Less sex, better dating?

Stop having sex! Okay, maybe that's a little extreme. Let me be more specific: if you are a woman who wants a long-term relationship, the single most important piece of advice I have for you is to extend the period of courtship. However long you normally wait before having sex with a man for the first time, you should undoubtedly wait a little longer. There are numerous studies to back this up.

A recent English study found that, by waiting longer, women could weed out the bad partners because those men were unwilling to wait around for, er, consummation. And there's another study that proves what researchers have taken to calling an "affective shift." What they found was that men and women react very differently after having sex for the first time. For women, feelings of attachment grow. For men, though, sleeping with a woman decreases how attractive he finds the woman and how attached he is to her.

All of this makes perfect sense if we step back in time and look at our relationships through the prism of evolution. Many evolutionary psychologists believe that our tendency to couple off grew out of a trade off--men agreed to provide food and other resources in exchange for a greater security that his children were indeed his own. A woman who sleeps with a man too quickly sends out a damning message--she is not enough of a catch to secure a long-term mate, so she is willing to settle for whatever short-term action she can get.

I realize that all of this flies in the face of sexual liberation and feminism, and it would be nice to believe that we could pursue sexual pleasure without any downsides. But part of what I try to argue in Decoding Love is that we can't simply ignore unpleasant facts just because they go against our current cultural beliefs. The truth is, scientists have devised any number of ingenious experiments that give as a detailed knowledge of human attraction and how it works. It may be more pleasant to ignore that science and do whatever we want, but it will also mean that you will be less effective at determining your romantic fate. Although I would never want to reduce love to science, I do think science can help you find love.