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Key points
- Though evolutionary theory explains libido and romance explains love and pair-bonding, something's missing.
- "Libego" is the ego-affirming facet of our pursuit of sex and love.
- Ego-affirmation is a natural, inevitable, though somewhat embarassing universal human need.
- There are interesting parallels between our attitudes about sex and ego.
- Birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it. Let’s do it; let’s fall in love. — Cole Porter
Perhaps you’ve done a bit of that yourself. I have. It happens, and why? Two popular answers, neither of which are the whole story. One is that love is a magical, undefinable miracle that makes the world go round and life worth living. Bring this answer to a traditional date.
The other is more appropriate to hookups: For 3.6 billion years, the object of the game of life was biological reproductive success. About two billion years ago, sexual reproduction evolved. Libido! It’s in our genes and jeans.
I’ve felt both.
Libido is what got me interested in evolutionary biology. I needed an explanation for my irrational obsession with chasing and winning women’s hearts. I found my answer. I come from a long line of horn dogs.
By now, I doubt libido was all or even the lion’s share of what drove me. My biggest driver was my need for affirmation, my addiction to what I call endorphment, the endorphin rush of being endorsed, seeing myself reflected affirmingly in a beautiful woman’s eyes.
I therefore propose a distinction. There’s libido, but there’s also libego, ego-affirmation as a driver for the whole sex-love-romance-dating-mating complex.
I suspect libego is a big driver for us all. But then I would, and not just as a projection. I study the parallels and contrasts between humans and other organisms, and here’s a big contrast: Humans are white-knuckle driving under the disorienting, emotion-triggering influence of ideas, concepts no other critters deal with.
Some researchers distinguish human consciousness as self-awareness, but few mention that, with self-awareness comes self-consciousness. We are a uniquely anxious species. I think of us as treading turbulent, raging waters, all the head-spinning thoughts that could drown us in self-doubt. It’s all we can do to keep our heads above water. That we’d embrace all manner of ego-affirming thoughts that can keep us buoyant, holding on for dear life. Belonging to a beloved, even just for a night, would be a big one.
I’m not an educated flea, but I’ve had an education, an education other critters can’t have and don’t need. Humans are born helpless and parasitic on culture. Without acculturation we’re feral, hardly human. We don’t just nurse at our mothers’ breasts; we nurse on our culture’s treasury of words and the thoughts they yield.
To be human, we need language, but have you noticed? Treading turbulent water bombarded by ideas is jarring as hell—all the real and imaginary, past, present, and future threats and missed opportunities we can conceive of through language. We’re homo sapiens. We live in chronic fear of missing out.
With language, we can imagine the ideal and see where we fall short. It’s no wonder we would need to self-idealize when we can get away with it. There are a few sanctioned ways to do it, and partnership is one. Religion is another. The parallels between them are obvious. To fall in love is to be born again, to have found heaven, to be granted eternal life destined to live happily ever after. R&B music is gospel music with the love object changed, from Go, the beloved to the partner beloved. Sex is like prayer to the beloved. Monogamy is like monotheism.
Other critters do their instinctual best without the burden of the anxious self-doubts that dog us. Around every corner lurks some concept that threatens to jump and debilitate us. We’re anxious and anxious not to feel or look anxious. So no, we don’t say “I’m in it for the affirmation.” We say “I’m in it for true love or hot sex.”
Humans are like-aholics. We live in an intensely competitive like-economy. Yes, ego is dangerous, but no, it’s not pathological.
The cure? Status and belonging. The human fear of ending up exiled, abandoned, and ostracized is well-documented, as is the sunk feeling we endure when rejected, dumped, or sidelined in the mating game.
Looking back, I can’t tell how much of my sexual pursuit was libido vs. ego. It surely changed over the decades. I’m guessing that by mid-life, libigo was 80% of what drove it. Ego still drives a lot of what I do. It’s not like I’ve retired from needing affirmation. Rather, I’ve shifted it to other mediums, for example, making videos like this.
What we think of as ego is, at heart, the chronic, natural human need for reassurance, given that we’re all treading turbulent thoughts like no other critter. And we’re ashamed about it, which is why ego is as dirty a word as sex. There are many obvious parallels between our attitudes about libido and ego:
- Libido and ego are considered strong fundamental human drives.
- Libido and ego are hard to control and can get dangerous.
- We try to control and hide our libidos and egos.
- Strong social norms regulate the expression of libido and ego.
- Prudes campaign to stem libido’s forceful tide. Ascetics campaign to stem ego’s forceful tide.
- Many such campaigners are later exposed as hypocrites, denying their libido (e.g. priests) and egos (e.g. gurus) while indulging them.
- We compete over who has the most libido (e.g., the meat market) and ego (e.g. politics). And over who has the least libido (e.g., holier-than-thou prudishness) and ego (e.g., humbler-than-thou selflessness).
Masturbation is one of the most blatant and embarrassing expressions of libego. Caught in the act, we’re ashamed not just of the sex but of the self-affirming fantasy that we’re in the same league as our fantasy lovers.
- Masturbation is a great metaphor for other momentary, imaginary ego-replenishment activities that can get addictive and dangerous, some socially sanctioned, some shunned as the practices of degenerate souls. Whatever else compels us to engage in them, we’re loathe to admit that they’re therapeutic ego-replenishment. For example:
- Shopping sprees
- Drugs and alcohol
- Dolling up
- Belonging
- Partying
- Armchair punditry
- Memeing
- Criticizing
- Gossiping
- Spectator sports
- Self-flattering self-description
- Playing hero
- Playing god
- Playing video games
- Identifying with fictional heroes and anti-heroes.
A video of this post:
