Sexual Relationships 
Sexual Health 
Lots of questions get asked about the opposite sex and why they think differently, act differently, or what different things then the asker’s sex, and everyone wants to know WHY. Why are men so obsessed with sex? Why are relationships so important to women? Why do guys show off? Why do women spend so much time on their appearance? Why are men protective over women? Why do women have so much empathy?
The answers to all of these questions and many more like them come down to our two primary biological imperatives: to SURVIVE and to REPRODUCE. Even in modern times, with the education and technology that we have available to us, and with modern societal standards, our daily behaviors are STILL heavily influenced and affected by our biological instincts that have kept humans going as other species (including other humanoids) went extinct.
Charles Darwin called what he observed during his studies “Natural Selection” - how any trait that helps or improves survival or reproduction is going to be reinforced, because people with those traits will tend to survive and reproduce, while those that lack the trait will be less likely to do so. Over generations, these traits evolve and strengthen or weaken. If things go the wrong way, the species tends to die out, and if they go the right way, the species thrives and grows. Natural Selection and the traits it caused humans to develop - both physical and behavioral - are still with us and affect us daily.
If you forget about the last 300 years and you look at how people lived for all of history prior to that, it’s easy to see that men and women had very different roles in daily life, reflecting their roles in survival and in reproduction.
Men tended to do the “heavy” and dangerous work, farming, hunting, smithing, mining, construction, woodcutting, and soldiering. It wasn’t uncommon for men to be die at young ages - fighting in wars, being injured during work, or from conditions like “black lung” from working in mines. Men were somewhat expendable, and their role was “heavy work” and “protection of the family.”
Women generally worked in the home and on the farm - feeding and caring for the children and animals, tending to the garden (most homes had one), cooking, sewing, and cleaning the home. Nurturing was a big components of the woman’s role.
Roles related to reproduction were also very different. Men are pollinators - their mission is primarily to fertilize as many eggs as possible, and from a genetic/Natural Selection perspective, the more women he impregnates, and the more diverse their genetics are, the more likely at least some of his children will survive illnesses and genetic flaws that he may carry, because some of those women will have a resistance to those diseases that he lacks. This is why men are attracted not just to having sex with many women, but with DIFFERENT women - women of different races and tribes - because that improves genetic diversity, which improves survival. It’s also important to note that men can fulfill their role in reproduction in just a few minutes, and he can potentially impregnate several women per day, every day - so absent other factors, sex only affects a man for an hour (being generous).
Women’s role in reproduction is vastly different. For a woman, a pregnancy is going to directly impact her for nearly a year, during which she won’t be able to be pregnant again - and after giving birth, she’ll need to spend at least 2 years feeding and caring for the child before it can survive even a few minutes on its own. During much of this time, the woman is vulnerable, as it can be nearly impossible to either fight or flee during the late stages of pregnancy or with a young infant. These factors all drive women to seek the stability and security of a relationship - preferably from a man with strength and resources - because without that, she and her child might not survive.
Those traits became instincts over time, for both men and women. Scientists say that it takes about 1000 generations for behavior to become instinctual, which means it takes about 20,000 years to make changes to instinctual behavior for humans. That’s why those instincts and behaviors are still with us today, despite life being much different.
Today, we have advanced healthcare and birth control and many of us have stability that couldn’t be imagined a few hundred years ago - war isn’t in our neighborhoods on a regular basis. That makes it easy to think that past history isn’t important - but it is, because it informs the instincts that we have today.
Why are men so visually attracted to women? Because for much of human history, one tribe would raid another for women (genetic diversity), and the target would be nubile women - women who were young but post-pubescent and therefore at the start of their reproductive years, and most likely to be able to bear the man many children. Being able to identify these women by the presence of breasts and prominent hips from a distance was an important skill when you were literally risking your life to obtain them.
Why do women want relationships and not just casual sex? Because sex had an impact on women that is a orders of magnitude greater than men - women could get pregnant, carry the child, and then would have to care for the child and provide protection for it until it could protect and care for itself - which meant in a historical context that she needed a strong man with resources to protect her and provide for her and her children. Women didn’t want to be vulnerable (pregnancy) or have her children vulnerable, and because prior to the 1960s, sex more-or-less always led to pregnancy before long, most women did their best to keep sex within relationships (often within marriage). That was also critical in many societies, where societal rules meant that only “legitimate” children were entitled to the man’s family name and to inherit his property or titles (if any).
No matter what behaviors confuse you because they are different from your own when it comes to relationships or sex or just behaviors and priorities, most of them will make sense if you remember to think of them in the context of Natural Selection and the different roles that men and women have historically had in both daily survival and in reproduction. Those differences are still the basis of our instincts and desires and behavior today, despite the relatively recent changes in modern society in much of the world. Even though we think we’ve adjusted to modern life, our instincts definitely have not, and will not anytime soon.
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