Cupid's Poisoned Arrow

I find this essay very interesting and well articulated. What I see is a growing realization in modern thought that human behavior might be at its most genetic level programmed towards a form of serial monogamy, with each love cycle designed to last long enough to raise a child effectively. (With variation of course, just like there's a spectrum of sexual preference, some people will naturally lean towards life long monogamy and others towards an inability to be happy in any monogamous relationship for any amount of time, and most somewhere in the middle.)

You wrote "In future posts we'll look at an option that various cultures throughout history employed: a way to make love that helps stave off habituation." In addition to looking for solutions around our biology to fit the mold of the culture we've created, I hope you can also address the very real possibility that life-long, monogamous coupling may in fact be a cultural construct that works against the natural nature of at least a large percentage of the human population. Before language developed, humans could not have negotiated intent of life-long bonding and that may be a clue into its artificialness.

Thanks for your comments, Daniel. I'd certainly agree that we are not *designed* to bond for life. Diversity in our offspring clearly serves our genes.

Some of us would *like* to bond for life, perhaps because we want to raise a kid together, or simply because we're tired of our genetic program jerking us around from mate to mate for its own ends.

In any case, the desire to form a lasting bond is a very healthy desire. Close, trusted companionship is associated with longer lives, lower rates of addiction and illness, and better psychological health. Mind you, I'm not judging those who prefer casual sex, just pointing out that a desire for a life companion is very healthy, even if our design doesn't make it easy to achieve.

Our design doesn't have to rule us, however. As an Oxford ethicist said, "There is no moral imperative to obey evolution." This is why I'm intrigued by ways of making love that counter habituation.

I know it's popular to say that monogamy is merely a social construct. I think this is only partly true. I think unrealistic expectations about living happily ever after, built into our culture, don't serve us as well as a clear-eyed understanding of our evolutionary heritage. However, while we may not be designed for lifelong monogamy on average, we *are* designed to pair bond. This means that the phenomenon of monogamy, even if it's only social monogamy, is more than cultural.

This distinguishes us from our closest genetic relatives, the bonobos, for example. This difference is a physiological and neurochemical difference. It looks like pair-bonders have more sensitive reward circuitry than non-pair-bonders. This appears to be what makes mating rewarding enough to urge us to bond...at least long enough to fall in love with our kids.

Alas, this increased sensitivity to dopamine also appears to make pair-bonders more susceptible to addictive substances and activities. (For more, see: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/cupids-poisoned-arrow/200906/why-bon...)This brings me back to my first point...that bonding may be especially healthy for humans, even if it's a challenge to sustain. Perhaps it is not unreasonable to hope that, with a bit of conscious effort to counter the Coolidge Effect, our pair bonds can naturally be extended to permit lifelong harmony.

I think it's misguided to assume that certain societies instituted lifelong monogamy for arbitrary reasons, and that we can therefore simply discard that idea as "unnatural." Monogamy came about for certain social reasons that aren't going away any time soon. It's no longer true that once kids are walking, they can just bounce around the village getting all the care they need. As people living in such situations can tell you, having kids with multiple partners, or even just trying to raise kids alone, gets really challenging really fast. Additionally, for a lot of people in our society, a spouse is the only permanent close relationship they're likely to have, so changing it every couple of years could be extremely disruptive. It would certainly be feasible to argue that we really should go back to living in extended family groups, but until that happens, long-term monogamy retains important functions.

As said prevously, this was a very well written summary of human sexual habituation. However I find myself asking one question which was not adressed. Has there been any research on the restoration of perceived novelty in prevous mates or sexual re-sensatization? In other words, has anyone tried to put monkeys (or people as the ethics board of that country may permit) who have grown tired of sex with one another back together and observed incrimentally renewed attraction after a period of seporation? And if so what is the resensatization period and how might this affect strategies to counteract sexual boredome? (eg abstain for a period and, as the case may be, masturbate or not - note I do not suggest "taking a break" and engaging other partners because the effects of such a break might defeat it's purpose so it's not of interest. To me at least - I don't doubt it could work though, it just seems like too many varriables would be introduced to produce a really consistent effect.)

A form of this experiment is practiced all the time by some Jews. They sleep in separate beds for almost two weeks of each month (the woman's period, plus seven days).

I once spoke to a widow who had practiced it her whole married life. She swore by it. Said it made sex special, partly because of the time-outs, but also because she felt she was doing what God had asked, so sex was "sacred." She said that when she was pregnant...which was a lot of the time, because this system returns partners to each other right at ovulation...and she and her hubby could have as much sex as they pleased, they usually waited until the Sabbath anyway - to keep the special feeling in their encounters.

I'm sure there are many ways to "skin the cat" of warding off the Coolidge Effect. Personally, I'm partial to the karezza solution, which I'll blog about soon.

I don't think this is entirely accurate. Dopamine isn't the only hormone at play when animals are "at play" -- you have to look into the oxytocin. Bonding hormones can be just as inspiring as dopamine, even if less "roller coaster"-like in character. But you don't want to ride a coaster forever, do you? If constrained to spend the rest of your life in a comfy arm chair or a coaster seat, I think you'd take the arm chair.

You're right that other neurochemicals are involved. In fact, the situation is very complex indeed. And oxytocin certainly plays a role. However, it looks like dopamine is the most critical player when it comes to attraction. Consider this article: "Monogamy: dopamine ties the knot" (PDF, http://www.genetics.ucla.edu/courses/hg19/monogamy.pdf)

Without dopamine, oxytocin alone wouldn't make a bond "rewarding." We need both neurochemicals, in balanced quantities, to feel "in love." I'll have more to say about oxytocin in future posts. Although it plays an important role in our bonding program, it is not a magical love potion.

Actually, I suggest that neurochemical roller coaster rides are not a good strategy for bonding. I'm sorry if that wasn't clear.

And therefore I have more reasons to bond with my husband than reproduction, and more ways to bond with my husband than sex. So, when neither of us is particularly in the mood, we can always have a really interesting conversation or engage in one of our other common interests. See, THAT is why you marry someone for common interests, rather than letting the oversexed rat in you run away with your mind to the point that you end up marrying a monkey.

A large difference between humans and other species is that humans have more complicated verbal and nonverbal negotiation for sex. It would be interesting to know how the brain functions during the negotiation phase. My guess is that dopamine would be released in anticipation of pleasure. Yet, a healthy negotiation would mean that you do not always get what you want, so how does the brain react to anticipation followed by frustration?

I just came across this website presenting your work without crediting you at all, as far as I could see.

http://politicalleft.blog-city.com/were_not_made_for_monogamy.htm

You should probably have someone from PT's legal department talk to them.

The editor there clearly has livelier taste in pictures than we do! We checked it out and it looks like there's a link in the title to the source of the article, so that's good enough for us.

As a psych major, I have to say that most neuroscience research is not really all that authentic. Dopamine is an important neurochemical BUT its actions and functions are not all that well-known. And there are so many complex functions and reactions going on in the brain all the time that at this point of time, with our limited knowledge, I really don't see how you could definitively identify reduced levels of dopamine as the cause for decreased libido.

What this article attempts to do, I feel, is try to justify the inability to stay faithful to a partner in a pseudo-scientific manner. As any good little psych student learns in an intro psych course, results from studies on animals may not (in fact are generally not) analogous to humans. How can you be sure that what you take for a rat's libido translates to a human's libido? Answer: you can't. Also, I've seen my mom support my dad through bad times and though my uncle and aunt quarrel quite a bit, they generally patch things up after she cooks him his favourite noodles. Cute as rats may be, I don't think that they've developed to a point that financial markets particularly concern them or that they're able to display culinary talent. They're not even particularly inclined to exist in mating pair so how can you draw parallels between a species that is generally agonistic except when mating and a species that has made marriage (that is the maintained pairing of two individuals) a social convention?

Even the human data is extremely flawed. You CANNOT discern and predict lifelong relationship patterns and responses using data from a subject pool made up of the psychology researcher's favourite subject: the cheap and oh-so-accessible college student. I don't think anyone could say that they're socially mature at that age. Therefore, with the statement at the beginning of this article, "sexual desire generally declines in women—while desire for tenderness generally declines in men" should come a disclaimer: statement only applies to males and females of college age, since the subject pool is ONLY made up of college students, as per the original article. So, using animal results that are not entirely accurate or applicable to humans (in the real world, you do NOT induce female desire by shooting them with hormones, or at least I hope that you don't) and human results from a distinct, secular portion of the human population, this article attempts to explain and justify promiscuity, particularly male promiscuity.

This is exactly like trying to explain superior male intelligence by claiming that males have larger heads than females in absolute terms or male promiscuity by using the evolutionary psychology argument that males' sperm is "cheap" in terms of physical resources while females' eggs are "expensive" as they only ovulate once a month, if that. Thus males are more inclined and able to spread themselves around. In fact, the following explanation is offered by the German paper to explain its results: the psychological mechanisms of attachment in an adult pair bond have evolved from the parent–child bond. Due to this nonsexual origin, a stable pair-bond does not require high levels of sexual desire, after an initial phase of infatuation has passed. Nevertheless, male sexual desire should stay at a high level because it was selected for in evolutionary history as a precaution against the risk of sperm competition. The course of female sexual desire is assumed to reflect an adaptive function: to boost attachment in order to establish the bond.

If you buy that, I have a piece of land in Timbuktu that I can sell to you too. What about couples that choose not to have children? And as my professor says, "Who are these men having sex with?"

The Women's Rights Movement has resulted in women being able to vote. But as long as we have ill-founded research and conceptually-malformed articles like this heralding pseudo-discoveries that attempt to justify male promiscuity in a crock of evolutionary psychology BS, it just means that male chauvinism is now attempting to manifest itself in the more benign and non-threatening but actually infinitely more harmful guise of academia.

I can relate to your anger. It can be *such* a jolt to realize that our biological mating programs are in conflict with each other. (Coolidge Effect vs. pair bonding) It appears that this tension, which is a recipe for restlessness and heartache, serves our genes. This is hard to accept, but the good news is that by becoming aware of how these programs arise in the brain, we can also start to understand which subconscious limbic cues trigger which responses.

Just as sexual satiety seems to be a cue for habituation, bonding behaviors are a cue for contented bonds. (http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/cupids-poisoned-arrow/200909/the-laz...)

Understanding the neurochemistry for sex is optional, but helps confirm the merits of those behavioral observations.

It seems from your response that you haven't read the rest of my blog...which, like my book (Cupid's Poisoned Arrow: From Habit to Harmony in Sexual Relationships), is very much devoted to how we can encourage stable, health-giving union between two contented partners.

I've found that part of understanding why we need to do something different if we want better relationship longevity is to understand more about what we're up against. Part of what we're up against is this old mammalian program, which, like all programs, is genetic and reflected in our neurochemistry. It produces feelings of habituation, restlessness, irritability...and makes novel mates look really good. Or it produces feeling of desire for contented closeness...depending upon the behaviors we engage in.

I fully agree that throughout history many people have resisted the urges to stray to new partners in favor of maintaining their pair bonds. (Even chimps don't "go for it" if the alpha chimp is watching.) And, had more people understood how to steer away from restless urges and toward the desire for closer bonds, probably many more would have stayed bonded. For tribal, pair-bonding primates like us, bonds offer lots of physical and psychological benefits, just as friendly interaction with others does.

I'm glad for your sake that your close relatives were among those who stayed bonded. (Two caregivers are a big advantage for human babies.) This was very common in past generations. However, their fidelity may say little about the *feelings* that your relatives were struggling with.

And now that church and state can no longer hold us in matrimony...and now that we are flooded with superstimulating erotic cues in the form of hot, novel mates (even if virtual and only on computer screens), we're more and more likely to see bonds erode. In fact, we ARE seeing it. Like it or not, we're giving men (especially) the signal for "get restless and move on," rather than the signals for "find each other more and more attractive."

Now, to the science objections you raise. First, keep in mind that no matter what you learn at school, science doesn't establish truth. Truth exists independently of science. It's easy to forget this in academic settings. Research offers only bits, like mosaic chips. And it's easy to put them together wrong...and then become really enamored of one's "picture." This happens all the time, and it may, of course, prove to be true of my theories as well. ;-)

Certainly, many new insights are dismissed by academics because they don't fit the preferred, or current, mosaic. For example, the initial papers on tectonic plates and neuroplasticity were treated with the same contempt as Galileo's observations. All three were completely valid, as it turns out. (My favorite example of this kind of misplaced arrogance and censorship is the story of how explorers reported huge redwood trees on the West Coast of the USA, and academics on the East Coast proved, to their satisfaction, in scholarly papers, that such trees could NOT exist.)

Truth is true. It's not determined by researchers; bits of truth are merely uncovered by them. We can all use those pieces to think things through in light of our own experience. And we should.

Personally, I think we have a LOT to learn about how sex affects the brain. And some of it already is not fitting the existing paradigms well. But so far, our culture is clinging to the assumptions of the last half-century, and that is to be expected.

That said, it's quite well established that dopamine is connected to libido. I'd be really interested in seeing research that suggests it is not. Pharmaceutical companies are even designing (risky) sexual enhancement drugs based on dopamine.

Of course not all animal studies perfectly mirror humans. On the other hand, as my husband quips, "Scientists aren't doing experiments on rats to help *them* with their addictions and erections." Animal studies tell us a lot about the reward circuitry of the brain, where key elements of our mating programs lie. Why? Because evolution is conservative. And this part of the brain does its jobs so well that it is surprisingly similar in ALL mammals.

Incidentally, right now, scientists are doing experiments on fruit flies(!) that are revealing interesting things about dopamine, alcohol and sexual orientation. So some of these mechanisms are so old that even fruit flies may offer useful food for thought. Remember, many experiments on the delicate neurochemistry of our reward mechanisms are so invasive that they can't be done on humans...so we're stuck with animals. While that is less than ideal for science, it would be silly to *ignore* such discoveries because they aren't based on human experiments.

The goal here is to understand mechanisms based on neurochemicals and nerve cell receptors. Just as falling in love is a neurochemical (emotional, perhaps even spiritual) event, so is falling *out* of love. It's not just "bad luck" or "the wrong partner," as we like to believe. As yet, we know little about these important phenomena, but neuroscience clues can help us learn important things about them...things that could enable lovers to steer better for the results they want.

As for studies on college students (age 19-32), I agree that if you included older couples you'd probably see more stable bonds. But I'm not sure your generation will see that increased stability as you age, for the reasons stated above. Our culture is shifting rapidly...and not toward closer pair bonding for the moment.

Virtually no controlled experiment would happen "in the real world," which is why they can only reveal tiny "chips" of the Big Picture. But those chips can still be useful in inspiring important insights.

I'm not attempted to "justify" male promiscuity. But I am trying to "explain" infidelity, and what makes us restless. This restlessness strikes females, too, by the way. When a lover feels restless over the days after hot sex...but realizes that this is a *normal* set of feelings to have while his brain is returning to equilibrium and that it will pass...he may be more likely to wait it out.

Without this knowledge, it's much easier to rush to online porn or start an affair because one has only the battle between his frontal cortex and his "gut feelings" of habituation to guide him - and his gut feelings may well be unusually loud while his brain is returning to homeostasis. (See http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/cupids-poisoned-arrow/200908/orgasm-...)

I look forward to your further thoughts.

Dear Tori Tan,
Your entire post can summed up as: since we do not know everything, we know nothing, and what we do know is useless.

Science will never know everything about any subject (such as neuroscience). However, this doesn't equate to knowing nothing.
Science has a lot to learn concerning the workings of the unviverse. Do we understand the mysteries of dark matter, multivereses, and black holes? No. Does this mean we should not allow kids to learn that the earth revolves around the sun?

It's hard to take your post serious with statements such as:
"Dopamine is an important neurochemical BUT its actions and functions are not all that well-known."

Although I'm sure there is an awful lot science will learn about doapmine, science has explored its functions, and learned quite a bit. A google scholar search for dopamine gives 671,000 articles, and an NLM search gives 127,000. That's a whole lotta research.

So, I came to this article through a friend. I've been with the same man for 20 years and he basically has stopped wanted sex about three years ago. He was always a little less interested in sex and more interested in being satisfied orally so this has always been an issue. I was hoping to find some answers to my problem, as I have not lost interest. I am 47 and he is 56. I suppose it could be hormonal for him, but he's not really open to suggestions. I think his ego is in the way and he won't discuss it. He does acknowledge there is a problem, but he says he's just not interested and really doesn't ever get an erection any longer, not even in the a.m. I would be appreciative of some guidance on where I can go to read more about how to deal with this problem. He is unwilling to discuss this with his dr. or a therapist, so I am trying to deal with it and possibly ease him into sharing it with a professional. We are very much in love and missing the best part of showing each other that love.
C

I share this information just as a friend. I'm not a professional counselor.

First, men who are watching today's Internet porn for a while often suffer from erectile dysfunction. They are overstimulating their *brains*, which desensitizes them. Lack of erection is one possible symptom. Another symptom is that normal sex is simply not as stimulating as their "porn drug" (the neurochemical "hit" that accompanies today's extreme porn). So normal sex is no longer a priority.

Second, if porn is not an issue, you have another option for recreating the closeness between you. It doesn't require sexual performance (although, sexual performance can certainly be included!). The approach is "daily bonding behaviors." They sound tame, but work like a charm. Here's a post about them: "Thge Lazy Way to Stay in Love" http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/cupids-poisoned-arrow/200909/the-laz...

Good luck!