Wondering why humanity does the same thing over and over again while pretending it is a bold new choice. Philosophers have entire libraries filled with warnings about this, yet humans still walk into the same walls with the same forehead. They call this destiny or maturity or whatever word protects them from admitting that they simply copied whatever everyone else was doing.
Conformism always begins as a quiet whisper. Nothing dramatic. Nothing cinematic. Just the subtle desire not to be the one who looks odd at the dinner table.
Humans think they are free until life hands them a situation where everyone around them nods in unison and something inside them panics at the idea of shaking their head. They say yes even though their soul is sprinting in the opposite direction. Suddenly they are twenty years deep into a path that was never theirs. Religion calls this surrender. Psychology calls it social proof. Peers call it being normal. Take your pick.
Now imagine this in relationships. Humans walk into love with glowing hope, emotional bravery, and whatever childhood trauma they have disguised as personality. Then slowly the gravity of conformity takes over. They stop asking for what they want because asking makes waves and waves make conversations and conversations require honesty which is inconvenient. They start playing the role of the partner they think they are supposed to be. They shrink their intensity. They mute their desires. They stop flirting with each other because long term couples on sitcoms never do. Before anyone knows it, relationships start to resemble two polite coworkers who share a mortgage and a Netflix password.
Here is the delightful part. Even when humans are unhappy, they conform to the unhappiness. It is the IKEA furniture of emotional suffering. They assemble it badly but refuse to take it apart because they have already invested time. The result is a couple quietly dying in a beautifully curated routine. To illustrate this, let me offer an absurd interactive experiment. Imagine two humans sitting on opposite ends of the sofa. At exactly the same moment, both want some activity but neither wants to seem needy. So they wait. Thirty minutes later both are scrolling on their phones pretending it was their choice.
This is conformism in short.
Relationships become tragic not because humans lack love, but because they follow invisible scripts about how they think love should look. Couples copy couples who copy couples who copy movies written by people who have been divorced three times. Social contagion at its finest. One study suggests that when one friend in a social circle gets divorced, the likelihood of others divorcing increases by seventy five percent. This is not romance. This is the emotional version of monkeys copying each other in a lab.
Let us push that image. Picture the classic experiment where one monkey gets shocked every time it tries to climb a ladder for a banana. Soon the other monkeys stop climbing too. Eventually none of them climb, even after the shock machine has been unplugged. They do not know why. They simply repeat what they saw.
The absurdity grows when a new monkey is introduced. He has never been shocked. He has no reason to fear the ladder. Yet the moment he reaches for the banana, the others drag him down and beat him until he learns the rule they themselves no longer understand.
Now replace the bananas with emotional needs. Replace the shocks with rejection. Replace the monkeys with humans trying not to look vulnerable. Suddenly the metaphor becomes uncomfortably accurate.
In the background you can hear the chant humans throw at you when things go sideways: Do not go to her, do not talk to her, she hurt you once so act like you do not care.
This same pattern is why many couples treat their love life like a Rick and Morty episode. Absolute chaos inside the mind but a forced deadpan expression outside. Rick pretends he does not care. Morty pretends he is fine. Both are lying. Both are exhausted. Both are stuck in a loop where speaking openly would break the entire narrative. Many relationships operate with this exact emotional physics. High stakes internally, absurd silence externally.
Conformism happens because humans crave belonging more than truth. They fear conflict more than disconnection. They would rather lose themselves quietly than disrupt the illusion that everything is stable. The romantic irony is that conformity kills the very connection humans are afraid to damage. Lovers become roommates. Passion becomes politeness. Intimacy becomes administrative.
The remedy is embarrassingly simple yet deeply inconvenient. The pattern breaks only when someone refuses to follow the script. Someone speaks first. Admits first. Disrupts first. Someone becomes the monkey who finally climbs the ladder, even if everyone else stares. Most humans never do it because the fear of looking strange outweighs the dream of feeling alive.
If nothing is done, the relationship does not explode dramatically. It erodes gently. Slow emotional erosion is the real killer. The breakup does not come from a catastrophic argument but from a thousand moments of silence where humans conformed instead of connected.
The question is whether humans want a relationship that performs well for others or one that feels true when both are lying awake at three in the morning. One is social comfort. The other is actual intimacy. Both cannot survive together. Not for long.
