When Harry met the first Yevette.    

Male/female attraction doesn’t simply pull us together like two magnets. Such strong forces pushing and pulling cause no end of damage. As a teen, I was uncomfortable and bumbling on those first dates. All week I worried about asking her out. When Friday finally came, I called and she rejected me because she didn’t wish to appear as “an afterthought”. Poor juvenile planning and tongue-tied performances were solvable problems. Finding a suitable spouse and creating a family might be simply a stretch or an insurmountable challenge.

Why so difficult?

Guys try to project confidence and control while feeling nothing but insecurity. Will the relationship be as consensual as it appears? Is there a risk of some creepy crawly incurable infection? Nevertheless, the attraction continues undiminished. Women face as many or more unwelcome issues but they still keep primping and hoping. Does it all have to be so problematic?

Spawning salmon, pollinating bumblebees, or mushrooms don’t suffer heart-rending complexities. When Mr. Mushrooms and Miss Mushroom are thinking about their future together and having little shrooms, they don’t think about all the ways they can screw up their lives or what the in-laws will think.

Relationships shouldn’t be this difficult. We must have taken a wrong turn somewhere along the evolution road.

When and how did all this sexual reproduction DNA swapping begin? Who took that first giant X-rated leap in biological history? Why abandon the chaste, celibate lives of self-dividing?  Why involve the bible with its Garden of Eden, apples, and serpents? We don’t need bodice-ripping novels and dirty magazines just to reproduce. 

If my first date felt stroppy,  so, I can only think what it must have been like for the planet’s first two biological lovers. What were they thinking when the first male life form impregnated the first female?

That first act is not well documented. Mother Nature probably blushed and covered up the evidence of hanky-panky because she was too embarrassed.

Nevertheless, without any pay-per-view video records of that first X-rated event, scientists who deal with this sort of thing, have produced some conclusions. Make no mistake about it, this was one giant step for all of us. Bigger than landing on the moon!

According to one theory, the evolutionary landmark of sexual reproduction all began in the year one billion two hundred million BC. You can imagine the scene: Late one romantic evening with tropical breezes under a full moon, – I’m just theorizing about the moon, but it did happen on that date, give or take a million years.

The night in question saw a demure, petite cell; let’s call her Yvette. She should have been sweet and the evening could have been amorous coquetry and seduction. But alas, Yvette did not play hard to get: She simply ate Harry, her smaller one-cell neighbor. While she gobbled him up, she did not fully digest Harry. Harry’s DNA remained within her and somehow combined with her genes and voila, as they say in France. How’s that for an inappropriate act?

I apologize to you Alpha male readers, because Yvette was not the supportive submissive girl you prefer. Nevertheless, this is what science tells us and it is not pretty.

Those among you may think the act was less about courtship, or rape, and more like cannibalism. Technically you are right. Among humans today, eating one’s mate is frowned upon. But remember, back then the cannibalism laws were frequently flouted. Back then, some single-cell members of Yvette’s social circle said “Tut Tut”. These were the law-and-order single-cell types, and you would probably agree.

But have some pity for poor little Yvette. What’s one small legal indiscretion compared to the advantages that Yvette bestowed on her descendants, including you and me? Think of those incalculable evolutionary benefits when DNA combines during reproduction.  Our disease resistance improves, and we can eliminate gene damage. Further, evolution, adaptation, and progress all move infinitely faster thanks to Yvette. Compare us with those chaste, celibate but emotionally stunted single-cell dividers. We’re miles ahead of them and we owe it all to the first couple, the inappropriate Yvette and Harry.