Why Does a Lover Pull Away after Sex?
To understand this common, but painful, phenomenon, learn how emotions and feelings arise in the primitive part of the brain. All feelings correspond to neurochemicals released in the brain and body, and they have multiple effects. In this article we will look at some key neurochemicals behind motivation, desire, and indifference....
Your primitive brain accomplishes these goals of more progeny and promiscuity by manipulating your brain chemistry, and thus your desires and thoughts. High levels of dopamine increase sexual desire, encouraging you to behave recklessly. The thrill of a new affair and the rush from using pornography are examples of high dopamine.
Unfortunately, consistently high levels of dopamine lead to erratic behavior and compulsions that are not conducive to survival. Most mammals, therefore, evolved with defined estrus periods when they "go into heat." The rest of the time they are more or less neutral about sex.
Humans, however, don't have a period of "heat" followed by a long period of indifference to sex. Unlike all other mammals, we have the potential for on-going, dopamine-driven sexual desire. Yet we, too, self-regulate. An "off switch" kicks in after too much passion....
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Have A Laugh at the Gender Gap
My girlfriend and I had been dating for over a year, and so we decided to get married. My parents helped us in every way, my friends encouraged me, and my girlfriend? She was a dream!
There was only one thing bothering me, very much indeed, and that one thing was her younger sister. My prospective sister-in-law was twenty years of age, wore tight mini skirts and low cut blouses. She would regularly bend down when quite near me and I got many a pleasant view of her underwear. She never did it when she was near anyone else.
One day little sister called and asked me to come over to check the wedding invitations. She was alone. She whispered to me that soon I was to be married, and she had feelings and desires for me that she couldn't overcome. She told me that she wanted to make love to me just once before I got married and committed to her sister. I was in total shock and couldn't say a word. She said, "I'm going upstairs to my bedroom, and if you want to go ahead with it just come up and get me." I was stunned. I was frozen in shock as I watched her go up the stairs. When she reached the top she pulled down her panties and threw them down the stairs at me. I stood there for a moment, then turned and went straight to the front door. I opened the door and stepped out of the house. I walked straight towards my car. My future father-in-law was standing outside. With tears in his eyes he hugged me and said, "We are very happy that you have passed our little test. We couldn't ask for a better man for our daughter. Welcome to the family.
The moral of this story is: "Always keep your condoms in your car."
Letters from the Trenches
All this info you sent ["Reuniting" newsletter] is quite fascinating. Though I have an intuitive sense of its merit (as I have the experience of "depression" after orgasm which I've previously identified with my sexual issues, past abuses, religious conceptions, etc.), from where I'm standing, "non-orgasm intimate relationship" feels like an oxymoron. Based on my experience I have not been able to seperate sexual intimacy and orgasm/ejaculation. Is there a technique I could benefit in practicing? What is the trick? ...
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PEACE BETWEEN THE SHEETS News
Want to tell Oprah about "Peace Between the Sheets?"
Many of you have told us that "Oprah should do a show on this material." Here's a link to her "submit show ideas" page. Feel free to tell her why you think so.
Link to Oprah's submission form
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'Fidelity gene' found in voles
A single gene can turn the Don Juan of voles into an attentive home-loving husband, Nature magazine has reported. By altering the small animal's brain hormone chemistry, scientists have made a promiscuous meadow vole faithful - just like its prairie vole cousin....
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The Kreutzer Sonata
In this story by Leo Tolstoy, an acquitted wife-murderer tells the gut-wrenching tale of his marriage. The Kreutzer Sonata is a candid account of the hidden weakness in sexual union. A brilliant observer and recorder of human nature, Tolstoy realized that there was indeed an addictive cycle to conventional sex.
I had become what is called a voluptuary; and to be a voluptuary is a physical condition like the condition of a victim of the morphine habit, of a drunkard, and of a smoker.
He also recorded how the "hangover" part of sex's addictive cycle was at the heart of the disharmony that erupts between men and women. Had Tolstoy known more about neurochemistry, he might have put it all together for himself, because he realized that the mood shifts in his marriage correlated with passionate encounters, both in number and intensity. "These periods of irritation depended very regularly upon the periods of love. Each of the latter was followed by one of the former. A period of intense love was followed by a long period of anger; a period of mild love induced a mild irritation. We did not understand that this love and this hatred were two opposite faces of the same animal feeling." How right he was! He perfectly describes the symptoms of high dopamine and its subsequent shutdown after over-stimulation of the pleasure/reward center of the primitive brain.
Sadly, like most lovers, he concluded that the flashes of love between him and his wife were illusory, and their recurring post-passion antipathy was the reality.
Love was exhausted with the satisfaction of sensuality. … I did not realize that this cold hostility was our normal state, and that this first quarrel would soon be drowned under a new flood of the intensest sensuality. I thought that we had disputed with each other, and had become reconciled, and that it would not happen again. But in this same honeymoon there came a period of satiety, in which we ceased to be necessary to each other, and a new quarrel broke out. It became evident that the first was not a matter of chance.
Indeed he says,
ninety-nine families out of every hundred live in the same hell, and … it cannot be otherwise....But… all, like myself, imagine that it is a misfortune exclusively reserved for themselves alone, which they carefully conceal as shameful, not only to others, but to themselves, like a bad disease.…"
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