Hug the Monkey

Mommy Your Man or Have a Grown-Up Relationship

There used to be a popular T-shirt that read, "I wanted to have a baby, not marry one!"

In fact, women can easily fall into the trap of mothering their mates. First, women's higher levels of oxytocin make them prone to mothering behaviors. And, let's face it, men who grew up with mommies who took care of them sometimes have a difficult time transitioning to independent adulthood. Finally, many men seem to not care as much as the women in their lives about things like neatness and nutrition.

These factors make it all too easy to fall into mommying him: Picking up after him, reminding him to take care of himself, making doctors appointments for him, etc. According to this article on CNN Living, it's a really bad idea.

Babying the man in your life can mean two things, Tessina says: A. You've been spending too much time being mommy and may need a break from the kids, or B. You need more adult contact, whether it be a weekend away with the girls or a few hours at the mall while the kids are with a sitter.

Tessina says that normal nurturing -- cooking for him, massaging him, tending to him when he's sick -- can feel motherly if you're too controlling about it. "Instead, tell him what you'd like to do to help him, and ask him if he wants that kind of help. This evens the field and makes you equals," she says.

I would add that it can ruin your sex life and your whole relationship. All that oxytocin a woman generates can make sex with him seem unconsciously weird, and oxytocin is not the hormone of desire, it's the hormone of fulfilled desire, aka orgasm. An excess of oxytocin also can damp down the effects of his testosterone -- not a problem when he's a young bull, but increasingly an issue as he -- and the marriage -- ages.

Besides, who wants to make love to a baby?

Read the article for amazing stories of how far some women go.

Do You Mommy Your Husband?

Tend and Befriend during Hurricane Katrina

  Reunion Arena Relief Efforts 
  Originally uploaded by tonguetyed.

You were more likely to survive Hurricane Katrina if you had the benefit of a social network with other women, according to researchers at the University of Missouri.

According to the article,

Jacqueline Litt, associate professor and chair of the Department of Women's and Gender Studies at MU, found that informal family and community networks coordinated by women are vital in emergency situations. More than 50 people were evacuated from New Orleans, La., through the efforts of two "core anchors," a 58-year-old woman and her daughter, who initiated communication and organization using established familial and social relationships.

Litt found that warnings from the government didn't carry as much weight with people as word of mouth from people they already knew and trusted. And women, who tend to be better at communicating and keeping in touch, were better at getting the word out and getting people to act in time.

This finding reflects a reaction to danger or stress that UCLA psychologist Shelley Taylor dubbed "tend and befriend." According to Taylor, while men often go into fight-or-flight mode, women have evolved the tend and befriend strategy because it was more likely to ensure that the children would be safe or at least survive. If a mother stood up and fought -- and lost -- her child might be killed too. If the child wasn't killed, it could only survive if her kin or friend were willing to foster it.

Taylor thinks that oxytocin, the neurochemical of calm and bonding, might be at work in the tend-and-befriend survival strategy. Oxytocin is also the chemical of social connection, helping women to create and maintain the social networks that can help them and their children survive.

The example of these women during the hurricane is an excellent example of this survival mechanism in action.

Is Gay Love Different?

If you're interested in my scientifically informed hypotheses about how gay bonding is different and the same from the straight version, please check out my article on Scientific Blogging: Lesbian Bed Death Explained.

The Vasopressin Takeover

Evan of Two Puppies Enter, One Puppy Leaves posted a link to a BBC science podcast in which scientists explain that three years after the birth of a child, oxytocin receptors in the parents' brains wane, while vasopressin becomes more prevalent.

I don't have time to listen to the podcast or follow up on the journal articles right now, but according to his blog post, Lucy Vincent (neurobiologist at the French Scientific Research Center) and Dave Perrett (Professor of Psychology at the University of St. Andrews) said that

after 12-18 months the infant becomes significantly less vulnerable (able to stand and perhaps throw off a bird or small animal attacking it), at which point only one parent would be necessary. And at that point, the oxytocin effect more or less ceases, yielding to increased vasopressin receptor activity- essentially a biochemical foundation for why people tend to “fall out of love” after a few years

I think maybe they were talking about the male brain, not the female's.

Motherhood and fatherhood both change a person's brain; changes in the mother's brain have been shown to be permanent in rats. However, oxytocin receptors, which become profuse during pregnancy, may disappear and/or become less sensitive.

Vasopressin, which is very closely related to oxytocin, may be more involved in male attachment, and lead to the expression of this attachment in protective behaviors. If you have the time, his post and the podcast are probably worth checking out.

Sex, Orgasm, Bonding and the Marital Blahs

Commenting on my post about how getting together with friends can provide a nice oxytocin boost that makes a woman happier in her marriage too, Dave said:

Over the years I have heard the importance of communicating, sharing non-sexual intimacy, supporting each other, etc., etc., but have rarely heard women openly say that sex is what bonds them to men. How about the more experienced couples (I don't want to say "older") - would most women who have been married 10, 20 years or more agree that sex is still the bonding element ? I believe it is, but do they ?

I think "ideally" is the operative word. Unfortunately, when it comes to sex and orgasm, the situation for women is far from ideal.

Orgasm can be problematic for women for several reasons. While this doesn't hold true for everyone, and I think our culture might be changing, many times:

Women are taught that sex is dirty or bad.

Women are not taught to get in touch with our bodies to learn what feels good, and what good sex should feel like.

Women are not taught to ask for what we want, in bed or out of it.

Pornography, as well as our soft-porn entertainment industry, portrays men and women as always sexually ready and available. Men can be really surprised, frustrated and bored  when a woman needs a lot of foreplay. I mean, we may be talking 20 or 30 minutes. How many men are, ahem, up for that?

Men get angry, annoyed, put off or insecure if women ask them to change what they're doing during sex, because  it makes them feel criticized.

Neither men nor women are taught anything about making love. We blunder through it at first, and often pick up bad habits.

Once a man and a woman become regular sex partners, it's not as *exciting*. So, the woman may actually need more foreplay or to be approached more slowly, while the man may feel he doesn't have to seduce her any longer.

As a man gets older, his erections may be less strong or less reliable. Our culture unfortunately expects men to be always ready sexually, so they feel shame if they don't get an erection right away. Instead of focusing on his partner and letting it happen or not, the man starts to focus more and more on his penis, making sex less and less pleasing for his partner.

So, a couple may start off with some bad sexual habits: He rushes things, she doesn't demand that he slow down, etc. Then,  after 10 or 15 years, when his testosterone dies down, sex begins to seem kind of pointless to her and she puts him off more and more.

They hopefully still will bond through sleeping together, hugging and other less sexual kinds of touching. We hear about couples who have sex into their 70s and 80s. I suspect they're the lucky minority.

I Missed Valentine's Day!

I mean, I had a very nice two-day celebration with Mike, so I didn't miss it personally. But I did get overwhelmed by the usual spate of oxytocin-related columns and news stories that happened last year and again this week, thanks to oxytocin's newly glamorous identity.

At least six news stories followed the same train of thought:

Attraction and love the result of neurochemicals ... adrenaline, dopamine important for attraction, oxytocin for connection. Etc.

Veronica Hendrix (at left) has the most readable version of the theme.  In The Undeniable Reaction to Attraction, she starts with a fun anecdote before examining the triggers that cause this neurochemical chain reaction to begin. She writes,

"The sequence of attraction, according to researchers goes something like this: people are first induced by visual triggers, such as body language or physical attributes, which stimulates their interest; secondly, it’s the resonance of a person’s voice; then finally, the content of what person is actually saying seals the deal."

Sexual Monogamy Probably Doesn't Exist

The prairie voles are always touted as paragons of monogamy, ever since Sue Carter at the University of Illinois made headlines by "turning off" pair bonds in females by blocking the effects of oxytocin.

The idea is that in the brains of monogamous animals, including humans, oxytocin and dopamine interact in the brain's reward centers to create what's sometimes described as an addiction to the mate.

But Carter and her early collaborator, Larry Young of Emory University, constantly reiterate that the voles are socially monogamous. In other words, they live in stable families consisting of a mating pair -- that stays mated for life -- and virgin offspring. This doesn't stop them from extra-pair copulation.

I went to a seminar last year in which Young said that a very high percentage of male prairie voles never become monogamous.

Now, new research published in Nature showed that the prairie voles cheat a lot. Lead researcher Alexander Ophir quantified these extra-pair couplings, but found that it didn't have any effect on the vole couples' ability to successfully breed and raise offspring.

Smooch of Oxytocin

Looks like we can add kissing to the list of activities that promote the release of oxytocin. According to a story in that most romantic of publications, Scientific American, Wendy L. Hill and her student Carey A. Wilson of Lafayette College compared the blood levels of cortisol and oxytocin in men and women, before and after they kissed.

They expected oxytocin to go up and cortisol to go down post-liplock. Surprisingly, only the men's oxytocin levels rose. The women's actually got lower. Cortisol levels dropped after kissing in both sexes.

SciAm got their conclusion a little wrong. According to the article, Hill and Wilson hypothesize that women need more than a little kiss to get the love thang going. In fact, the researchers thought that the atmosphere of the lab might be at fault. From the abstract:

... the gender effect on changes in OT suggests that females may require a more intimate atmosphere than males in order to respond positively to a kiss.

It's also possible that blood levels don't accurately reflect the levels in the brain in this case.

Laura's Psychology Blog has all the relevant links.

The Power of Courtship

Some private comments to me from a reader prompted me to think more about how culture influences our perceptions about what's the “normal” progression of love relationships.

He's 19 and says he's never been in a relationship, and therefore doesn't understand what love is. He added that this could be because of his cultural background.

This totally makes sense to me. Love, in the sense of the oxytocin-based bond, is deeply physical as well as emotional. By that, I don't mean necessarily sex or sensuality, but rather that the oxytocin response, like other emotional responses, is a full-body feeling. I think my friend, whom I will call T., may be in a highly desirable though rare state.

I've written before about the difference between romantic love and committed, oxytocin-based love. American culture focuses on romantic love, which is based on excitement and novelty. Helen Fisher, author of Why We Love, thinks that lust, romance and love are handled by different systems in the brain, so they're not even that related. Americans strive for that early romantic stage and, when it inevitably ends, think they've fallen out of love.

So, T. seems to have managed to avoid those false expectations of romance that our culture imposes. He's an emotional virgin. That means, when he does fall in love – and I believe he will, when he's ready – he'll be able to experience it in all its depth and glory and variety, as it moves from romance to committed love.

T. also said that different groups of friends encourage him to do different things. I would guess that his westernized friends encourage him to date a lot of women, and have sex with him if he can. It's important to be experienced, they tell him. Friends from his traditional culture advise him to wait until he's found someone he wants to marry.

The more I learn about the oxytocin bond, the more respect I have for traditional behavior. Let me invoke once again the prairie voles.

These monogamous rodents provided the first clues to how oxytocin creates social bonds. Thomas Insel, Larry Young and Sue Carter all did experiments with blocking the effects of oxytocin or injecting it into the brains of voles. And they found that, especially in females, blocking oxytocin blocked the ability to bond.

But bonding doesn't happen automatically for the prairie voles. Females don't go into estrus and then seek out or accept a male. Here's how they mate: Females remain with their family groups, while newly mature males leave the nest. When a male finds a virgin female, he remains close by. After approximately three days of peaceful proximity, the female goes into estrus and they mate, then go off to establish their own nest.

The female needs time to become comfortable with the male before she's receptive. Once they've mated, they're mated for life. (Although both may engage in extra-pair copulation.)

Does that sound like traditional human courtship or what?

In fact, it's clear that human mates are able to bond deeply without going through the romantic phase at all.

My advice to T. would be: It's natural to wonder about love, to crave and desire it. Don't try to force it by doing anything that doesn't feel right or comfortable to you. Instead, wait until you meet someone who is like you. And don't worry about understanding love. When it begins for you, you'll know it.

See Also, Romance versus Love and Get Over Romance, Already.

Photo from Just Clicked.

Cuddles Now or Hookups Later

A terrific article in Time magazine talks about how we develop the ability to love -- as well as the style in which we love.

Writer Tiffany Sharples mentions unpublished research showing that kids who grow up in cold or hostile families are more likely to engage in sexual behavior at an early age.

Psychologists have long warned that children who grow up in a hostile home or one in which warmth is withheld are likelier to start having sex earlier and engage in it more frequently. In a study that will be published in March, Trish Williams, a neuropsychology fellow at Alberta Children's Hospital, studied a group of 1,959 kids ages 11 to 13 and did find a striking correlation between a volatile home and earlier sexual behavior. A few of the children had had intercourse at as young an age as 12, and while the number of sexually active kids wasn't high--just 2% of the total--the cause was clear. "Hostile parenting is highly associated with problem behavior," says Williams.

This is another thing that can seem like a big duh. When you don't get enough love at home, you'll try to get it wherever you can -- and for preteens and teens, love is pretty hard to separate from sex. (And that craving for love can be seen as a need for more oxytocin release to counteract the stress of daily life.)

But it's important to have this kind of statistical backing for what some people understand intuitively, because other people don't. Everyone thinks  -- or at least unconsciously feels -- that the way they grew up is normal. If you had cold withdrawn parents, you're very likely to parent your kids the same way, rationalizing it by saying, "They need to be independent and able to stand up to the hardships of life." Or something.

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