Moody Bitches: The Truth about the Drugs You’re Taking, the Sleep You’re Missing, the Sex You’re Not Having and What’s Really Making You Crazy.... Julie Holland
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say they have created lasting pairs in this way. Follow your nose to marital bliss. Being attracted to someone’s pheromones can help carry you through some significant bumps in the relationship. Taking in another’s scent helps with bonding. Primates are prosocial, and they solidify bonds in their community by grooming, which involves sitting close to each other and breathing in each other’s scent, never mind picking and eating bugs off each other’s fur. The next time you’re mad at him, smell your man’s armpits or T-shirts, and see if that doesn’t help you feel a bit better about who he is and what you have together. If and when you have them, smell your kids, too. There’s research on mother-infant bonding via pheromones as well.
Men rate not just a woman’s visible sexual attractiveness as highest when she’s midcycle; they like her scent more then, too. If she’s on the Pill and not ovulating, she doesn’t have the same “cyclical attractiveness of odors” that naturally cycling women do. A much bigger deal: being on the Pill affects the way women process pheromones in terms of these important genetic compatibility issues. Women on the Pill don’t seem to show the same responsiveness to male scent cues. They tend to pick mates who are more similar to them, and less “other.” Scottish researcher Tony Little found that women’s assessment of men as potential husband material shifted drastically if they were on oral contraceptives. In a replay of the sweaty T-shirt experiment, women who were using birth control pills chose men’s T-shirts randomly or, even worse, showed a preference for men with similar immunity to their own. One study remarked that a woman on the Pill might go off it only to realize she is with someone who is more like a brother than a lover.
The good news is that she will probably pick a dad and not a cad. Women on the Pill favor less masculine men, which could mean he will stick around for child rearing. But do you want him? Women who were on oral contraceptives when they chose their mates scored lower on measures of sexual satisfaction and partner attraction. If there was a separation in their relationship, they were more likely to have initiated it than the men were, and more likely to complain of increasing sexual dissatisfaction. But they were also happier with how their partners provided for them, and often ended up having longer relationships.
These days, I actually recommend to my patients who are on oral contraceptives that they go off them for three or four cycles to make sure the man they met when they were on the Pill is still the man they want to bed down year after year and create a family with when they’re off it. Once you’re already in a relationship, it gets mighty complicated to stop your birth control to reassess the man you’ve already chosen. Better to do your mate selecting while not under the influence of any other hormones besides your own, which means finding a nonhormonal form of birth control—such as condoms, an IUD, a diaphragm, or a cervical cap—while you’re on the lookout for the man of your dreams. I also recommend spending some time in his armpit to make sure he’s the one. I’m not kidding. The body, undisrupted, is powerfully intuitive and worth listening to.
Mating, MILFs, Monogamy, and Menopause
The way we’re wired, neurologically and hormonally, has a lot to do with how we think and feel—and when we think and feel it. But relationships exert their own powerful effects on the body and the mind. The first few months of attraction create a heady mix of neurotransmitters that no drug can adequately mimic. As a psychiatrist, I will say this: falling in love turns women into manic, obsessive, delusional junkies. At its most unromantic, falling in love is the neural mechanism of mate selection, evolved to ensure that we pine for, obsess over, and pursue the one person we believe will provide us with not only the fittest offspring but also the support to nurture that child through infancy. Falling in love with someone is an elaborate dance in the brain and body that motivates and focuses us on mating with this preferred partner. And in the early stages, the difference between falling in lust and falling in love can be difficult to distinguish. The progression from attraction to attachment is a physical process as much as it’s an emotional one. (Attachment, the phase that comes after attraction, has its own brain chemistry, which I’ll get to in the next chapter.)
Dopamine is the key chemical element of attraction, underlying the experiences of paying attention, sensing pleasure, and seeking reward. Dopamine tells us two things: “Notice this important thing” (called salience) and “This feels good; do it again.” The reward circuitry runs on dopamine, the molecular cornerstone of addiction. Drugs that enhance dopamine levels, like cocaine and speed, are more likely to be addictive than other drugs; many researchers believe a drug can’t be addictive without at least secondarily increasing dopamine transmission.
When you fall in love, dopamine makes you crave and need your newfound crush. The object of your affection is specific, partly because dopamine has tagged him or her as salient. Experiments with prairie voles, typically monogamous, showed that higher levels of dopamine were responsible for preferring a particular partner, and blocking dopamine decreased that partner preference. In anthropologist Helen Fisher’s brain scans of people who fell deeply in love, their dopaminergic reward systems were kicked into high gear, reminiscent of brain scans of people high on cocaine. Increased blood flow was seen in the caudate nucleus, an area fed by dopamine neurons. Sometimes referred to as the “motor of the mind,” the caudate directs your body to approach the target, motivating you to go after the reward. Dopamine ensures that this is a pleasurable process, making the behavior reinforcing, meaning you’ll gladly do it repeatedly.
Addiction is characterized by three things: sensitization, tolerance, and withdrawal. Over time, smaller triggers will induce a craving, more substance is required to induce pleasure, and going on the wagon feels terrible. You see the same increase in wanting, in appetite and desire, whether for a drug or for a crush. And if the object of your desires breaks it off, your brain chemicals nosedive into abrupt withdrawal. Expect a bad crash. Crying, sleeping, and bingeing on food and alcohol are common in my jilted patients. If you reunite, some portion of the feel-good chemistry reappears, convincing you that you were meant to be together. But don’t be fooled by your pharmacological homecoming party—junkies feel good when they relapse, too, at first. It doesn’t necessarily mean he’s the one, but it should help to explain the particular pleasure of makeup sex. You fight; you feel ultraterrible because you’re in withdrawal from your lover and a whole lot better, and higher, once you are reunited.
The dopamine reward circuitry underlies not just pleasure but the anticipation of more pleasure and the motivation to get it. This may be the biological logic underlying the age-old advice to play hard to get and the dating advice book The Rules. Studies show that getting the reward too early in the game reduces the intensity and the duration of the brain’s dopamine activity. A delay in the win gives the most pleasure, potentially benefiting both of you.
But dopamine alone is not responsible for that blissful feeling of finding Mr. Right. Falling in love stimulates the release of norepinephrine, a chemical cousin of adrenaline, which keeps you excited and energized, with sweaty palms and a rapid heartbeat. Norepinephrine revs up all five senses, the better to heighten awareness and remember every detail of your love object and his or her effect on you. Your brain and body are on high alert, primed for action and reaction. Sleep is optional. So is food, for that matter.
Norepinephrine also contributes to