Reviews, Paradigms & Beliefs

Marriage Isn’t Just Romance: The Role of Instincts and Alignment (Part 2)

December 5, 2025

Marriage is complex and has been part of human life for thousands of years and that will probably continue for 1000 more years because it fits who we are at so many levels, that we're probably going to have marriage — or some close approximation of marriage — continue to be how we interact with each other as males and female members of our species, functionally forever.

Whatever we do for the long term, we know that most of the population in our own country are married now and intend to be married in the immediate future, so we should take what we're learning now about our instinctive behaviors and our deep connection and involvement in our cultures, and we should do smart and intelligent things so our marriages succeed now and for the for seeable future, to give us ongoing support and beneficial processes and outcomes in our lives.

We're smarter on many issues than we were in the past, and we now know that our cultures, our instincts, and our new artificial intelligence tool kits are going to be game-changing, and that we should be able to steer our lives in more beneficial and positive ways by using all of those tools in the best ways for the future — beginning now.

Marriages are going to be an important part of that future.

We need to understand the interplay of human instincts, cultural norms, and intentional alignment — and we should build them into approaches, strategies, and agendas to give us the best chance of having our marriages succeed.

We need every married couple to look at what we need to do to give us the best chances of marital success for large numbers of our people.

This blog series breaks down the key insights about Marriage from our newest white paper: Marriage Instincts and Best Practices for Alignment, Connubial Bliss, and Next Steps to Do Today. In it, we explore how couples can cultivate enduring connection and fulfillment.

Key Points

• Instincts: Humans naturally seek partnership and cooperation, just like many of the socially wired animals, and marriage can easily be understood as an instinctive behavior in the context of our lives that has a massive influence over our lives at multiple levels, which we each just accept as being the right thing to do, because it aligns with basic instincts at relevant and important levels.
• Culture: Culture shapes how we act on our instincts, reinforcing shared values and commitment, and we need to understand our cultural factors that exist on marriages and then determine how to get the best overlaps between those cultures and our lives, to have that behavior plan and pattern give us lives that we accept and enjoy a high percentage of the time, and that steer us in good directions individually and in every group setting where it's relevant to our behavior.
• Alignment:Strong and effective marriages combine instinct and culture through shared goals, support, and intentional choices, and we'll be better served as individuals and as married couples if we understand the intersections that exist between those factors and steer them to the best behaviors for our own lives.

Why This Matters

We'll be best served as a society and a nation if we have a significant number of marriages happen and if we have those marriages succeed — and if we do the right things to make that happen.

We do now know some basic things about marriages that we can use to make that part of our toolkit better and more effective for us as people, if we do it effectively in the various multi social media venues and artificial intelligence world we live in today.

We've seen many marriages fail and we've seen many marriages achieve success — and that extensive experience gives us some advice and suggestions, and effective guidance, that we can use to significantly improve the likelihood of marital success for people who are either married now or on the path to marital alignment.

We now have some extremely practical advice that can be used now to help marital successes happen. Please look at that advice and see if it can be useful in helping you help your own marriage succeed.

We recommend that you look at this advice and at your own marriage and figure out how to use this guidance in your world today and now, in ways that work effectively for you.

We need each couple to decide to do the right things to help their marriage succeed. You need direct contact with your spouse and an agreement, from both of you, to have your marriage succeed and to do the right things in caring and trusting and extremely intentional ways to have that happen.

We need direct contact at a functional level to start that process for each couple.

Sit down with your spouse and look at each point listed below together and talk about them — and then decide, together, in very explicit ways, how to build each point into your marriage.

The first piece of advice is very simple — commit to being an actual friend with your spouse and tie that commitment to your direct sense of who your spouse is and what they do with you in the setting and situation where you work.

Be friends.

Next Steps For Marriage We Can Functionally Do Today

• Decide to make your spouse your friend in a very warm, intentional, friendly, and caring way. You need a friend. Having your spouse as your friend gives you a whole set of interactions and feelings that don't exist when that 'friend reality' doesn’t exist, and it lets you anchor your other interactions on that functional anchor.
• Be clear and direct as spouses about what you're doing on all of your levels of interaction and experience, and then do it together in the most respectful, appreciative, supportive and caring ways that feel right to each of you at this point in your marriage, and that will continue to work for you over time because the reinforcement that happens from that approach is now in the right direction, and the behaviors will reinforce themselves in key ways when you actually make them your belief and your behavior.
• Commit in your marriage to win-win as a belief and a behavior, and as an intentional way of interacting. Make that commitment now and as a future way for you to interact with one another in every way that having you both win is relevant to your thinking and your behavior.
• Enjoy and appreciate each other sexually, because marriages should be a pathway, conduit, avenue, and setting for romantic and sexual interactions with each other. You should both determine how to make those interactions a positive and ongoing part of your life, because it's so good for each person when that happens and becomes an expectation for your interactions. We each tend to place a high priority on sexual activity and sexual experiences, and we should be open to having positive sexual realities in our world, because our marriages should exist in part to make that happen.
• Find the pathway in each marriage to the sexual interactions that work best for each marriage.

Create Alignment

We're male and female in our biology and we each clearly have different instincts on multiple topics that are triggered by those biological differences. We should each be accepting and appreciating and even enjoying the directions that our behaviors create from those realities, and we should determine how to have the emotions, drives, and thought processes, that are created by those differences as positive aspects of who we are.

We need marriages that are huge successes in creating alignment with each other and with the world around us. We should each take the time needed to steer ourselves into optimal alignment with the world around us, with our emotional status, and with our sexual identity and behaviors.

We should each be comfortable being the person we create by having noncoercive and caring interactions in that space.

We're all creatures of instincts who use our cultures in most settings to channel our instincts into alignment with the world we live in.

We all interact with the cultures of every group we belong to. We have local cultures, community cultures, professional cultures, and religious and faith-based cultures — and we all tend to have alignment with the cultures that we believe in for our own lives.

Mating is a cultural event.

In our basic community culture, we marry and mate for life.

We have many component parts of our lives — and we should commit to each other in love and with clear conviction to learn how to treat each other as life partners to make our commitment something we appreciate, celebrate, utilize in good ways, optimize, and enjoy — because it feels right and is a good thing to do.

People should be very honest and direct with their spouse in their marital commitments because those are some of the most important commitments we make, which can have a major impact on our lives and can steer so many areas of what we each do as married couples.

As a couple in those basic communications that tee up the relationship, be very honest with each other about what you want your marriage to be and do, and then work hard in joyful and friendly ways to make that happen.

Please read our Inter Group Institute Peace pieces and related books about making Peace between groups and for creating a sense of Us in a community or setting for directions, commitments, strategies, and approaches from the Institute that can help make that happen.

Creating a sense of Us in a community can be a very good thing for everyone, and creating a sense of Us in a marriage can be even better — because we know that 'Us' has our back and we know that 'Us' is on our side — and if we do special and good things for 'Us,' it feels like the right thing to do because it actually is the right thing to do.

We know that slightly more than half of Americans plan or hope to be married, and we know that only about one-third of our youngest American men believe that they're on a path to be married — so creating an advice piece for marriages makes sense because those are still very large numbers of people and we should want as many of those marriages to be as successful as possible.

If you're married now, it makes sense to do the right things to help your marriage succeed.

If you are married — there’s no reason not to do the right things to make your marriage an extremely positive and beneficial part of your life, because your life will be better when that happens.

Sexual imagery and visuals should be used in each marriage in the ways that feel right to each couple.

That isn’t pornography, because sex is generally and often intended to be a core part of the marriage reality, and visual enjoyment is a gift of love when it happens in that setting.

Pornography has been the number one volume use of the internet since it became publicly available. The commercial social media chains and venues forbid pornography as a content use, but Pornhub and other direct access approaches are easily available, and a number of people observing the process are now concerned that some of our younger men are addicted.

The biological instinctive programing for men is obviously tied to visual stimulation, and that's a clear pattern and frequent and almost perpetual interest that we need to understand and accept as the functional reality that it currently is, and something we need to deal with if we want to have marriages succeed and have the men engaged in the sexual interactions.

Some highly successful marriages use those tools now.

We know that sexual image sharing, in the form of various levels of selfie images, is an extremely positive internal communication that happens inside many marriages and we should support and enable that to happen.

A very high percentage of men who write in the social media venues about their own sexual activity and their own sexual interests often celebrate when they get that level of visual content from their female partner or wife, and if they can somehow view it themselves as part of their sexual interactions.

There is now an internet service called OnlyFans that allows women to sell naked views of their own bodies in exchange for money from the viewers. It’s a relatively high-volume business. About 90 million American men will pay for that service and those views this year, and estimates are that about 80 million of those men are married.

Roughly 5–6 million women sell those views, and most of those women make less than $10,000 for those sales. Some make a lot more money and a couple hundred women will earn more than $1 million each for those views.

That's a new sexual reality for the country.

That particular business isn't likely to be outlawed in any way, and it seems to be now one anchor of our sexual contacts and interactions in our country going into 2026.

That’s clearly inferior at multiple levels for actual sexual experiences in our marital settings, and we need to steer our world into actual loving and exciting sexual activity instead of electronic second-hand sex as often as we can.

We need to strongly support marriages succeeding in this country, because we need them for our families and children and we need them to anchor key aspects of our communities.

We have extensive exposure to sexual- and gender-related information flooding into our world on a daily basis from multiple internet venues and channels.

Men and women tend to use those venues slightly differently for the sexual content of those settings and interactions.

The internet has different patterns in some important areas for men and women today. Its content streams are extremely visible in a number of areas, so we don’t need to guess about how it's being used or the issues it creates.

Women tend to have a major focus on beauty in their sites, and there are thousands of sites for women with beauty as their function and core content.

Absolute beauty is described as the goal on many of the social media discussions for women, and it’s possible to look at many sites that start with a bare-faced woman who adds layers of makeup to her face in extremely skillful and almost magical ways, and then manages to create an extremely beautiful person on the screen as the result of those processes.

Beauty is the goal and the skill set of many sites for women, and they sometimes make a lot of money because the vendors for each screen are often selling things relevant to that process and are doing it for significant amounts of money.

There a many influencers and experts running those sites, and they have multiple reasons for their aspirations to beauty.

Some women say that they create beauty to attract men, and others say — with anger on some sites — that they believe that men want only younger women and that that's absolutely unfair to the older women on those sites because youth fades. Some say that it’s extremely unfair for men to expect only young women on those websites in this culture.

The people who say that's unfair are extremely wrong in that statement and belief, because in the real world men generally want to see the faces and bodies of women who are closer to their own age, whether they're younger or older. And there are significant numbers of men who buy magazines with nude pictures of women in their 30s, 40s, 50s, and even 60s. In fact, one term that many men have in their value set about women is "MILF" — which is considered a compliment to 'older' women in many settings.

There are strong fan clubs and significant video streams for MILFs that are never mentioned in social media streams created by women, and no sense in many women’s sites that are good representations of what many men prefer in their sexual viewing, aspirations, and fantasy life.

Many men in various settings celebrate the actual bodies of their wives and their girlfriends — and you can see in the men’s social media information flows that many men believe that one of the very best things that can happen for them in their life is getting a sexual selfie from their wife or girlfriend. Those selfies are celebrated, and many women have no idea how much they're appreciated.

One OnlyFans woman, at age 60, earned over $1 million in 2025.

Many women who sell those views are age-appropriate for their customers, and those women clearly do not have the 'young' bodies that some women’s social media websites claim is the preference for most male OnlyFans members.

Most men in relationships are very much attracted to the bodies of the woman they're with, and many women who do social media pieces about those visual issues don't have a clue about how true that is in relationships.

Many women would be surprised at how much their body is appreciated by the man they're with — and that might be easy to test in some settings by doing playful and seductive visual things to get the man's reaction when that happens.

Sexy apparel is appreciated by both sexes, and one of the best uses of family resources in many settings could be to give gift cards that are tied to the purchase of sexually lovely, revealing, and even seductive apparel from any of the many social media venues, like Instagram or TikTok, that sell those items, because they can trigger appreciation from multiple directions now.

Men used to return from their hunting episodes with gifts of food and covering materials, and it’s entirely possible that we should recreate that pattern with modern gift cards now, which can feel instinctively right as a pattern of male and female behavior because the role of men bringing gifts of some kind is included in many cultures — and it might fit our internet world today.

The women’s websites we see that create beauty for millions of women today very often don’t feature sexually seductive apparel in their sites — but we might want to look for crossover visuals for those sites that make women and men both happy about the visual impact, and we might want some confidential links to visual information for women (even from the beauty sites) that could be very good for the morale of the men.

Many internet discussions today, for both men and women, talk about the role and status of both alpha men and alpha women in the social world, and for dating and mating interactions.

People speculate on some sites that most alpha women choose alpha men, but those sites seem to define alpha women as being beautiful and many of those sites describe alpha men as being prosperous and/or tall.

Tall men get high ratings on many of the women’s sites, and — on some sites — tall men are regarded as more desirable or at an even a higher value than wealthy men.

The input we get from the sites that are sharing information about alpha men is that they rate themselves as being successful if the women they attract seem to like them personally. Some of the sites that ask men for how they rate their own success in those social and dating areas say that the alpha men feel most successful if they believe and trust that the woman they attract likes and respects them as a person.

The more alpha women give themselves high scores for their catches if the man is 'OK' on appearance and high on either money or power, and at least relatively tall if they're not rich.

The most beautiful women in their pure beauty sites generally don’t cross the line into actual nudity, but they wear extremely revealing and sexual clothing and make themselves appear almost unattainable on some sites. The men prefer to see women with curves, and the women seem to prefer to be seen for flawless skin.

Men often appreciate being with alpha women as part of their perspective about life, and the men who get rated by the women as alpha males say that the thing they want most in their relationships is a woman who is beautiful, interesting, and definitely seems to like them as person and a human being.

They want to be appreciated by the women in order to feel that they've succeeded in linking with an alpha woman.

That interest and need to be appreciated seems to drive some of the interest level in the non-alpha males who buy access to seeing unclothed women on OnlyFans — and that service only pays the women who interact with the men in some way that's on some level of appreciation. Pure nudity isn’t paid for.

OnlyFans models require visual interaction to get paid, and it appears that the alpha male thought process takes similar trajectories in determining whether the interaction and the relationship with the alpha women is a win.

That recognition need seems to be relevant to the business model for both people getting scored as alpha males and people who just pay for the views though the service.

There must be an opportunity that exists with this cash flow to make marriages better.

Gift cards could be part of the next steps for these interactions.

It might be possible for the 80 million married men who pay OnlyFans now to somehow stop spending that money on those women, and instead create a flow of gift cards for their own spouses that can strengthen the cash situation of the family and also be used, at least some of the time, to encourage positive visual interactions by purchasing some exotic and seductive clothing for some of the wives.

What gifts could be used to create a good context within the marriage and make the interaction in that setting more interesting and supportive and reinforcing, rather than having that money paid to OnlyFans as a business?

If couples make the commitment to win-win interactions in their marriage, then maybe they should talk about the best use of their family resources with those goals in mind.

That’s the kind of thing we should want friends and lovers who are married to each other and who want the sexual aspects of their marriage to be successful and beneficial to both people to discuss in the kind of open communication that we need to create for each marriage.

There are probably ways of creating win-win process and approaches that make marriages better and more successful than they would be without those gifts and approaches on the table.

We should use the same sets of thought processes and approaches that we use to create a sense of Us in inter group settings for our marriages.

Check out these Peace approaches from the Institute website.

We also need Peace in the world — and life is too short not to enjoy more of it.

We need people who love each other and who are sexually interested and activated by each other to feel safe as friends and actual real-world spouses to figure out ways of making the interactions within our marriages extremely positive for each person, and to enjoy what those interactions create.

If you're married — make your connection with your spouse one of the very best things happening in your life, and enjoy each other and the opportunity.

Trust each other.

Have fun with each other.

Be good to each other and you won’t regret that you did it, because life is better when that happens.