernization, cash economies, or legal changes, while in others (e.g., parts of South Asia) it persists.

Anthropologists like Jack Goody linked dowry to diverging devolution (property passing to both sons and daughters) in certain agricultural societies, contrasting it with bridewealth in others. It wasn’t universally “paying to offload a daughter” — interpretations include it as a form of pre-mortem inheritance for women or a conjugal fund.

Feminist critics sometimes frame historical dowry as patriarchal (treating women as burdens requiring compensation), while defenders note it typically empowered women with direct material security or reflected mutual commitment to the marriage and family investment.

Dowry Ethos (as Differentiated Concept)

The “dowry ethos” strips away the specific historical mechanics (no actual transfer from bride’s family to groom is required) and focuses on the principle of balanced contribution and assortative pairing:

• Women are expected to bring tangible value — material resources, practical skills/labor, fidelity, domestic contributions, or other assets — commensurate with what the man brings (resources, earning potential, provision, protection, status).
• Pairing should occur between partners of roughly equal “market” or contributory value. A woman with limited material/practical input would traditionally pair with a man of similar (modest) standing, not demand a high-provider without offering reciprocity.
• This ethos assumes relationships involve mutual investment and rejects one-sided entitlement. In traditional systems, it checked hypergamy (women seeking markedly higher-status men) by tying women’s options to what they (or their families) could offer in return.

In this framework, the ethos is “broadly understood” as a cultural expectation of fairness: “both partners should bring commensurate value… Under traditional systems, women were expected to contribute materially or through labor and fidelity.”

Key Differentiation and Modern Contrast

• Historical dowry = A concrete, often one-directional transfer of assets (bride’s side -> groom/couple), embedded in specific legal, familial, and economic systems.
• Dowry ethos = An abstract norm or attitude emphasizing reciprocity and matched value in mate selection and ongoing relationships. It doesn’t prescribe paying dowries today; it critiques situations where this balancing expectation has eroded.

Proponents argue that modern Western “romantic chivalry ethos” or unconditional “love” narratives have largely waived the contribution requirement for women. Men are still culturally (and often legally) expected to provide resources, protection, and emotional labor, while women’s hypergamous preferences face fewer checks. This creates asymmetry: women can pursue higher-value men without equivalent input, leading to entitled dynamics, provider burnout, or men feeling like “ATMs.”

The ethos is invoked to advocate for mutual standards — e.g., women demonstrating “something to the table” (career, skills, resources, low entitlement) rather than expecting provision based solely on romance, attractiveness, or traditional female roles without reciprocity.

In short: Historical dowry was a specific practice involving asset transfer; dowry ethos is the underlying idea of balanced, value-matched partnership that some argue has been selectively discarded in favor of female-favoring romantic ideals. The term highlights perceived imbalances in contemporary dating and marriage markets.

Academic definitions of romantic love portray it as a single, universal construct experienced identically by both sexes. This unitary framing is a serious misrepresentation. It erases the distinctly feudal dynamic that has always defined the tradition, bleaching its asymmetrical structure into a feel-good myth of mutual (read identical) behaviors, emotions and reciprocity.

In reality, romantic love is a dyadic cultural script – a single overarching construct built from two distinct, complementary roles. Unlike other forms of love such as eros (sexual desire), agape (charity/compassion), storge (bonded/familial affection), companionate love (pairbonding), philia (friendship), and pragma (pragmatic, material gestures of care) — each of which operates as a single construct enacted similarly by either sex — romantic love requires not one, but two separate sets of roles, each governing the expectations, behaviors, and moral obligations of one sex.

On the male side stands romantic chivalry: the active performance of proving oneself by service, protection, provision, and devotional elevation of the woman. This is the vassal’s role – deferential, sacrificial, and oriented toward earning favour.

On the female side stands romantic ennobling: the active claiming and performance of elevated, aristocratic status within the romantic dyad. She embraces and reinforces her position as the “Dame” or “midons” (my lord) – the ennobled figure who receives devotion while occupying the superior, sovereign place in the hierarchy. This is the lordly role transposed into the feminine — a role that persists today in the widespread feminist emphasis on women’s “status,” “esteem,” “worth,” “dignity,” and “respect” in heterosexual relationships, terms once reserved exclusively for nobles.

These two roles are not symmetrical. They are deliberately complementary in the feudal sense: his chivalric service is meaningful only because she performs and expects ennoblement. Together they form the complete script that Western romantic love has inherited from medieval courtly tradition, where the lady was addressed with masculine titles of lordship precisely to signal her exalted position.

Recognising romantic love as a dyadic construct rather than a unitary one restores analytical clarity. It explains why the experience, the expectations, and the moral economy differ so sharply between the sexes — a difference that the prevailing academic narrative works hard to obscure. Romantic love is not a gender-neutral emotion. It is a structured cultural system with two interlocking parts, each carrying its own distinct imperatives.

Since its invention in medieval Europe, the concept of romantic love has referred to a specific cultural template: a feudal-inspired dyad in which the man acts as a devoted servant (embodied in chivalry) and the woman is elevated to a pedestal traditionally reserved for a feudal lord. This structural relationship, adapted from feudal society and applied to intimate bonds, became the defining framework for romantic love. It spread globally and remains symbolically potent today—for instance, in the common image of a man kneeling on one knee to propose marriage, an act that implies the same roles between men and women even when not literally performed.

This core template—the feudal structure itself—is what distinguishes romantic love from other forms of affection. Over time, however, it has undergone what might be called category creep through its increasing association with two related but distinct elements:

1. The freedom to choose one’s love partner.
2. Sexual desire and activity.

Importantly, the sexual component was not inherent or necessary to the original model.

Courtly love (amour courtois), the direct precursor to what we call romantic love, was frequently and even ideally Platonic in nature. Troubadour poetry and chivalric literature often celebrated an elevated, non-physical devotion in which the man’s service and the woman’s pedestal remained pure; consummation was neither required nor always desired. Sex sometimes occurred as an additional element, but its presence or absence did not define the romantic construct. This historical reality demonstrates conclusively that sexual activity is merely an adjunct—something that may accompany the template but is not identical to it.

Because sexual desire is clearly an evolved human behavior, its frequent close proximity to the romantic template has encouraged academics and lay observers alike to interpret the entire phenomenon—including the cultural feudal template—as a biological universal rather than a historically specific construct. The result is a form of misplaced adaptationism: the assumption that because one component is innate, the whole package must be as well.

A Foundational Study and Its Limitations

A widely cited 1992 paper by William Jankowiak and Edward Fischer examined evidence of “romantic love” across 166 cultures and reported its presence in 147. Their criteria focused on generic features such as personal anguish and longing, love songs or folklore, elopements based on affection, and ethnographers’ reports. However, this definition notably omitted the feudal template—the man-as-vassal, woman-as-lord dynamic—that formed the heart of the European romantic love construct. Without that central element, what they described aligns more closely with broader passionate or pair-bonding experiences found across human societies than with romantic love in its historically specific sense.

Jankowiak and Fischer later acknowledged this distinction. In subsequent work and communications, they shifted to the more accurate term “passionate love” for their construct, recognizing that the original European romantic model was a unique cultural development that later spread worldwide, and that they had made a serious error to employ the phrase “romantic love” in their study. Their willingness to refine the terminology reflects intellectual honesty and humility.

Uncritical Reliance in Evolutionary Psychology

Despite these clarifications, some scholars continue to rely on the earlier framing. Steve Stewart-Williams, in his otherwise insightful book The Ape That Understood the Universe, relies on the Jankowiak and Fischer findings to make his conclusion without fully addressing the missing feudal component. He writes:

“And why, as far as we can tell, is romantic love found in all cultures? That’s right; contrary to stubborn anthropological myth, people everywhere fall in love. One line of evidence for this claim comes from the anthropologists William Jankowiak and Edward Fischer, who scoured the anthropological research on 166 historically independent cultures, noting down any evidence of romantic love that they came across: romantic poetry, elopement, all the usual symptoms. Their conclusion? Romantic love was unambiguously present in around 89 percent of cultures…

The question all these findings raise is a straightforward one: If romantic love is an invention of Western culture, why is it found in every geographical region, historical period, and ethnic group? The simplest and most plausible answer is that romantic love is not an invention of Western culture. Instead, the idea that romantic love is an invention of Western culture is itself an invention of Western culture, and a rather implausible one at that. Human beings were falling in and out of love for hundreds of thousands of years before we ever had Hollywood blockbusters or knights in shining armor. We’re just that kind of animal – the kind that falls in love from time to time.”

This passage illustrates a category error and equivocation that weakens the analysis. By folding evolved sexual urges (eros) together with the culturally constructed feudal template under the single label “romantic love,” the argument treats a composite as purely biological. The feudal metaphor—man in service to an elevated beloved—is not a universal biological reflex; it is a medieval European innovation that has since globalized. Conflating it with sexual desire risks overlooking the genuine cultural novelty involved and perpetuates imprecise scholarship.

That said, Stewart-Williams usefully distinguishes “romantic love” from “companionate love,” the steadier form of attachment that often follows the intense early phase and supports long-term pair-bonding. As he notes:

“But the end of the crazy, can’t-keep-your-hands-off-each-other phase doesn’t necessarily herald the end of love. Sometimes romantic love matures into a distinct form of love, which psychologists call companionate love. … Companionate love is a less exhilarating form of love than romantic love, but in many ways, it’s more real. With romantic love, or at least early-stage romantic love, we often don’t really know the person we fall in love with.”

This differentiation is valuable, though the broader point remains: precise definitions matter. Romantic love, properly understood as the feudal template adapted to intimate relations, is a cultural achievement with a clear historical origin—not a timeless biological given. Sloppy handling of these distinctions in academic work, even by otherwise capable researchers, perpetuates confusion and overgeneralization. Clearer categorization allows us to appreciate both the evolved foundations of human attachment and the culturally inventive ways societies have shaped them.

References

Jankowiak, W. R., & Fischer, E. F. (1992). A cross-cultural perspective on romantic love. Ethnology, 31(2), 149-155.

Stewart-Williams, S. (2018). The Ape That Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve. Cambridge University Press.

The following 2025 study of ‘The Woman King’ reveals the growth of gynocentrism & gamma bias in modern cinematic productions: Aris, Q., & Syam, E. (2025). Gynocentrism: Female Superiority Propaganda in The Woman King. Rainbow: Journal of Literature, Linguistics and Culture Studies, 14(2), 191-198.

• The conflict of love and honor: the medieval Tristan legend in France, Germany and Italy, by Joan M. Ferrante

“The legend of Tristan and Isolde, posing the basic human conflict between an overpowering passion and the demands of morality and honor, offered a rich fund of material for medieval writers. They told the story in various forms for various reasons. Some condemned the love, others exalted it. For one, Tristan is a great hero, destroyed by a passion he cannot control; for another he is an artist inspired by a love that is mostly pain; for another, a knight caught between his love and loyalty to an unworthy king…

The conflict arises because Tristan’s love for Isolt is not just an ennobling inspiration, it is also a physical passion that demands fulfilment and destroys prudence. Love, which should guide the knight in the right direction, instead gets in his way. This presents a crucial paradox: without honor in the world a man cannot be a perfect lover, but without love a man is not a complete knight.

Why does this paradox exist? Because love between man and woman cannot be a purely spiritual phenomenon; there is always the danger of the physical impulse asserting itself and taking control. Then love, for all its ennobling powers, becomes an anti-social force. The only way out of the dilemma is death, so instead of a moral comedy, we have a romantic tragedy.”