Is It Love or Is It Lust?

[CZBZ]

hahaha...I knew the subject title would get ya clickin'!

Because many of us have tried sex without strings, the work of Dr. Helen Fisher offers scientific facts about male and female biological reactions to copulation. No strings attached? Well, don't count on it! Those strings might be our own hormones kicking in (as they were intended through the human evolutionary process) creating an infatuated madness whether our copulating partner merits idealization or not...and most likely: NOT!

Love and good luck to all....

CZBZ

Helen Fisher: "Can you copulate with just a friend and then suddenly fall in love with them? Not always. Most liberated American adults have had intercourse with somebody that they never fell in love with but it can happen. As a matter of fact I get more and more emails from people who tell me that is exactly what happened. And I think it is largely, at least in part, because elevated activity of testosterone associated with the sex drive can increase activity of dopamine in the brain. And in fact sexual activity in many mammals does increase dopamine in the nucleus accumbens, part of the reward system of the brain, as much as 50%.

This is one of the reasons I tell my students at Rutgers, “Don’t copulate with people you don’t want to fall in love with because it may just happen to you.” You also might feel attachment to this individual. Orgasm draws up levels of Oxytocin and Vasopressin in the brain associated with attachment." (excerpt from following article)

A speech by Dr. Helen Fisher

What Is Love Anyway?

An Evolutionary Perspective on Couples Sexual Health

Dr. Laura Berman: Our next speaker I am very excited about. She is a mentor of mine that I have worked with from graduate school and beyond and has been really instrumental in my professional development and I hope you will find what she has to say instrumental to your clinical work as well. Dr. Helen Fisher is an anthropologist at Rutgers University and author of four books on sex, love, and marriage. Her most recent book was published this year by Henry Holt and it is called Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love. It is really fast paced and fascinating research on the brain and the differences between men and women and what we experience with romantic love as well as the clinical implications, so I recommend that everybody pick up a copy. There is my plug for your book but it is a great book. Dr. Helen Fisher come on up.

Dr. Fisher: Good morning. I am delighted to be here. Laura was my first student and I have been a student of Laura’s and it is a joy to finally be at a conference where there are so many people here interested in the subject that Laura and I have spent so much time on in my apartment and then watching her develop into this. Both Laura and Jennifer have really talked about how much sex is involved in mind and how it is all connected. It reminds me of one little story that Laura was starting off about how women are multitaskers and they do many things at the same time, they think many things at the same time, which is a wonderful aspect of women. I invented a term for it. I call it web thinking but it is really not good in bed.

Women are distractible in bed and in fact we are not the only ones that are distractible in bed. If you put a mouse, male and a female mouse, in a cage and they start copulating and you start to sprinkle some cheese in the other part of the cage [audience and speaker laughing] the female keeps looking at the cheese and the male just keeps copulating. [audience and speaker laughing] So, it seems to be a female architecture of the brain that we share with other animals.

I want to expand human sexuality and some of the problems that we have out into a larger world. I am going to end up by maintaining that there are some trends in sexuality right now that have a much greater impact on women’s well being then is currently known.

So, I am going to start out by talking about my research on love and then move on into the impact on sexuality. What I have done with my colleagues at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and SUNY Stoneybrook is to put 40 people who were madly in love in a functional MRI brain scanner and I wanted to show you some slides of what we found but I can’t do that. So, I want to talk a little bit about love and how it connects with sex and the impact that this has on all of our lives.

“What ‘tis love?” Shakespeare said. I think we have been pondering this since our ancestors sat around their campfires a million years ago. I divide love into three different brain systems. The first is lust, the craving for sexual gratification. Pavlov and *Auroticon* on eternal thirst and infinite ache. *D. Jordan* called it an intolerable neural itch. That is what it is. It is associated largely with testosterone and many other chemicals but certainly centrally testosterone. There is generally sometimes no object to the sex drive. You can feel it for a range of partners.

The second brain system that I think evolved from mating and reproduction is romantic love. That passionate love, obsessive love, being in love, infatuation. I think they are all slightly different brain varieties of the same thing. It is associated with elation, heightened energy, focused attention, obsessive thinking, you can’t stop thinking about the person, intense craving for a particular human being. And I long had the hypothesis that this was associated with elevated activity of central dopamine and/or norepinephrine in the brain and low levels of serotonin.

The third brain systems is attachment. The sense of calm and security that you can feel with a long term partner. Other scientists have associated this with elevated activity of Oxytocin and Vasopressin in specific circuits in the brain.

I think that all three of these brain systems have a different brain circuitry and a different brain chemistry. They have different feelings and behavior patterns. They evolve for different reasons. The sex drive evolved to get you out there looking for almost anything at all or at least a range of things. Romantic love evolved to enable you to focus your mating energy on just one at a time, thereby conserving mating time and energy. And attachment evolved so that we could tolerate this individual at least long enough to rear a single child together as a team. [audience laughing]

These three systems are connected in many ways. For example, when you fall in love you can suddenly feel an intense interest in somebody. Three weeks ago he was just another nice guy, now suddenly even the way he moves his arm or smiles or gets off the bus becomes intensely sexually attractive to you. The reason is, at least in part, because elevated activity of dopamine in the brain can elevate activity of testosterone, the hormone of desire.

But is the reverse true? Can you copulate with just a friend and then suddenly fall in love with them? Not always. Most liberated American adults have had intercourse with somebody that they never fell in love with but it can happen. As a matter of fact I get more and more emails from people who tell me that is exactly what happened. And I think it is largely, at least in part, because elevated activity of testosterone associated with the sex drive can increase activity of dopamine in the brain. And in fact sexual activity in many mammals does increase dopamine in the nucleus accumbens, part of the reward system of the brain, as much as 50%. This is one of the reasons I tell my students at Rutgers, “Don’t copulate with people you don’t want to fall in love with because it may just happen to you.” [audience laughing] You also might feel attachment to this individual. Orgasm draws up levels of Oxytocin and Vasopressin in the brain associated with attachment.

The interaction of these three different brain systems can also help to explain why sexual activity tends to decline in a long term marriage. Because the hormones of attachment, Oxytocin and Vasopressin, can suppress testosterone. I was very interested in your slide about that Laura. So, as you feel more and more attached to somebody you can be suppressing testosterone levels associated with sex drive. You can also elevate, Oxytocin and Vasopressin, associated with attachment can also interfere with dopamine and norepinephrine pathways in the brain, suppressing feelings of romantic love. I think this is in part why people in very long relationships have a hard time maintaining romance. And in fact there is only one actual clinical way to sustain that romance and that is to do novel things together. Novelty drives up levels of dopamine and norepinephrine in the brain. This is one of the reasons that vacations or just doing anything different can be so romantically and even sexually stimulating because as you drive up the dopamine you are driving up the testosterone and they go together.

These three systems lust, romantic love, and attachment interact in many ways but they can also operate independently of each other. In fact, you can feel deep attachment to a long term partner while you feel madly in love with someone else, while you feel the sex drive for a host of individuals unrelated to either partner. In fact, you can lie in bed at night and swing from feelings of attachment for one person to wild infatuation for somebody else. It is as if you have a committee meeting going on in your head [audience laughing] as you are having these feelings. Plato once said, “When the mind is thinking it is talking to itself.” We wouldn’t be able to talk to ourselves if these systems were totally related. I think that all of these systems evolve. I think the sex drive evolved to get us out there looking for almost anything.

Romantic love evolved to enable us to focus our mating energy on just one individual and fall in love. And attachment evolved so we could form this pair bond and act as a team. I think these three systems became unconnected from each other so that our ancestors could form a pair bond with one individual and take advantage of what we say politely in my discipline, EPC, or extra pair copulations with other partners. There is adaptive, I am definitely not advocating adultery, but for billions of years those men who were adulterous would have had more children, for millions of years those women who are adulterous would have had more resources for the children that they had. If you spread more genes into the population those children survive. You are going to carry along with you, unconsciously, whatever it is in the male and female brain associated with adultery. We are actually beginning to know some of the genetics of fidelity.

In short we have evolved a double reproductive strategy. A tremendous drive to seek sex, a tremendous drive to fall in love, a deep need to attach to a partner, and also the tendency for adultery, divorce, and remarriage.

Now, we are not puppets on a string of DNA. We can control our impulses. Over 50% of Americans do not divorce, many more remain faithful to their partners, but inherent in our human nature are conflicting drives. Drives that can bring great joy and great sorrow to our lives.

The brain system that I have been studying is romantic love. I started in 1996 by taking a look at all the psychological literature to see what happens when you fall in love, to see if I could find some of the brain circuitry of this.

The first thing that happens when you fall in love is somebody takes on what I call “special meaning”. As a truck driver once said to me, “The world had a new center and that center was Maryanne.” George Bernard Shaw once said, “Love consists of over estimating the differences between one woman and another.” [audience laughing] Indeed that is what we do. Then you focus your attention on this individual. We can list what we don’t like about a sweetheart but we sweep that aside and focus on what we do. Intensely heightened energy, real euphoria, mood swings into despair when things are going poorly, adversity tends to heighten the passion, and this is dopamine related and I am going to go into this a bit.

A coined a term for this. I call it frustration attraction. What a bad deal. The moment somebody doesn’t like you you like them harder, and in fact I know how this operates now in the brain. Real separation anxiety, when things are going poorly, and intense desire for sex and sexual exclusivity, what we say in my business, mate guarding, all animals guard their mates but the three major components of romantic love are you focus your attention on this individual, you obsessively think about him or her, and you crave emotionally and you are highly motivated to win this particular individual.

So, I came up with a hypothesis. These various traits led me to the hypothesis that romantic love was associated with a specific brain chemistry. Now, many chemicals are involved but primary among them I thought were dopamine and norepinephrine because these are associated with elation, energy, focused attention, and motivation to win a reward, and with lower levels of serotonin, this is important, lower levels of serotonin because obsessive thinking is regularly associated with low levels of this neurotransmitter. So, I knew that romantic love was found in every single society on earth for which we have looked every where in the world where there is data, people have love songs, love poems, love magic, legends, myths, suicide, homicide, invokement, or they have told anthropologists about their love affairs. So, it is a universal experience. It has a very specific set of psychological or physiopsychological traits and so I decided to put people into a functional MRI.

We have now put 20 men and women who were madly in love and their love was returned into an MRI and 20 men and women who had just been rejected in love. We have not analyzed those who were rejected in love but we have looked at those who were madly in love and their love was returned. We found many results but among them we found activity in the ventral tegmental area in the midbrain. This is the brain factory for dopamine. It not only makes dopamine but it spreads dopamine to many brain regions. We also found activity in the caudate nucleus, the dorsal caudery tail and body. Both of these regions in the brain are integral to the brains reward system. The system associated with pleasure and focused attention and the motivation to win a reward. And in fact we did not find activity in the classic brain regions that govern emotions. As a result I changed my thinking about what romantic love is.

I came to believe that this is the fundamental human drive, a mating drive, a psychological and physiological urge, a need, a motivation, an instinct that evolved specifically to drive men and women to court a specific partner and indeed I think it is stronger than the sex drive. When you ask somebody to go to bed with you and they reject you you don’t go kill yourself. When you have been rejected in love a certain of people fall into a clinical depression, a large number of them actually, and they kill themselves or somebody else. In fact this drive can even overcome the will to live.

We found many other things in the brain. We found some gender differences. We found a difference between wanting and liking. You can want another cigarette but not like them. You can like a pretty face in a room but not want to marry that person. In our brains we found activity in the wanting center. We found many other things but I am just going skip that and simply say that most important romantic love engages a very wide range of brain systems but basic to it is this reward and motivation system in the brain.

I think this evolved. I think that it evolved many millions of years ago. I think that other animals have an equivalent of this. You seen no animal will copulate with anybody. Not an elephant, not a gerbil, not a rat, nobody will copulate with anybody. They all have preferences. These preferences are associated with activity of dopamine in the brain and they display many of the characteristics of romantic love. They follow doggedly, they don’t eat, they don’t sleep, they focus their attention, they express intense energy, activities that people express when they are madly in love. So, at some point I think during human evolution this basic brain system for the mammalian attraction evolved into human romantic love.

I go into this because it is important, I think, to understand the broader implications of how the sex drive interacts with other brain systems. I am going to continue now to talk about a particular trend in sexuality that truly disturbs me and came from my understanding of romantic love.

In 2003, in the United States, 213 million prescriptions for anti-depressants were written. The vast majority were for serotonin enhancing drugs. It is well established, as Jennifer mentioned, that these drugs can cause diminished sexual desire, delayed sexual arousal, and muted or absent orgasm and I and colleague of mine, psychiatrist Andy Thompson, have come to believe that these sexual side effects not only jeopardize your sex life but can also jeopardize your ability to find the right partner, to fall in love, to stay in love, and to sustain a marriage. Because when you knock out the sex system you affect evolutionary brain mechanisms for courtship, romance, and attachment.

For example, and most importantly, elevated activity of serotonin associated with these serotonin enhancing medications suppresses the dopamine pathways in the brain. Dopamine is the fundamental neurotransmitter associated with romantic love. So, when you raise serotonin at the synapse and effect these dopamine highways you are changing your threshold, your ability to feel the elation of romance. Now, I am not telling anybody to not take these drugs. If you are going to kill yourself or somebody else there is certainly every reason to take them but Americans are taking them long term, for many years in a row, for simple psychological well being. Those are the people that I think are in jeopardy of not being able to fall in love. In fact, this is why people take these SSRI’s. They take them to blunt the emotions but when you blunt the emotions you blunt your ability to fall in love. SSRI’s also suppress obsessive thinking, which is what you want when you are terribly depressed but it is also another central component of romantic love. Serotonin enhancing anti-depressants and the simple lack of sexual activity can jeopardize romantic love in marriage in other more subtle ways. As I mentioned to you, orgasm produces a flood of Oxytocin and Vasopressin in the brain.

Oxytocin is associated with maternal bonding, social bonding, and attachment. They call it the satisfaction hormone or the cuddle chemical. This is why people as they make love feel very warm, almost a very cosmic union with one another, because these neurohormones have increased. So, when a woman takes a serotonin enhancing anti-depressants or stops having sex for other reasons and fails to achieve orgasm she fails to stimulate in herself and her partner neural mechanisms associated with attachment.

From a Darwinian perspective orgasm also is a primary device by which women unconsciously assess a mating partner. Women don’t reach orgasm with every partner that they have. It was long said that therefore orgasm was therefore a faulty mechanism that women just weren’t well designed the way men were and it is now come to be called the fickle female orgasm and it is now believed that it is an adaptive mechanism that enables women to distinguish between those partners who are willing to spend time and energy on them, “Mr. Right”, and those who are impatient and lacking empathy, “Mr. Wrong”. And when women take anti-depressants or don’t have orgasms they jeopardize this ability to assess the commitment level of a partner.

Women also use orgasm to assess an existing partnership. Women tend to have more orgasms with somebody who is a long term sweetheart and at the onset of an orgasmia this can destabilize a marriage. A good example, I am getting more and more people from around the country who write me about this, and one example is the woman who is 35, married, recurrent depression and anxiety disorder, starting to take SSRI’s, diminished libido, absent orgasm, and she began to conclude that she didn’t love her husband. She kept her feelings to herself for five years and kept taking the drugs and finally decided to divorce him. Then she was switched to an anti-depressant that had no side effects, her orgasmic response came back, she decided to stay with her husband, and now they have a child. When you suppress or stifle the orgasmic response you jeopardize powerful evolutionary mechanisms that evolve to assess the commitment level of a mate, to sustain romance, and sustain long term attachment, and it can even affect your genetic future.

Also, when you don’t copulate with somebody you don’t get their seminal fluid. Gordon Gallop and others have established that seminal fluid contains dopamine and norepinephrine associated with romantic love, Oxytocin and Vasopressin associated with attachment, and testosterone associated with the sex drive. It also has FSH, LH, and other things associated with female sexual cycling. These don’t all go through the membrane barrier but they certainly could contribute to sex drive, romantic love, attachment, and healthy normal sexual cycling. And when you don’t take them you are less likely to feel good. As a matter of fact Gallop has more recently done a study of women who were directly exposed to seminal fluid as opposed to those who used condoms and indeed they found that seminal fluid had an anti-depressant effect. [audience laughing] For all the obvious reasons that you can think of but the seminal fluid I will add to the list.

Serotonin enhancing anti-depressants can also inhibit psychological mechanisms for mate choice. You can certainly guess these. If you are, in some people it inhibits motivation, they shy away from courtship and sex because they are scared of poor performance in bed or they blame the partner for their frigidity or impotence rather than understand that this is drug related. It can affect self esteem and it certainly can blunt your emotions. As a matter of fact the very first study of this has been done by psychologist Maryanne Fisher. She studied 20 women on SSRI’s and 20 women off SSRI’s, normal, and she had them all look at pictures of men on a computer screen. The women on the SSRI’s rated the male faces as less attractive and also looked at them for shorter periods of time.

So, I am going to conclude with this sex matters. Sexual activity has complex biological interactions with two other primary and powerful mating drives. Romantic love and deep attachment to a partner as well as other evolutionary mechanisms that aid courtship, reproduction, and parenting. And when a couples sex life is suffering it can have subtle but far reaching affects on both partners psychological well being, feelings of attachment, marital satisfaction, and even their genetic future.

Thank you.

*     *     *

Dr. Helen Fisher

Dr Helen Fisher from Rutgers University in the United States is an anthropologist who specialises in love. And she says poetry is one manifestation of what love does to the chemical state of our brains. So, what's her favourite love poem? She replies, "I have so many different love poems that I like. I read love poems from around the world, but there is one by Xuan Chen which is I think in 10th century China, and it's called The Bamboo Mat.

I cannot bear to put away the bamboo sleeping mat;

The night I brought you home I watched you roll it out.

"And the reason I like the poem so much is because, you know, I study love, and I study the brain chemistry of love and one of the things that happens when you fall in love is that you focus on some tiny little aspect of the person that you're in love with. I mean you can just remember the way they cocked their head as they got off the bus, or just the way they smile at you across the dinner table, and you'll replay these moments. [This is] a poem from 10th century China that displays almost a universal characteristic about love."

Rae Fry interviews Dr. Fisher on The Anatomy of Love

*     *     *

David Gergen speaks with Dr. fisher Online NewsHour: The First Sex

*     *     *

HelenFisher.com

[eyes_up]

i read "the first sex" and I highly recommend it.  It changed my thnking in terms of dating and sex in terms of selecting a mate. Any woman who on the market for a man should definitely read this book.

eyes

[CZBZ]

Archived Comments from 2007

From: talia
Sent: 2/3/2007 2:28 PM

I think this brain chemistry stuff is fascinating. And I'm reflecting on my own past relationships with regards to feelings of lust vs. love. And, of course, how does this all apply to one with Npd. More thoughts on that later..lol. I'm sort of processing what's on my mind to put it in written form...
 
Just wanted to post a quick thought. Not sure if this would make any difference whatsoever in educating teens about sex. But I think the brain chemistry stuff should be included. What I remember about sex education in high school, is that it was all about the physical mechanics and how it relates to producing babies. There was never any talk of emotions,or relationships...lust vs. love,etc. Maybe this other stuff needs to be taught by parents. My parents didn't talk about anything..Nada..LOL
 
hugs,t



From: eyes_up
Sent: 2/3/2007 6:31 PM
 
I read her book "The first Sex" and it says all this stuff and more. I highly recomend the read. Although I would also say that it gets very black and white such as her example of the female mouse and female human...this stuff isn't completely across the board.

I have also learned that the laws of attraction are very complex. This book of fishers doesn't go into this at all but I think this should be something to take note of since it is not just about romance or even copulating...other stuff is in the mix. Wish I could make referance to a book about this concept.

eyes



From: Cornfield10
Sent: 2/4/2007 6:38 AM

From the old lady...............We had all kinds of experiences and then we started studying about what the heck is going on in our lives.    Sort of sounds backwards, doesn't it?
Teachers in school are attempting to teach about avoiding pregnancy, and I found students who didn't learn the foggiest about that when they were taught.  Parents can't teach something they don't know much about, so they aren't equipped to to do job, either.  So we aren't making much progress generation after generation.

Marriage laws and sex were supposed to be based on usable principles that worked but we know that hasn't been very usuable or practical.  I am not one to say that being married solves the problem.  My 50-year marriage was a disaster and the best solution to my sex  problems was no sex life at all.  So, don't ask me for advice!

I have studied neurology and physiology and can understand much of what is said about the hormones.  MRI's and such machines are telling us enough physical information that we have a lot to study and think about. I am thankful that I was able to produce three children, which kept me in the marriage based on principle and the need for a warm roof over my head.  I am a survivor living a very good life now, and no one wants to talk about my past.  I do feel an obligation to teach the grandchildren a few things about honesty, trust, and commitment as we go along.  I probably will discuss the hormones and sex when the subject comes up because they know to ask me all kinds of questions, and know I will search for answers.  It is that trust on which hangs the hope for a better understanding and future for them.  I guess for me it was love and obsession which clouded my life in the beginning.
I never knew anything about lust in my life, which was very sheltered in comparison to today's experiences.  It is very difficult to look back and make sense of anything, so the hormones are a good place to start. 

This study of anti-depressants is one we can explore more for understanding because so many of us can feel the effects on our personal lives.  The question is, what are we doing to ourselves?

Cornfield


From: _CZ
Sent: 4/2/2007 10:15 AM

The Biology of Attraction

by Helen Fisher


Much of courtship and mating is choreographed by nature. In fact, nature designed men and women to work together.

In an apocryphal story, a colleague once turned to the great British geneticist J.B.S. Haldane, and said, "Tell me, Mr. Haldane, knowing what you do about nature, what can you tell me about God?" Haldane replied, "He has an inordinate fondness for beetles." Indeed, the world contains over 300,000 species of beetles. I would add that "God" loves the human mating game, for no other aspect of our behavior is so complex, so subtle, or so pervasive. And although these sexual strategies differ from one individual to the next, the essential choreography of human courtship, love, and marriage has myriad designs that seem etched into the human psyche, the product of time, selection, and evolution. They begin the moment men and women get within courting range—with the way we flirt.

In describing these strategies, I make no effort to be "politically correct." Nature designed men and women to work together. But I cannot pretend that they are alike. They are not. And I have given evolutionary and biological explanations for their differences where I find them appropriate.

Flirting

Women from places as different as the jungles of Amazonia, the salons of Paris, and the highlands of New Guinea apparently flirt with the same sequence of expressions.

First the woman smiles at her admirer and lifts her eyebrows in a swift, jerky motion as she opens her eyes wide to gaze at him. Then she drops her eyelids, tilts her head down and to the side, and looks away. Frequently she also covers her face with her hands, giggling nervously as she retreats behind her palms. This sequential flirting gesture is so distinctive that [German ethologist Irenaus] Eibl-Eibesfeldt was convinced it is innate, a human female courtship ploy that evolved eons ago to signal sexual interest.

Men also employ courting tactics similar to those seen in other species. Have you ever walked into the boss's office and seen him leaning back in his chair, hands clasped behind his head, elbows high, and chest thrust out? Perhaps he has come from behind his desk, walked up to you, smiled, arched his back, and thrust his upper body in your direction? If so, watch out. He may be subconsciously announcing his dominance over you. If you are a woman, he may be courting you instead.

The "chest thrust" is part of a basic postural message used across the animal kingdom—"standing tall." Dominant creatures puff up. Codfish bulge their heads and thrust our their pelvic fins. Snakes, frogs, and toads inflate their bodies. Antelope and chameleons turn broadside to emphasize their bulk. Mule deer look askance to show their antlers. Cats bristle. Pigeons swell. Lobsters raise themselves onto the tips of their walking legs and extend their open claws. Gorillas pound their chests. Men just thrust out their chests.


"Copulatory" Gaze
 
The gaze is probably the most striking human courting ploy. Eye language. In Western cultures, where eye contact between the sexes is permitted, men and women often stare intently at potential mates for about two to three seconds during which their pupils may dilate—a sign of extreme interest. Then the starer drops his or her eyelids and looks away.

No wonder the custom of the veil has been adopted in so many cultures. Eye contact seems to have an immediate effect. The gaze triggers a primitive part of the human brain, calling forth one of two basic emotions—approach or retreat. You cannot ignore the eyes of another fixed on you; you must respond. You may smile and start conversation. You may look away and edge toward the door. But first you will probably tug at an earlobe, adjust your sweater, yawn, fidget with your eyeglasses, or perform some other meaningless movement—a "displacement gesture"—to alleviate anxiety while you make up your mind how to acknowledge this invitation, whether to flee the premises or stay and play the courting game.

Baboon Love

Baboons gaze at each other during courtship too. These animals may have branched off of our human evolutionary tree more than 19 million years ago, yet this similarity in wooing persists. As anthropologist Barbara Smuts had said of a budding baboon courtship on the Eburru cliffs of Kenya, "It looked like watching two novices in a singles bar."

The affair began one evening when a female baboon, Thalia, turned and caught a young male, Alex staring at her. They were about 15 feet apart. He glanced away immediately. So she stared at him—until he turned to look at her. Then she intently fiddled with her toes. On it went. Each time she stared at him, he looked away; each time he stared at her, she groomed her feet. Finally Alex caught Thalia gazing at him—the "return gaze."

Immediately he flattened his ears against his head, narrowed his eyelids, and began to smack his lips, the height of friendliness in baboon society. Thalia froze. Then, for a long moment, she looked him in the eye. Only after this extended eye contact had occurred did Alex approach her, at which point Thalia began to groom him—the beginning of a friendship and sexual liaison that was still going strong six years later, when Smuts returned to Kenya to study baboon friendships.


At The Bar

Could these courting cues be part of a larger human mating dance?

According to David Givens, an anthropologist, and Timothy Perper, a biologist, who spent several hundred hours in American cocktail lounges watching men and women flirt, American singles-bar courtship has several stages, each with distinctive escalation points. I shall divide them into five. The first is the "attention getting" phase. Young men and women do this somewhat differently. As soon as they enter the bar, both males and females typically establish a territory—a seat, a place to lean, a position near the jukebox or dance floor. Once settled, they begin to attract attention to themselves.

Tactics vary. Men tend to pitch and roll their shoulders, stretch, exaggerate their body movements. Instead of using the wrist to stir a drink, men often employ the entire arm, as if stirring mud. The normally smooth motion necessary to light a cigarette becomes a whole-body gesture, ending with an elaborate shaking from the elbow to extinguish the match.

Then there is the swagger with which young men often move to and fro. Male baboons on the grasslands of East Africa also swagger when they foresee a potential sexual encounter. A male gorilla walks back and forth stiffly as he watches a female out of the corner of his eye. The parading gait is known to primatologists as bird-dogging. Males of many species also preen. Human males pat their hair, adjust their clothes, tug their chins, or perform other self-clasping or grooming movements that diffuse nervous energy and keep the body moving.

Young women begin the attention-getting phase with many of the same maneuvers that men use—smiling, gazing, shifting, swaying, preening, stretching, moving in their territory to draw attention to themselves. Often they incorporate a battery of feminine moves as well. They twist their curls, tilt their heads, look up coyly, giggle, raise their brows, flick their tongues, lick their upper lips, blush, and hide their faces in order to signal, "I am here."

Some women also have a characteristic walk when courting; they arch their backs, thrust out their bosoms, sway their hips, and strut. No wonder many women wear high-heeled shoes. This bizarre Western custom, invented by Catherine de Medici in the 1500s, unnaturally arches the back, tilts the buttocks, and thrusts the chest out into a female come-hither pose. The clomping noise of their spiky heels draws attention too.

Keeping Time

Body synchrony is the final and most intriguing component of the pickup. As potential lovers become comfortable, they pivot or swivel until their shoulders become aligned, their bodies face-to-face. This rotation toward each other may start before they begin to talk or hours into conversation, but after a while the man and woman begin to move in tandem. Only briefly at first. When he crosses his legs, she crosses hers; as he leans left, she leans left; when he smoothes his hair, she smoothes hers. They move in perfect rhythm as they gaze deeply into each other's eyes.

Called interactional synchrony, this human mirroring begins in infancy. By the second day of life, a newborn has begun to synchronize its body movements with the rhythmic patterns of the human voice. And it is now well established that people in many other cultures get into rhythm when they feel comfortable together. Our need to keep each other's time reflects a rhythmic mimicry common to many animals. Chimps sometimes sway from side to side as they stare into one another's eyes just prior to copulation. Cats circle. Red deer prance. Howler monkeys court with rhythmic tongue movements. Stickleback fish do a zigzag jig. From bears to beetles, courting couples perform rhythmic rituals to express their amorous intentions.

Wooing Messages

Human courtship has other similarities to courtship in "lower" animals. Normally people woo each other slowly. Caution during courtship is also characteristic of spiders. The male wolf spider, for example, must enter the long, darker entrance of a female's compound in order to court and copulate. This he does slowly. If he is overeager, she devours him.

Men and women who are too aggressive at the beginning of the courting process also suffer unpleasant consequences. If you come too close, touch too soon, or talk too much, you will probably be repelled. Like wooing among wolf spiders, baboons, and other creatures, the human pickup runs on message. At every juncture in the ritual each partner must respond correctly, otherwise the courtship fails.

The Dinner Date

Probably no ritual is more common to Western would-be lovers than the "dinner date." If the man is courting, he pays—and a woman instinctively knows her partner is wooing her. In fact, there is no more widespread courtship ploy than offering food in hopes of gaining sexual favors. Around the world men give women presents prior to lovemaking. A fish, a piece of meat, sweets, and beer are among the delicacies men have invented as offerings.

This ploy is not exclusive to men. Black-tipped hang flies often catch aphids, daddy longlegs, or houseflies on the forest floor. When a male has felled a particularly juicy prey, he exudes secretions from an abdominal scent gland that catch the breeze, announcing a successful hunting expedition. Often a passing female hang fly stops to enjoy the meal - but not without copulating while she eats.

"Courtship feeding," as this custom is called, probably predates the dinosaurs, because it has an important reproductive function. By providing food to females, males show their abilities as hunters, providers, worthy procreative partners.

Odor Lures

Every person smells slightly different; we all have a personal "odor print" as distinctive as our voice, our hands, our intellect. As newborn infants we can recognize our mother by her smell. Both men and women have "apocrine glands in their armpits, around their nipples, and in the groin that become active at puberty. These scent boxes differ from "eccrine" glands, which cover much of the body and produce an odorless liquid, because their exudate, in combination with bacteria on the skin, produce the acrid, gamy smell of perspiration.

Today in parts of Greece and the Balkans, some men carry their handkerchiefs in their armpits during festivals and offer these odoriferous tokens to the women they invite to dance: they swear by the results.

But could a man's smell actually trigger infatuation in a woman? This possible link between male essence and female reproductive health may provide a clue to attraction. Women perceive odors better than men do. They are a hundred times more sensitive to Exaltolide, a compound much like men's sexual musk; they can smell a mild sweat from about three feet away; and at midcycle, during ovulation, women can smell men's musk even more strongly. Perhaps ovulating women become more susceptible to infatuation when they can smell male essence and are unconsciously drawn toward it to maintain menstrual cycling.

A woman's or a man's smell can release a host of memories too. So the right human smell at the right moment could touch off vivid pleasant memories and possibly ignite that first, stunning moment of romantic adoration.

But Americans, the Japanese, and many other people find odors offensive; for most of them the smell of perspiration is more likely to repel than to attract. Some scientists think the Japanese are unduly disturbed by body odors because of their long tradition of arranged marriages: men and women were forced into close contact with partners they found unappealing. Why Americans are phobic about natural body smells, I do not know. Perhaps our advertisers have swayed us in order to sell their deodorizing products.

Love Maps

A more important mechanism by which human beings become captivated by "him" or "her" may be what sexologist John Money called your love map. Long before you fixate on Ray as opposed to Bill, Sue instead of Ceciley, you have developed a mental map, a template replete with brain circuitry that determines what arouses you sexually, what drives you to fall in love with one person rather than another.

These love maps vary from one individual to the next. Some people get turned on by a business suit or a doctor's uniform, by big breasts, small feet, or a vivacious laugh. But averageness still wins. In a recent study, psychologists selected 32 faces of American Caucasian women and, using computers, averaged all of their features. Then they showed these images to college peers. Of 94 photographs of real female faces, only four were rated more appealing than these fabrications.

As you would guess, the world does not share the sexual ideals of Caucasian students from Wyoming. Despite wildly dissimilar standards of beauty and sex appeal, however, there are a few widely shared opinions about what incites romantic passion. Men and women around the world are attracted to those with good complexions. Everywhere people are drawn to partners whom they regard as clean. And men in most places generally prefer plump, wide-hipped women to slim ones. Looks count.

So does money. From rural Zulus to urban Brazilians, men are attracted to young, good-looking, spunky women, while women are drawn to men with property or money. Americans are no exception.

These male/female appetites are probably innate. it is to a males' genetic advantage to fall in love with a women who will produce viable offspring; it is to a woman's biological advantage to become captivated by a man who can help support her young. As Montaigne, the 16th-century French essayist, summed it up, "We do not marry for ourselves, whatever we say; we marry just as much or more for our posterity."

Love At First Sight

Could this human ability to adore another within moments of meeting come out of nature? I think it does. In fact, love at first sight may have a critical adaptive function among animals. During the mating season a female squirrel, for example, needs to breed. It is not to her advantage to copulate with a porcupine. But if she sees a healthy squirrel, she should waste no time. She should size him up. And if he looks suitable, she should grab her chance to copulate. Perhaps love at first sight is no more than an inborn tendency in many creatures that evolved to spur the mating process. Then among our human ancestors what had been animal attraction evolved into the human sensation of infatuation at a glance.

Infatuation Fades

Alas, infatuation fades. As Emerson put it, "Love is strongest in pursuit, friendship in possession." At some point, that old black magic wanes. Yet there does seem to be a general length to this condition. Psychologist Dorothy Tennov measured the duration of romantic love, from the moment infatuation hit to when a "feeling of neutrality" for one's love object began. She concluded, "The most frequent interval, as well as the average, is between approximately 18 months and three years" John Money agrees, proposing that once you begin to see your sweetheart regularly the passion lasts two to three years.

Psychiatrist Michael Liebowitz suspected that the end of infatuation is also grounded in brain physiology. He theorized that the brain cannot eternally maintain the revved-up site of romantic bliss. As he summed it up, "If you want a situation where you and your long-term partner can still get very excited about each other, you will have to work on it, because in some ways you are bucking a biological tide."

Harem Building

Only 16 percent of the 853 cultures on record actually prescribe monogyny, in which a man is permitted only one wife at a time. Western cultures are among them. We are in the minority, however. A whopping 84 percent of all human societies permit a man to take more than one wife at once—polygyny.

Men seek polygyny to spread their genes, while women join harems to acquire resources and ensure the survival of their young. If you ask a man why he wants a second bride, he might say he is attracted to her wit, her business acumen, her vivacious spirit, or splendid thighs. If you ask a women why she is willing to "share" a man, she might tell you that she loves the way he looks or laughs or takes her to fancy vacation spots.

But no matter what reasons people offer, polygyny enables men to have more children; under the right conditions women also reap reproductive benefits. So long ago ancestral men who sought polygyny and ancestral women who acquiesced to harem life disproportionately survived.

Man Is Monogamous

Because of the genetic advantages of polygyny for men and because so many societies permit polygyny, many anthropologists think that harem building is a badge of the human animal. But in the vast majority of societies where polygyny is permitted, only about five to 10 percent of men actually have several wives simultaneously. Although polygyny is widely discussed, it is much less practiced.

Whereas gorillas, horses, and animals of many other species always form harems, among human beings polygyny and polyandry seem to be optional opportunistic exceptions; monogamy is the rule. Human beings almost never have to be cajoled into pairing. Instead, we do this naturally. We flirt. We feel infatuation. We fall in love. We marry. And the vast majority of us marry only one person at a time.

Pair-bonding is a trademark of the human animal.

Unfaithfully Yours

Although we flirt, fall in love, and marry, human beings also tend to be sexually unfaithful to a spouse. Americans are no exception. Despite our attitude that philandering is immoral, regardless of our sense of guilt when we engage in trysts, in spite of the risks to family, friends, and livelihood that adultery entails, we indulge in extramarital affairs with avid regularity.

A survey of 106,000 readers of Cosmopolitan magazine in the early 1980s indicated that 54 percent of the married women had participated in at least one affair, and a poll of 7,239 men reported that 72 percent of those married over two years had been adulterous.

Why? From a Darwinian perspective, it is easy to explain. If a man has two children by one woman, he has, genetically speaking, "reproduced" himself. But if he also engages in dalliances with more women and, by chance, sires two more young, he doubles his contribution to the next generation. Those men who seek variety also tend to have more children. These young survive and pass to subsequent generations whatever it is in the male genetic makeup that seeks "fresh features," as Byron said of men's need for sexual novelty.

Unlike a man, a woman cannot breed every time she copulates. In fact, anthropologist Donald Symons has argued that, because the number of children a woman can bear is limited, women are biologically less motivated to seek fresh features.

Sexual Variety

Are women really less interested in sexual variety? My own modest proposal is that during our long evolutionary history most males pursued trysts to spread their genes, while females evolved two alternative strategies to acquire resources: some women elected to be faithful to a single man in order to reap a lot of benefits from him; others engaged in clandestine sex with many men to acquire resources from each. This scenario roughly coincides with common beliefs: man, the natural playboy; women, madonna or w***e.

In a study by Donald Symons and Bruce Ellis, for example, 415 college students were asked whether they would have sex with an anonymous student of the opposite sex. In this imaginary scenario, participants were told that all risk of pregnancy, discovery, and disease was absent. The results were those you would expect. Males were consistently more likely to say yes, leading these researchers once again to conclude that men are more interested in sexual variety than women are.

But here's the glitch. This study takes into consideration the primary genetic motive for male philandering (to fertilize young women). But not the primary motive for female philandering—the acquisition of resources.

There is no evidence whatsoever that women are sexually shy or that they shun clandestine sexual adventures. Instead, both men and women seem to exhibit a mixed reproductive strategy: monogamy and adultery are our fare.

Parting

We all have our share of troubles. But probably one of the hardest things we do is leave a spouse. From the tundras of Siberia to the jungles of Amazonia, people accept divorce as regrettable—although sometimes necessary. They have specific social or legal procedures for divorce. And they do divorce. Moreover, unlike many Westerners, traditional peoples do not make divorce a moral issue. The Mongols of Siberia sum up a common worldwide attitude, "If two individuals cannot get along harmoniously together, they had better live apart."

Why do people divorce? Bitter quarrels, insensitive remarks, lack of humor, watching too much television, inability to listen, drunkenness, sexual rejection—the reasons men or women give for why they leave a marriage are as varied as their motives for having wedded in the first place.

Overt adultery heads the list. Sterility and barrenness come next. Cruelty, particularly by the husband, ranks third among worldwide reasons for divorce. I am not surprised that adultery and infertility are paramount. Darwin theorized that people marry primarily to breed.

The Four-Year Itch

Hoping to get some insight into the nature of divorce, I turned to the demographic yearbooks of the United Nations. Divorce generally occurs early in marriage—peaking in or around the fourth year after wedding—followed by a gradual decline in divorce as more years of marriage go by. The American divorce peak hovers somewhat below the common four-year peak. Purely as a guess, I would say that this may have something to do with American attitudes toward marriage itself. We tend not to marry for economic, political, or family reasons. Instead, as anthropologist Paul Bohannen once said, "Americans marry to enhance their inner, largely secret selves."

I find this remark fascinating—and correct. We marry for love and to accentuate, balance out, or mask parts of our private selves. This is why you sometimes see a reserved accountant married to a blond bombshell or a scientist married to a poet. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the American divorce peak corresponds perfectly with the normal duration of infatuation—two to three years. If partners are not satisfied with the match, they bail out soon after the infatuation wears off. So there are exceptions to the four-year itch.

Divorce Is For The Young

Another pattern to emerge from the United Nations data regards "divorce with dependent children." Among the hundreds of millions of people recorded in 45 societies between 1950 and 1989, 39 percent of all divorces occurred among couples with no dependent children, 26 percent among those with one dependent child, 19 percent among couples with two, 7 percent among those with three children, 3 percent among couples with four young, and couples with five or more dependent young rarely split. Hence, it appears that the more children a couple bear, the less likely they are to divorce.

This pattern is less conclusively demonstrated by the U.N. data than the first two. Yet it is strongly suggested and it makes genetic sense. From a Darwinian perspective, couples with no children should break up; both individuals will mate again and probably go on to bear young—ensuring their genetic futures. As couples bear more children they become less economically able to abandon their growing family. And it is genetically logical that they remain together to raise their flock.

Planned Obsolescence Of The Pair Bond

Marriage dearly shows several general patterns of decay. Divorce counts peak among couples married about four years. And the longer a couple remain together, the older the partners get, and probably the more offspring they produce, the less likely spouses are to leave each other.

This is not to say that everybody fits this mold. But Shakespeare did. Etched in Shakespeare's marriage and in all these other divorces recorded from around the world is a blue print, a primitive design. The human animal seems built to court, to fall in love, and to marry one person at a time; then, at the height of our reproductive years, often with single child, we divorce; then, a few years later, we remarry once again.

Adapted from Anatomy of Love; The Natural History of Monogamy, Adultery, and Divorce, by Helen E. Fisher. 

This article was excerpted from Psychology Today

[CZBZ]

I am reposting this informative thread from our WoN archives since we might want to talk about having Sex without becoming attached. Is It Even Possible???

Hugs,
CZBZ

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From PsychologyToday.com:


Sex, Love & SSRIs  

Cupid's ComeUppance    

The Stalker in All of Us    

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The Plunge of Pleasure

by Deborah Blum

If serotonin is the Zen-master among neurotransmitter, dopamine is Pollyanna,responsible for the highs of infatuation, new love, joy, self-confidence, and motivation. But like all roller-coaster rides, dopamine highs have their dangers.

We use the term "falling in love" even though the first giddy days of a new romance feel buoyant, free from gravity, as if some perfectly placed wind were boosting us skyward. That sense of becoming airborne is so unforgettable that years later we may recall it longingly and wonder why relationships now seem so bound-to-Earth. We may even gaze on our partners with some dissatisfaction, measuring them against that lost intensity.

But the gleam of infatuation--if current theory is right--may be largely the product of unexpectedly potent brain chemistry. And the primary ingredient in that chemical brew is dopamine, a neurotransmitter best known for its ability to initiate muscle movement (and thus a key factor in diseases in which that ability is lost, such as Parkinson's). These days dopamine's profile is on the rise--the neurotransmitter became a celebrity in its own right when it graced the cover of Time magazine last May. But while that story focused on dopamine's role in addiction, new research suggests that the neurochemical may be similarly important in triggering the joyously obsessive nature of first love. Rutgers University anthropologist Helen Fisher, Ph.D., suspects that love's initial all-consuming sizzle is part pure lust, part pure dopamine. "My prediction is that dopamine is an essential part of infatuation," says Fisher, who is now scanning the brains of wildly infatuated people, probing for that dopamine drive. "Dopamine," she notes, "is already associated with euphoria, sleeplessness, loss of appetite, and a rush of motivation." In other words, the dazzling beginnings of love.

But as Fisher's comments suggest, such behaviors have far broader ramifications. Dopamine now seems everywhere in the brain: running through four main brain pathways, picked up by five different types of receptors--each with several subtypes, many still just being defined. Suddenly, the neurotransmitter is the target of research into happiness, attention, extroversion, self-confidence, and goal-direction.

"Dopamine, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways," jokes George Koob, Ph.D., a professor of neuropharmacology at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. Excitement about dopamine is now so high, says Koob, that the danger is not underestimating its reach but exaggerating it: "Today's gig is that dopamine is a kind of everyman's neurotransmitter because it does everything. And the fact is, it doesn't."

What does it do, then? The long-observed link to Parkinson's remains dead-on. Starting in the mid-brain and reaching to structures such as the basal ganglia, dopamine clearly functions as a kind of spark plug, initiating motor behavior. When the spark fails, the brain's ability to order appropriate muscle movement fails, too. "You are trapped in your body," is the way Koob describes it.

In addition, dopamine appears to influence attention and the ability to concentrate. This is why researchers think that some dopamine-enhancing drugs, such as Ritalin, help control the jittery, unfocused behaviors of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Still the most intense excitement among researchers is over the role of dopamine within the limbic system, a brain region that helps regulate emotions. Basically, dopamine brightens and highlights our connections with the world around us, says David Goldman, Ph.D., a neuro-scientist with the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. "It's essential for associating something that happens with the feeling of pleasure." In other words, it reinforces behaviors that make us feel good.

Koob tells an anecdote about B.F. Skinner, Ph.D., the Yale University psychologist who made famous the whole notion of reinforcement. According to the story--cheerfully shared among dopamine researchers--the famed psychologist's class once decided to experiment on him. So for an entire lecture half the class smiled at him, half glared. By the end of the session, he was only talking to the beaming side of the group. "And that, we assume, would have been a dopamine-driven response," Koob says.

In this sense, dopamine seems a sort of Pollyanna among neurotransmitters: It only really responds to the good stuff. In experiments with monkeys, scientists rewarded some tasks with juice (apparently beloved by the primates) and punished other tasks with puffs of air blown in their faces (equally hated.) The monkeys learned to anticipate either reward or punishment. But the dopamine neurons in their mid-brain only got active when juice/pleasure was foreseen.

It seems logical to ask, then: If a person is born with a highly responsive dopamine system, wouldn't he or she be more tuned to receiving pleasure, to feeling rewarded? Would, in turn, the person with a sluggish response tend to be unmotivated and less exuberant overall? And what creates that outlook--the dopamine itself, the receptors that process dopamine's chemical messages, or some combination of the two? These are questions researchers are still sorting through.

But there is a growing consensus that the dopamine network does influence everyday behaviors. There is even speculation that by pursuing certain behaviors--single-mindedly focusing on a project, for instance--a person might increase that dopamine drive. Richard Depue, Ph.D., professor of human development at Cornell University, points out that goal-directed behavior (or the lack of it) tends to stand out as a major personality trait. Put simply, some of us are motivated to pursue goals and others are not. Depue believes it's the dopamine system that explains that difference. "When our dopamine system is active, we are more positive, excited, and eager to go after goals and rewards, whether it's food, sex, money, education, or professional achievement," he says. In fact, he suggests that people who are goal-directed are not only more motivated but are generally happier. "We have strong evidence that feelings of elation [that occur] because you are moving toward achieving an important goal are biochemically based, though they can be modified by experience."

If we compare dopamine to serotonin--another "happiness" neurotransmitter--it becomes clear that dopamine requires a cautious approach. Serotonin is a Zen master among neurotransmitters, linked to tranquillity, reason, calm. The best-selling antidepressants on the market--the Prozac family--keep serotonin levels high by preventing neurons from reabsorbing the neurotransmitter after it has been released, thus increasing its availability. Prozac users talk of an emotional leveling, a gradual disappearance of the depressive free-fall. "Prozac is not an abusable drug and never will be," Koob says. "There's no tangible effect the first time you take it. It just slowly helps regulate the system."

There's nothing Zen about dopamine; it doesn't call up thoughts of monasteries and meditation, but of more breathless images--a teenager standing up in a plummeting roller-coaster car, perhaps. There's a body of work, still debated by researchers, that links dopamine directly to novelty-seeking and risk-taking behaviors.

It's not surprising, then, that dopamine is suspected of facilitating the effects of not just Ritalin but more troubling drugs as well. As alcohol concentrations build in the body, the brain responds by releasing more dopamine. Cocaine also seems to stimulate a dopamine rush. And with that comes a high-flying sense of pleasure, power, concentration, a jazzed-up sense of energy. It's well known that rats and other lab animals will perform tasks devotedly and sometimes desperately in return for a cocaine hit once they become addicted. That behavior continues unless scientists block their dopamine transport system. Then the drug suddenly falls into the ho-hum category. Without dopamine, cocaine would apparently be nothing more than white, powdery stuff with a funny taste.

Richard Mailman, Ph.D., a professor of psychiatry and pharmacology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, points out that a pleasure-reward system in the brain is, in an evolutionary sense, a terrific idea. It pushes us toward accomplishment, achievement, improving ourselves. "But it's supposed to be a subtle system," he says. "With cocaine, you get a jackhammer effect." There are hints, in fact, that the body tries to keep dopamine in check. And there's growing evidence that too much dopamine--notably in the limbic system--plays a role in the development of schizophrenia. A number of antipsychotic medications seem to suppress goal-oriented behaviors and interest in the world, a strong suggestion that the drugs are suppressing dopamine's effects.

Mailman emphasizes that dopamine does not work in isolation; indeed, many scientists suspect that dopamine and serotonin may interact--in some complicated and poorly understood ways--to produce psychotic illnesses such as schizophrenia. But researchers are currently fascinated by the dopamine angle, with its hints of how thin the line may be between intensity and insanity. One of the newest theories holds that dopamine initiates not only thoughts of pleasure, but perhaps initiates thought itself. "The idea is that schizophrenia is a result of dopamine hyper-activity," Koob explains. "The person is bombarded with so many thoughts their ability to pay attention to what's real and what's not is overwhelmed."

Given all this, perhaps it's reassuring that Fisher suspects that the dopamine high of first love is meant to be a merely transient pleasure. "When I first started looking at the properties of infatuation, they had some of the same elements of a cocaine high: sleeplessness, loss of a sense of time, absolute focus on love to the detriment of all around you. People walk out of marriages, abandon children. Infatuation can overtake the rational parts of your brain."

Fisher theorizes that different neurochemicals influence different stages of male-female relationships, which she categorizes as lust (driven mainly by hormones), attraction/infatuation (dopamine), and attachment. As we move into attachment--long-standing relationships--it may be that serotonin or hormones, such as oxytocin, that are associated with nurturing behaviors become more important. For partners and parents, such stability is essential. It is those who never grow out of infatuation, who remain obsessed with love, that may eventually become dangerous lovers--stalkers, for instance.

On the other hand, Fisher's theory also holds hope for those who look back wistfully, wishing they could recreate those heady days of early romance. Fisher suspects that parenting, in particular, may suppress the dopamine spark in relationships. But not necessarily forever. Later in the relationship the chemistry may return; long-time partners may somehow "fall" in love all over again, and be carried away on a dopamine high.

And people who have lost one partner thus may tumble again for another. Among those couples that Fisher is studying are newly met partners in nursing homes, people in their 70s and 80s, whose infatuation is just as intense as that shared by 20-year-old lovers. "I think there's a wonderful message in that," she says.

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Deborah Blum is a Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer, the author of Sex and the Brain (Viking), and a professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Wisconsin.

[eyes_up]

"Unlike a man, a woman cannot breed every time she copulates. In fact, anthropologist Donald Symons has argued that, because the number of children a woman can bear is limited, women are biologically less motivated to seek fresh features."

This just sounds way too made up and by a man. Could it be possible that the woman is busy tending to children and the energy is focused else where.

Seeking fresh features is only possible if the attention isn't on nurturing the children. Bearing children doesn't seem to be the larger part of the task.

Obviously I do not agree with the above argument. I tend to think there is a natural balance/order through the womans  selection. Female refined selection is part of the whole. It isn't because she ovulates only once a month. Female sex is more complex than that.

I also say that their is more to sex or thier can be than simply getting impregnated.


The way Sex is approached is as if every one is experiencing famine. I mean if there was no food every one would be out for food. If the population was low then bearing children would be a major focus. Yet population is enormous. Running around copulating to make sure one genetics is taking over the planet seems base in terms of intelligence. So is creating war. Both of which are due for change/evolution.

Also I think more women would be sampling  more men if they were culturally forbidden and oppressed (controlled). There are a lot of things some women do and most women do not due to patriarchal rules so mind/psyche has something to do with this.

The facts are not out until every one gets to delight in base level / instincts. Who knows what the human world would look like if men decided to stop dominating females and females decide that their rights and instincts deserve to thrive.

I listened to a study done on college students. They were asked to anonymously tell how many sex partners they have in a month and in a year or what ever/

The women all slanted the numbers down and the men all raised them up higher. Womens bodies have been controlled for eons. I doubt a truthful survey or argument can be published until women are acting behaving whole heartedly on instincts. Then there is the womens selections process which differs from a mans since she claims immediate responsibility to the off spring her job is huge compared to a mans. A mans job takes about how long???

The above statement with quotations is not including the whole sexual process of the female...it is narrowing it down to one part of the process.

I think there is much more involved with why a woman isn't running around with her skirt flying up at every party other than she only ovulates once every month. It is a more complex combination.

eyes

[CZBZ]

LiveScience.com: Monogamous Animals, It's not What You Think

http://www.livescience.com/bestimg/index.php?url=monogamous_Prairie_Vole.jpg&cat=monogamous

This is an interesting site as long as we're comparing ourselves to animals (without bringing up the human capacity for CONSCIENCE that differentiates human beings from animals, heh?). You have to rate each animal image to progress to the next image but it's worth the hassle.

Hugs,
CZ