That First Act of Sex Forebodes an Inevitable End
By Korski

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In a Stick submission more than two years ago (27/1/2006), one called “Raymond’s Relationship Rules,” Raymond identifies what he calls Rule Number 2: “The first time a man has sex with a woman is in fact the beginning of the end of the relationship, or at the very least, the beginning of the eventual end of good sex within the relationship. The end may be one day away, or be postponed by the sex getting better with practice for a limited time, or survive on habit and boredom for 30 years, but the end is inevitable.”

The other day, I was chatting with a friend who drew my attention to the Raymond piece—now forgotten by all but a few readers, I’d bet--and he asked me what I thought of it. I too could barely remember it; but he reminded me of its major point. In particular, the friend drew my attention to the first two lines of the rule: “The first time a man has sex with a woman is in fact the beginning of the end of the relationship.” The friend thought that this sounded true, absolutely right.

Later, when I had a chance to gather my thoughts, I concluded that on this particular point Raymond did have it just about right. Here are some of the principal reasons that I came up with.

At least two broad biological principles—both related--are implicated, and another two or three social or cultural principles can be brought to bear on the issue. One is perhaps more appropriately called an historical principal. I should note here that this brief sketch could be expanded into a much larger explanatory schemata; my purpose is only to identity major reasons and point to why Raymond Rule Number 2 indeed does make sense.

Evolutionary Theory teaches us that all organisms (plants, animals, fungi, protists, bacteria, archaea) strive to maximize their fitness, by which biologists mean reproductive effort. In evolutionary time (measured in tens of thousands, millions, hundreds of millions and billions of years) as opposed to historical time (tens, hundreds, thousands of years) the most successful individuals are those that do the best job of replicating their genes. This idea, it should be noted, is perhaps not only the most important idea in the history of the world (or at least on a par with one or two physical and biochemical laws), and is the lynchpin around which all of modern biology revolves. But it is also an idea that in recent decades has led to new and major understanding in anthropology and psychology, and there is even talk now of “literary Darwinism.” The latter is perhaps a bit far fetched, but then it indicates both the importance and pervasiveness of Darwin’s idea of evolution by natural selection.

It so happens that male and female strategies to maximize fitness are, again on the evolutionary stage, quite different. Because sperm is so cheap to produce and a man can produce healthy sperm well into late middle age, it is in a man’s interest—again, speaking evolutionarily—to impregnate as many females as possible. A notable effect of this is that powerful and rich men in societies want and get as many wives and mistresses as possible, and men at all social levels philander as much as they can get away with. Once one is able to look beyond or ignore the social proscriptions that proclaim whoremongering to be bad or immoral behavior, men will go with prostitutes as much as they are able to. Just about all societies—those that are “primitive” as well as those that are “advanced” and industrialized--have had female prostitutes to service men. Emphatically, the fact that men go to prostitutes does not mean that they are consciously or willfully seek to further their biological fitness. What it does mean is that going to prostitutes is what might be called a byproduct of a predisposition that has been selected for, one expressed by having intercourse with a woman. Ideally young (she has the greatest potential to successfully get pregnant and come to term), and ideally without a condom. But, the fact that a whoremonger wears a condom all the time does not mean that he is no longer “giving in” to an urge that is programmed into his very genes; his “good sense” (a rational mind) is simply telling him that until he gets to know the girl or woman it is foolhardy to have sex without a condom because of the likelihood of catching diseases, one in particular of which can be deadly.

Now, at the risk of oversimplification, the same woman becomes less desirable with time, if only because she is either pregnant or she’s not, and in either case it is in the male’s evolutionary best interest to move on to the next female, and the next one after that, and so on. What, on the streets in the world of prostitution, especially in Southeast Asia, is widely known as being a butterfly.

The brake on the full-blown and unrestrained expression of butterflying in relationships and marriages are: (1) the illusion of love; (2) a rather crude belief in “growth” and closeness through commitment to one person; (3) the bonds of children, and for the very good reason that both parents have half of their genes replicated in each of their children, (4) the enormously high financial, especially in the West, and even emotional cost of divorce; and (5) strong social norms that condemn infidelity, philandering, and consorting with prostitutes.

Put a little differently, all men get bored with sex with the same woman (and those that say they don’t are in denial or lying), and that boredom comes about not just because of the lack of variety in positions or places to have sex but also because of that evolutionary “push” to maximize one’s fitness. Boredom is overcome by having sex with another woman, which almost always at some point opens up the possibility of replicating one’s genes, getting them into the next generation. Or, as a biologist would say, simply increasing one’s fitness.

Before turning to some cultural and historical issues, it is important to say a few words about the woman’s strategy and what is ideal from her point of view. Because eggs are so expensive to produce (energetically speaking), and because a woman may have few or no viable eggs by the time she is in her mid thirties, and because it is always a woman who must pay the price of carrying a child within her for nine months, she is always asking one fundamental question (I don’t mean literally asking it as I so simply put it, but asking it as a “rational” organism on the evolutionary stage): will this man who has impregnated me support me and the child. The more he will provide the resources to do so, and stick around to do so, the more desirable that man. (Here, again at the risk of oversimplification, we can see the desirability of older vs. younger men, richer men vs. poorer men, perceived faithful men over perceived philanderers or butterflies, and farang over so many Thai or Filipino men because they are generally so irresponsible.)

Another point arises at this juncture, and it again comes from biology and all this talk about fitness. When women have children, most women (the great majority) give more of their “love” and attentions to their children than to their husbands, for the very simple reason that they share fifty percent of their genes with each child and none of their genes with their husbands. One result of this, or undesirable byproduct, is that women simply don’t care as much as they did in the earliest parts of a relationship about their appearance of what their husband or mate thinks about all kinds of things—especially if divorce laws are friendly to women or will provide them with half or more of all a man has, thereby making it possible to both support the children and get rid of the man who the woman may see as having all kinds of undesirable traits: he likes to drink to excess, he likes to philander, he verbally expresses his distaste for his fat or uncomely wife, and, to bring us to an often central cultural fact—two people who had done something for their respective fitness quotients by having one or more children have now accumulated long histories of grievances against one another. Baggage—to use a commonplace word in this regard.

So, to quickly summarize at this point. From the husband’s point of view, the wife is not just unattractive because she’s let herself go as the children have become central to her life and sense of worth; but she is also “sexually boring”—her eggs are older and not as good as they once were and certainly not as good as someone who is ten or fifteen or twenty years younger, even if that younger woman has a “bad” history (prostitute), has children by another man, and has cultural traits that are always difficult to live with even in the short- to medium run (the propensity to deception and lying among Thais, for example).

Now, we are, if this hasn’t already happened (this is where the much longer story would come into play), we’re at that stage where Raymond’s Rule No. 2 becomes stark reality. The wife in her thirties or forties is now “undesirable,” both biologically and culturally (here’s where advertising and the cultural emphasis on youth comes into play), and if there is an opportunity for a man to start over again, he’s back into the “fitness game,” and perhaps with the most “desirable” kinds of woman around. They’re young and full of good eggs, and they’re cheap to “buy” because they’re poor, and they “intuitively” understand what their biology is telling them (masked of course in all kinds of social and cultural language about money and family needs and dead buffalos if we’re talking about young Thai and Filipina women). And then, too, in the beginning, and before that first act of sex brings about a feeling of love and thereby major changes in brain chemistry (literally by changing the amount of serotonin and dopamine, mimicking hard drug addictions), there is none of that debilitating historical baggage that eventually cripples just about all couples whether or not they stay married.

There’s an awful lot I did not touch on here, and arguably this is not the place to talk about biology that someone can easily spend ten weeks on with students to get across basics; but the point is that to understand that the end is foretold in that first sex act, and as Raymond notes the end may come after one or two couplings (the consummate butterfly) or after thirty years of marriage, one must go to biology and particularly the nature of evolution itself to begin to grasp, among other things, why there are so many female prostitutes in the world to meet the needs of men, and, on the other hand, almost no male prostitutes to meet the needs of women.

Let me end with a somewhat perverse and unhealthy thought: the potentially most successful individual in the world today may well be that dedicated, hard-running butterfly in Pattaya who never uses a condom and has a marvelous sixth sense of which bar girls are not using protective devices and when they are ovulating. There is, of course, other than for humans with that peculiar thing called culture, no moral code on the evolutionary stage: it’s all about winners and losers, and in the long run all scoring is based on biological fitness.

Stickman's thoughts:

That last thought really is perverse.  If we extrapolate that thought a little further, it would seem to me that that most successful individual has a name that begins with D and ends in A!

The author can be reached at korski1@cox.net.
 The author of this website, NOT this article, can be contacted at: stickmanbangkok@gmail.com.