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.

Vocabulary and attraction

Single men, take note! It may be time to start casually dropping big words into flirtatious conversations. Tongue twisters like triskaidekaphobia (fear of the number 13) or sesquipedalian (characterized by long words!). Researchers have long known that intelligence is one of the qualities that women look for in partner (and they care even more about for short-term hookups than they do for long-term partnerships). Well, it appears that vocabulary can be added to the list of proxies that women use to judge intelligence. In a recent British study, students were asked to imagine a romantic encounter with someone or to imagine a conversation with an older person. Then the students were asked to write an essay on an unrelated topic. The result? Male students who had been primed with thoughts of romance used more unusual words in their essays. This should give hope to any of us geeks and nerds who fear we might never find someone and hide our insecurity behind daunting vocabulary words.

Risky sex... among Nile lechwe

According to a recent article in The Economist, the Nile lechwe (an endangered antelope) engages in risky sex--at least the female does. And, no, it's nothing kinky. But researchers have found that as the mothers age, they have a higher percentage of sons. Scientists have not figured out the mechanism behind this, but it is more clear cut evidence of how deeply sexual selection principles are hard-wired into us (including humans). In this case, the sexual shift appears to be a classic example of risk/reward. Almost all females reproduce, so having daughters is a good way to ensure genetic success. Sons are riskier. Only the more successful will mate, but they have the chance to pass along their genes to many more offspring. As female lechwe near the end of their lives, it appears that they are more willing to roll the dice on males, even though male births are also three times more likely to kill them. Apparently, once a female lechwe has neared the end of her ability to breed, she is willing to pay the ultimate price in an attempt to pass along her genes to a greater number of offspring.

Of laughter and marriage

Teasing is good for your relationship! That, at least, is what recent studies suggest. Researchers have discovered that married couples who have a lot of nicknames for one another are happier. In fact, teasing has been shown to help even during fights. This goes against the conventional wisdom of couples therapy, which often insists on discussing things in the most earnest tones imaginable. These findings go to the heart of one of the great paradoxes of relationships. Although they are incredibly important and serious, they do better when we treat them with a certain amount of playfulness. People always talk about working on a relationship, but that is often the wrong approach. When you think it's time to work on the relationship, that probably means it's time to play.

Sperm and superiority

The latest study offers an interesting twist on what women should look for in a man--good sperm. Okay, okay, I know the next question: how does one go about finding good sperm? Well, it turns out that all a woman needs to find is an intelligent man. A recent study discovered a clear link between intelligence (as measured by something called Spearman's g) and sperm quality. Since we are all shaped by sexual selection, this is not a shocking finding, but it does offer an interesting window into just how deeply that sexual selection has shaped our species. On first blush, most of us would probably assume that there were many good reasons for the development of intelligence that had nothing to do with attracting a mate. But this study suggests the possibility that we have put the cart before the horse. Perhaps sexual selection is actually the driving force behind the expansion in human intelligence, and the many other uses we find for our brains are actually just fortunate byproducts of that sexual selection. Who knew that dating might hold the key to human evolution?

The battle of the sexes

The science section of The New York Times had an interesting article last Tuesday (Nov. 11) on a new theory about mental disorders. It suggested that there is a struggle between a mother and a father’s genes for control of the brain. If the mother’s side wins too decisively, the brain can end up with schizophrenia or a related mental illness. If the father's side wins too decisively, the child can have autism. Now, there is still a lot of evidence needed to validate this model. But it does fit with a number of other things I have read.

For example, it turns out that the fetus is not some harmless passenger in the mother’s body. In many ways, it is like an internal parasite, and the mother’s body is in a constant struggle to keep the fetus from wreaking havoc with the mother’s health (a lot of pregnancy problems, such as gestational diabetes, stem from this struggle).

What all this suggests is that many things we assume are harmonious are actually better described as a kind of stalemate between fiercely warring factions. And I want to suggest that male-female relationships also fall into this category. Take conception. Researchers have discovered a host of measures that men’s bodies naturally perform to try to ensure that they are the father of a child, while women’s bodies have developed their own counter-measures to try to ensure that they are selecting the fathers. The most wild example of this? Female orgasm, which some scientists have suggested is a “cryptic selection device.”

Of course, this sort of information is no help to people in relationships, so for them, it’s probably better to forget about this post and just think of their couplings as a beautiful expression of what happens when a man and a woman love each other very much…

The problem with dating books

I’m embarrassed to say how many dating books I’ve read. But it’s not my fault. I have had many of them foisted on me over the years by my sisters or my female friends. And I had to read a whole slew of them when I was researching my book, Decoding Love. After doing that, I have to come to one simple conclusion, there’s no there there. The vast majority of books are basically a series of anecdotes strung together.

Let’s take a huge hit from a few years ago, He’s Just Not That Into You. As Sex and the City fans know, this book emerged from Miranda’s sudden relationship epiphany that all of male relationship misbehavior can be explained with one simple statement: He’s just not that into you. And the book goes on to illustrate the point in endless ways. It’s the first book I have ever read that you really could judge not just by its cover but by its title alone.

I can see the appeal of the book. It’s funny and entertaining. As relationship advice, though, it is, to say the least, a little thin. If I could pose one simple question, why is he just not that into you? I don’t think that is too much to ask. I’m not looking for heavy number crunching and statistical modeling. But I think it’s not unreasonable to offer something to readers beyond a one-sentence thesis.

And there is a fairly straightforward explanation. Men make sperm, and women make eggs. My previous post explains the significance of this, so I won’t go into the details again. But I do think the reader deserves more than a one-sentence catchphrase when trying to understand something as complicated as relationships.