Quote Originally Posted by denuseri View Post


Or as part of a quite natural biological response; a response that varies depending upon the individuals, how much or how little that response is hardwired etc and situational modifiers involved. It also can be impossible to control in some circumstances and in essence be considered quite reasonable behavior for some people to exhibit and in effect be just as "ok" as not being jealous?
We seem to be the only primates with a pair-bonding urge. It's been argued that this is due to the greatly extended dependency of human infants: that doesn't stand up well when you consider that we also show signs of being adapted to co-operative child rearing (such as the ability of human females to lactate without pregnancy if they nurse someone else's baby for long enough,) but it might explain why a pairing that feels eternal when it starts can fade away after a few years, when an infant might be big enough not to need a couple's care.

But if it's a real instinct, it must have been overlaid on the much older primate promiscuity. And as so often happens when you add a software patch over an existing program, and launch it without enough debugging, the two sometimes interact in bizarre ways and sometimes crash completely.