The Origin of Romantic Dynamics

When I began to build this model of human courtship twenty years ago, there was nearly no research about single people in romance or dating. 

That was before the ratio of marrieds to singles, flipped for the first time, and where single people came to dominate society.

In the 1990s, the team at Romantipedia started developing unification models of personal growth and character growth and searched for areas of public health to apply the models. 

What came to the fore in the early 2000s was that cultures in the west were starting to suffer in dating and romance. 

What we found—in applying systems of character to the portion of romance where people first meet and decide to date—is that character and the psychology of the conscious mind does not bear as much relevance as the instinctual behavior of people.

We went to work on that problem, and we found that due to the preponderance of sociology research that touts "gender roles" and "scripts" as well as stereotypes to explain the interactions between males and females. This at the expense of and in deficit of statistical, evidence-based psychology research on the subject, not sociology research.

In the mid-2000s, we hypothesized that there must be actual "gender instincts"— masculine and feminine instincts—to explain the unconscious processes, body language, gestures, and nonverbal interactions between men and women.

Early in romance, most psychology theories that address the conscious mind, cognitive processes, and models, treat men and women as having the same functions and processes of behavior as identical do not at all suffice to explain people's early romantic interactions.

By the late 2000s, we had come to form the Romantipedia and Romantic Dynamics companies formally. We determined that the research backing for the early segments of courtship would depend on the function of differences in instincts between men and women.

At the same time, a trickle of formal psychology research on the instinctual differences between men and women started being published. The researchers such as Martin Seager, John Barry, and Louise Liddon used terminology such as the "archetypes" coined by Carl Jung to explain such differences without going so far as to claim a "biological determinism" that would have to call those differences "masculine and feminine instincts."

Simultaneously, there was an explosion of evolutionary psychology research that, while considered "politically incorrect," was also accurate, at least theoretically useful on a practical level, and statistically rigorous.

Through trial and error, and practical application, we determined by the late 2000s that there are three phases of human courtship—sexual, emotional, and intellectual attraction—and nine expansive steps to it, with three steps for each phase.

The first phase, sexual attraction, appears to be largely dependent on the instincts of men and women in its first three steps of courtship. As instincts, this means that the automatic behaviors of the human unconscious need to be at the fore of research studies.

If an adroit student of psychology were to consider what two areas of psychology focus most prominently on how the unconscious human instincts work, it would have to be the very different fields of the old, early Jungian Psychology models with—unexpectedly—the field of Evolutionary Psychology.

Jungian Psychology, emerging with Carl Jung's break with Sigmund Freud over 100 years ago, pertained strongly to the role of stories of folklore and mythology to explain the human unconscious and differences between the instincts of men and women that Jung called terms such as "archetypes," the "anima" of the male and the "animus" of the woman.

Cutting to the most recent era of psychology research, the newer models of Evolutionary Psychology also pertain strongly to the role of evolution's focus on "survival and reproduction" as drivers of unconscious, instinctual behavior.

We noticed the unexpected similarity in the two models, as separated in the history of science that they are. They both pertain heavily to the human unconscious and differences between men and women, and ultimately both use very different ways of understanding instincts.

Jungian Psychology uses the universality and durability of human folklore and myth in stories that "decode" the "collective consciousness" of humanity (the human unconscious.)

Evolutionary Psychology uses the phenomenology of behavior to work backward in evolution, then applies modern statistical models and research methods not available to Jung to look at the same thing: instincts, the unconscious, and differences in behavior between males and females necessary to examine the "reproduction variable" of the "survival and reproduction" principle of Darwin's.

Clearly, Jungian Psychology and Evolutionary Psychology need to be synthesized to determine their joining points, and we are doing so in a way that speaks to the public in normal language and yields us practical application.

This is today's Romantic Dynamics™ system.

Let us begin.

Go to the Romantipedia Substack to be a free member…