“Make Love, Not War”

I have been thinking about bonobos lately. And you should too. Not to copy them (obviously), but to see what our messy constraints of sexuality really say about us. Native to the dense forests of the Congo Basin, they are among our closest relatives and surely among the most intriguing—“the forgotten ape,” as primatologist Frans de Waal once called them. What captivates me is not their resemblance to us, but their difference in how they navigate intimacy.

Unlike humans' sexual lives that are often tangled in jealousy, competition, criticism and repression, bonobos seem to have reached a form of peace through sex.

From adolescence, they form bonds, but without the constraints of strict monogamy or the volcanic eruptions of possessiveness. As Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá argue in Sex at Dawn sex, for them, is not only about reproduction but also about diplomacy. It is a magic currency, a white flag, an ambulance rushing through their dark conversations in the dead of the night. I think of us, of myself, spiraling with rules and a hunger for forever, for safety, for shore. A shore bound by paper and fear.

Stories. Legends. Myths.

And my first reaction is: why can’t we be more like them? Why can’t we reconcile our desire for stability with our longing for freedom and our search for love with our hunger for exploration? I begin listing my answers—smart and not so smart ones—and every time I am hitting a wall, the thick and selfish wall of biology that separates them and us.

But biology is only the foundation. On top of it we’ve built twisty towers and castles of memory, culture, and fear. On this wall I find not only a story of the selfish gene but also stories of how we are taught to love: that love must be monogamous to be real, that desire must be controlled to be respectable, and that jealousy is a proof of devotion rather than a symptom of something deeper. I see ugly stories, myths and legends that tell us freedom especially if you’re a woman—is dangerous.

Bonobos do not seem to carry such walls. How lucky of them. Their intimacy is not stacked with myths of property or poisoned by centuries of caution. For them, closeness is not burdened with contracts or heavy with memory; it is simply peace. We are not wired for their effortless and fractionless generosity any more than we are equipped to thrive on earthworms and bark, but they are a mirror held up to our own sexuality—the jealousies, the rules, and the fears we have mistaken for nature. A mirror that shows us, again and again, how heavy, messy, and beautiful it can to be human.