When we reflect on human choices, we often speak of free will. Yet a human choice is never as simple as it seems. The biological legacy of the body, the unconscious dynamics of the mind, and the social norms of society draw an invisible map beneath every decision we make. The female tendency associated with “seeking someone better,” known as hypergamy, and the male desire for multiple partners, polygamy, are two different routes on this very map. Popular culture often frames these tendencies in opposition, but psychology reveals that they grow from the same root: the evolutionary and cultural traces of human drives.
Evolutionary Traces and Animal Experiments
Experiments with mice and primates shed light on the primal strategies preserved in the human genetic memory. Male mice exhibit a strong drive to mate with new partners, the biological expression of spreading their genes. Female mice, on the other hand, tend to choose stronger, healthier males who can provide better genetic heritage and safer care for their offspring.
To reduce this picture to mere biology would be incomplete, but the psychological echoes of these survival strategies, shaped across evolution, remain alive in us today.
The male “impulse to inseminate” and the female “tendency to choose better” both serve the same principle: the continuation of the species. Yet in the modern world, these drives wear new masks. Men display strength less through muscles and more through career, wealth, or social status. Women, in turn, seek security not only through biological protection but through emotional connection, loyalty, and social support. The essence of the drives does not change, but the ways in which they appear transform alongside culture.
The Topography of Psychology
As in Freud’s topographic model, the human psyche is layered. The boundaries between consciousness, the unconscious, and the preconscious reveal the tension between drives and choices. This is why the topography of psychology is so rich: the horse (drive) longs to run, the carriage (body) bears its weight, the driver (mind) tries to guide it, while the father (authority) reminds us of the rules of the road.
Hypergamy can be read as the horse’s desire to reach wider pastures; polygamy as the horse’s urge to dart in many directions at once. Yet the driver always struggles to hold the reins, while the father insists on boundaries. This metaphor allows us to explain the different tendencies of men and women without blame. For the real issue is not the preferences of women or men alone, but the endless struggle between drive, consciousness, and culture within every human being.
The Invisible Reins of Norms
Social norms act as invisible hands that redirect the path of drives. Throughout history, polygamy has been legitimate in some cultures and forbidden in others. Hypergamy has sometimes been seen as a survival strategy for women, and in other contexts dissolved into the supposed “naturalness” of love.
Norms do not simply regulate behavior; they reshape the way desires themselves are perceived. What one society deems “natural,” another society might condemn as “immoral.”
Here psychology offers us an important lesson: what we call human choice is not purely an individual decision but a psychological experience shaped by collective values. Drives carry the echo of the unconscious, but society dictates how that echo will be heard.
Conclusion: A Shared Human Story
Hypergamy and polygamy are not isolated traits belonging to a single gender. They are the present-day projections of evolutionary strategies etched into the biological memory of humankind. Regardless of gender, we all carry the traces of these strategies within our conscious decisions.
What guides us is not merely the wild run of the horse (drive), nor the absolute control of the driver (mind). Choices emerge from the negotiation between body and culture, drive and norm, individual and society.
Perhaps the real question is this: Who truly governs the human being? The horse, the driver, or the father? Psychology does not give us a definitive answer, but it shows us this: human choice is the product of a negotiation woven between the primal call of drives and the delicate fabric of culture.
This is why the topography of psychology is abundant; because the story of humankind is never one-dimensional, but profoundly multi-layered.