I feel like the daily experience of relationships in 2024 America is wildly incompatible with the idea that relationships are for reproduction.
Our genes may at some level be programmed to conspire to get us to reproduce, but we are (for all intents and purposes) autonomous and free to do that or not as we wish, and to have relationships for whatever reasons we want.
There's a bizarre twist of logic going on when you replace "the drive of creatures is (empirically) to reproduce" with "therefore we ought to reproduce". The two are not equivalent; you do not have to do what you are "told".
You might not be as autonomous as you think. Behavior in this area is mostly driven by instinct and emotion. People just rationalize their actions later.
I'm not saying that I am or am not autonomous at a chemical level. I'm saying that the fact that someone is programmed to do something has no bearing on whether they ought to do it at a moral level. The only reason a person ought to "follow their programming" is that they want to. After all, if it really is their programming, they will follow it automatically. There is no point rationalizing: "I must be programmed this way, therefore I have to do it". No, if you were programmed to do it, you'd be doing it already.
Is it possible that instinct and emotion drive some people to scale mountains, write software, start businesses, create great works of art, instead of having children?
The explore-exploit tradeoff is well known. Maybe my DNA isn't written to be happy with putting down roots and having kids?
Our genes may at some level be programmed to conspire to get us to reproduce, but we are (for all intents and purposes) autonomous and free to do that or not as we wish, and to have relationships for whatever reasons we want.
There's a bizarre twist of logic going on when you replace "the drive of creatures is (empirically) to reproduce" with "therefore we ought to reproduce". The two are not equivalent; you do not have to do what you are "told".