Is Sex Mindless?

You’ll notice an emerging theme both here and in my psychology today blog:  Passion isn’t just a feeling; it’s movement. It’s a furtive glance, an inside joke, and yes, it’s middle aged parents planning a date night.

The whole reason I wrote the Valentine’s day piece, which reviewed research on the role of behavior in romantic attraction, was to reclaim and celebrate human agency in romance. We’ve become drunk with the sense of power that comes from peering into the brain, via MRI, and catching cupid in the act. I get this fascination with what makes us tick. It’s why I became a psychologist. But there are times that, in all our glee over being able to catalog various neurotransmitters and their effects,  we seem to lose sight of our humanity–or more precisely what makes us so uniquely human. We don’t just act on urge or impulse (at least, not all the time). Humans can also plan and sing and dream, and even though all that surely affects chemistry, too, you wouldn’t know it. Not based on how attraction is discussed in some articles.

A recent piece on the Wall Street Journal’s site reviewed a good deal of research suggesting that the use of contraceptive changes women’s (and men’s) mate preferences. Naturally, this is just one interpretation of the data, but  people are more than happy to run with it. Deprovera (a common birth control drug), apparently, is  now causing affairs and divorce.

My question with these studies, which are often based on fleeting and abstract markers of attraction (who doesn’t like photos of hot people?), is how much of a role do these responses really play in actual romantic relationships, especially committed, long term ones? We’ll always find some people more physically attractive than our partners. What seems most important is how we choose to respond to those feelings. There’s considerable evidence that we also influence the chemistry of attraction through behavior (see for example, here ), which could easily override evolutionary influences. In fact, in another study, committed men actually seemed to be able to turn themselves off in the presence of ovulating women. Where does the influence of biology end and the impact of behavior (and conscious choice) begin?

Comments

[lederm]

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