There are many ways to organize social life. Nature gives us many examples how it can be done. Many animals have a well developed social behavior. Meerkats live socially within groups in one way, female elephants in another way. Swans and many other birds have well organized communities, with sophisticated group dynamics and monogam partnership. Also monkeys live in groups, and so do wolfs and penguins. But there are also many solitary animals. Examples are cats, and also male, grown elephants and zebras. Can we as humans learn anything from all those animals? How do we want to live ourselves, and why?
Family plays a major role in human life for as long as we can remember. But how we live together as families has changed over time. The job often decides where we live. And only few children continue the work of their parents. It became normal to choose a field of profession more or less uninfluenced of our origin. That has an impact on family life. When we are grown up, we often move further away from our parents, find a partner in other parts of the country or the world. Of course there still are families loyal to their Heimat (German word for the place and culture one grew up in), and here children get to see their grandparents and other family members almost daily. But it is not unusual that it takes a few hours to visit the grandparents. Because of professional life, that both partners maintain almost equally nowadays, and the distance to the rest of the family, external care for children has increased and begins earlier, often before the first birthday. What we inherit nowadays is typically converted into money. Some children continue life in their parents home and raise their own children in the same place, but that is the exception today. Passing on real estate, a house or a farm through generations has become unusual. Apartments and houses have become interchangeable, and they have to be so we can move where work is offered to us. This dynamic and distance results in a slight loss of connection with our roots. Often, we share our living space only with one partner and the kids, until they are grown up. More and more live on their own. Other people we see at work of while exercising our hobbies. Or when we take effort to meet someone. Otherwise we are isolated within our own walls, connected mostly to the entertainment industry and the news. Both can easily become an addiction and a burden.
Are we fully flexible about this? Do we simply organize our social life depending on the circumstances and the demands of the norms that we are exposed to? Do we adjust to any expectations, or do we also have our own innate preferences? The philosophers in and around ancient Greece were already wondering about this question. Are social norms only given by culture, by cities or countries, and adopted by the citizens, or are there some general norms, that are embedded in the nature of humans? I am also wondering about this. When we look at common statistics, it appears to be a challenge to stay together as a couple for a long time or even throughout the entire life. Raising children is also not always easy. Both tasks push many to their limits and beyond. Why is it like that? Are the expectations too high? Do we no longer live in accordance with our nature? Have we adopted a culture that does not really fit to us? Or have we become strangers to ourselves? Have we forgotten who we are, how children develop, what the special features of our characteristics are? Is there possibly someone who has an interest in loose and superficial relationships and the presence of children in well observed and organized child care?
If we had only forgotten who we are, we would still have a chance to get things right intuitively and go through life successfully. Many people do just that. But it becomes very difficult when incorrect ideals or expectations are conveyed to people. When we have a specific understanding of an idea or an object, of how we believe things are, it can be said that we have a Vorstellung. There is no English word for this, which makes the problem harder to grasp for the English-speaking people. A Vorstellung can be planted in the mind of a human. We could call it a belief or a conviction, or a mental image. The problem is, with that conviction we are pre-occupied and are no longer interested to put effort into observing reality. So when we are given a specific concept of who we are, of how the people around us are like, then we sort all of our observations into that image, and we reject everything in conflict with it. There were and still are efforts to deny all differences between people that are not physically obvious. Who addresses a difference can be certain of loud outrage from a group of people who made the enforcement of equality their mission. And for them, it does not matter that everyone can experience the difference in case of careful observation, because they are prejudiced and taken over by an ideal. When they get in conflict with reality, they deny or fight reality instead of giving up the ideal.
Many difficulties in relationships and families can be partly traced back to a lack of knowledge, but mostly they are the result of an incorrect representation (Vorstellung) of the idea of a human being in our worldview. Who beliefs that children, women and men have the same needs, deal with stress in the same way and react the same to problems, will have substantial difficulties in a relationship or family. Due to that belief it is not common in our culture to learn what women and men need. In that case, others will remain a mystery to us, we interpret their behavior incorrectly and also fail to convey the reasons for our behavior. We get crushed by reality. If we condemn the identification of differences for ideological reasons, because we beliefe they are a discrimination or a disadvantage, and insist on equality due to an incorrect understating of justice, then we block our way to understand humans with all their childish, male and female character trades. Maintaining a relationship becomes almost impossible then, because I am no longer willing to consider that someone else might be different, might have specific needs that deviate from mine. Then I am blind to those differences. Then I cannot have respect for them, and I get confused or deeply hurt when my partner does not give me what I desperately need, and what I would have provided in her or his place. I must have an interest in the differences, and must give up the idea that everyone thinks and feels the way I do. Otherwise a fundamental lack of understanding will remain until death, and it will cause struggles, fights and discontent. If you are interested in this topic, I can recommend to you the book “Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus” by John Gray.