“What made marriage so difficult back then was yet again that instigator of so many other sorts of heartbreak: the oversize brain.”
Kurt Vonnegut

More than five years ago I found some literature on such discipline as "Ethology". It is the science that studies the mechanisms of instinctive behavior of animals and from this standpoint tries to explain many features of human life such as hierarchy, social roles, morality, love, family, unfaithfulness, social traditions and so on. I was shocked with how simply ethology explains the processes taking place around us every day. At the same time, these explanations appreciably differed from those of classical psychology stating that the major determinants of a person's identity is his environment and his experience gained mostly in childhood. I also paid attention to works of modern psychologists who believe that the identity of the person is mainly determined by his own choices and decisions. On the pages of this book I have attempted to combine different concepts of my colleagues, examining the human identity and relationships from different sides and angles.

The result of such efforts was the development of the theory which I call the triple brain concept. According to this theory, human thinking can be conceptually divided into three parts, each of them is to some extent controls our desires and aspirations.

* The first component called the logical brain helps us to objectively evaluate the surrounding reality, to set goals and to build plans to achieve them, to make deliberate decisions and draw conclusions basing on the past experience.

* The second component is an emotional brain. This brain is responsible for such our inner manifestations of our behavior as affection, conscience, nostalgia, inspiration, tenderness, vanity, romance, etc.

* Finally, the third component is the instinctive brain. It is in charge of the management of our primary needs such as sleep, rest, food, sex, and security.

All three components of thinking regularly come into a confrontation with each other and the fight between the last two is usually more severe. One of the most illustrative examples of such confrontations is the process of finding a partner for relationship.

Each brain has its own opinion about the best potential partner and, while men do not suffer much from contradictions between logical and emotional and instinctive brains, the things for women are completely different.

Logical brain forces both men and women to look for partners corresponding to their cultural and intellectual level, the ones from similar social groups and with a similar mentality, those whom they are not ashamed to present to their relatives and friends, who conforms with those percepts and beliefs that were shaped in childhood.

Emotionally men are looking for good mothers, wives and friends. Sensual part of brain attract them to open, sociable, romantic and sympathetic women. In turn, the emotional brain of women encourages them to seek for good husbands, potential fathers, reliable, loyal and stable partners, courteous romantics and family oriented persons. With support of this brain we create a family - a unit of society providing the best conditions for bringing up kids and preparing them for adult life.

Instinctive brain, which usually plays the leading role when we choose a partner, offers men and women quite different innate programs.

First, the satisfaction of one of the most important and ancient of our instincts, which is procreation, ensuring the development of mankind as a system, determines for men and women completely different strategies for finding a partner. In order to pass their gene pool to the next generations with the greatest probability, men due to understandable reasons stick more to a quantitative strategy of “collecting women's bodies”, while women are much more oriented to focus on winning men's hearts in order to later select the right man with the best gene pool.

Secondly, the criteria of choosing a partner are also different. Men instinctively are attracted to women’s appearance, health, novelty, feminity of behavior, physical weakness, to a lesser extent - vitality and unavailability. Women’s instinctive brain, in turn, makes them to choose dominants, leaders in groups mainly in men’s ones, guys with high social status, self-confident, experienced and resolute men, carriers of enviable genes, possessors of such personal qualities that provide the highest survival potential in extreme conditions.

The chance for a woman to meet the combination wanted by all three brains in just one man is far lower than that for a man, although the latter is not very high as well.

This explains why despite the mutual desire to have a partner both sexes can barely manage to find each other. That's why both men and women need to consciously work on developing particular features in them which they lack and which are in great demand.

Besides partner search process the human behavior is influenced by the three brains in a variety of situations such as choosing a profession, breakup, overcoming conflicts, interaction with new people, planning vacations, etc.

The concept of three brains is inherently not new. Even in ancient India people began to divide the human aspirations into desire of the soul, desire of the mind and desire of the body. However, very little attention is usually paid to the three brains each having own evolutionary age and solving own biological task. Think about it. The main reason why people do so many unconscious actions is that they make decisions not by logical brain. Everything that we do, absolutely everything we do, we do searching for a certain benefit. Sometimes the benefit is realized by us. But very often, evolutionarily young logical brain is not able to justify decisions we’ve made. When emotional or instinctive brains come into play we are doing things that we do not seem to want or, on the contrary, we don’t do things that we consciously strive for.

The three brains theory allows you to see the world from a different angle, to explain many complex situations that arise in your relationship and to better understand the partner’s actions and motives and that of your own. Please, don’t look at this theory as something destroying your outlook on the world. Quite the opposite, it provides you a great opportunity to see it as a new construction material to build your life, your relationship and your reality.