Your Feelings Are Stupid, Sorry

[ice_cat]

Feelings Have No Place In Modern Decision Making

My opinion is quite simple, human feelings in their unguided, raw form are idiotic, misguided, irrational and unsuited to modern relationships. This applies to both men and women.

Nominally, your feelings should guide you towards people with whom you can have good relationships with. Well, remember all those disastrous relationships from your past? All the heartbreak? That's right, your feelings were blatantly wrong time and time again, but you still trusted them! That is indeed a very dangerous leap of faith.

Furthermore, remember all those people you rejected? Your instincts told you they weren't a good match for you, right? Well given your track record of picking people that are good for you, those choices may seem a little more regrettable now.

Such biases in our cognition don't appear only within the contexts of relationships and romantic attraction. We have an entire system of built-in heuristics that allow us to simplify tasks and make quick 'gut' decisions. Most of which work excellently in natural contexts (the ones we evolved in), but fail us miserably in the modern systematic, sanitized world.

The same set of heuristics that makes you firmly believe that after losing 100 times at a slot machine, you will win in the next turn, also guides you in choosing people you are attracted to. And yes, you do choose this. I especially often hear ladies claim that their emotions are out of their control, essentially absolving themselves from having any role in the failure of their relationships. While, yes, that is a very convenient means of justifying your poor choices, unfortunately the same feminism that is widely embraced in popular culture, also states that women are rational adults who can act reasonably and realistically. You are not free from the responsibility of managing your emotions, regardless of your gender.

Why do I care?

I will not apologize for the fact that I want a relationship. If you wanted to be 'clever' you could say that I am succumbing to the same fallacies and broken logic I described earlier. In a sense, this is true. I am in no way impervious to the nagging subconscious mechanisms within my mind. More than anything I feel those primal desires which ultimately would lead to some form of procreation. Had my ancestors not felt similar desires, I wouldn't exist.

Now, relationships can be beautiful. They can also be quite simple. It saddens me when I hear endless stories about how some couples fight constantly or end up divorcing bitterly, etc. They scar their children with toxic ideas about relationships, leading to another generation of similarly confused individuals (my parents had a relatively spotless, drama-free marriage). Hearing my friends (usually this will be my female friends) complain about how they got played or how the guy they're dating is a 'jerk' (their words) makes me question why they feel the need to subject themselves to such terrible realities, almost purposefully. What's even more perplexing is the abundance of better opportunities.

To me, it sounds much like an obese person excusing themselves from responsibility for their weight by citing their primal urge to eat sugary and fatty foods. Is it a valid urge? Maybe. Can it be conditioned away or curbed? Of course. Similarly, whether you believe it or not, both men and women can condition themselves towards more successful happy relationships.

A very successful therapist once told me: "Many people follow their intuition blindly, and then wonder why bad things happen to them." Put simply, being in a good relationship and growing up are your responsibility. You have to make it happen and if you constantly deflect responsibility away from yourself onto your supposedly enigmatic emotions, you have no one but yourself to blame for your failed relationships and hurt feelings.

[Viperkiss]

Very true. Nice take.