Have you ever seen headlines like "Sex Makes Your Brain Grow," "Orgasm Bonds Lovers," "Masturbation Is Good for Your Health" or "Sex Increases Longevity?" Despite these terrific-sounding claims, has it been your experience that greater passion did not lead to deeper bonding (at least for long), that masturbation often left you with a mysterious empty sensation or a desperate desire to feel good again, or that emotional friction from relationship trauma threatened to shorten someone's life? Clearly there's more to the story.

The physical and emotional benefits of ongoing, caring union may, in fact, outweigh any supposed benefits from conventional sex - especially as experience unfortunately suggests that passion and close, lasting union are like water and oil. Moreover, most of the health claims associated with conventional sex are not borne out by the facts. Too often reporters take one sentence from a study and build a misleading article around it.

Scientific research is a wonderful tool. Indeed, there's science behind the ancient sacred sex wisdom, and it is most encouraging. For example, oxytocin's recently-discovered roles in bonding, reducing cravings, and countering stress and depression help to explain union's remarkable benefits. Moreover, research on the neurochemistry of addiction is demonstrating that too much dopamine in the reward center (the center that drives sex) can lead to many forms of distress (anxiety, addictions, compulsive behavior). Orgasm also triggers a rise in prolactin, and high levels of prolactin often produce symptoms suspiciously similar to the complaints of many couples (low libido, impotence, anxiety, mood swings, hostility, etc.). Such research substantiates the claim that there is an unsuspected, but potent, separation mechanism at work in intimate relationships.

Yet science has its limitations. Medical research is generally highly specific, and therefore myopic. Findings can easily mislead both the careful journalist and the casual reader. This occurs because behaviors that are not good for your overall health can still be associated with specific gains. For example, moderate consumption of alcohol may lessen the risk of heart disease…but increase the risk of breast cancer and diabetes in women. Similarly, smoking has been shown to decrease the risk of developing Parkinson's disease by 60 percent. If you read that alone, you might conclude that it was a good idea to light up, even though smoking sharply increases the risk that you won't survive long enough to face Parkinson's.

Here are some examples of articles about the benefits of sex that give false impressions:

1. Orgasm and bonding. Oxytocin often shoots up at orgasm. As it is the "bonding neurochemical" it is logical to conclude that the more orgasms partners have the more they will bond. However, oxytocin performs many functions in the body, most of which have nothing to do with bonding. Oxytocin appears to aid bonding only when it is released deep within the brain. Some scientists surmise that oxytocin's rise in the bloodstream at orgasm merely initiates the muscle contractions associated with climax. Researchers surmise this because oxytocin is responsible for certain other involuntary muscle contractions, such as milk ejection and labor contractions.

2. Masturbation has been touted as a preventative against prostate cancer because an Australian study last year found that a few frequent masturbators in a study of many men had less prostate cancer. A study released on April 7, 2004 found that increased frequency of ejaculation correlated with lower incidence of prostate cancer. Years ago a study of Catholic priests found that priests had a slightly greater risk of prostate cancer. The official position of the medical profession, however, is that ejaculation frequency, or infrequency, is not considered a risk factor for prostate cancer.

Why these results? It's not yet clear. Protate cancer has been linked to higher levels of testosterone. (Eunuchs don't develop prostate cancer.) Doctors have have also theorized that lower rates of prostate cancer for frequent ejaculators may be explained because men are somehow ejaculating carcinogens in their semen (a scary thought for their partners). The lower rates of prostate cancer for frequent ejaculators may simply be a question of exercise, as was suggested in the priest study. That is, circulation of blood through the area of the prostate is good for that gland, so lovemaking is healthy.

The important question is "what behavior offers the best overall protection of men's health?" Frequent over-stimulation of the reward center of the brain can lead to another category of problems: addictions, depression, and desire for emotional separation. One day science may discover that gentle, frequent, non-orgasmic lovemaking, which allows deeper emotional union due to the absence of an addictive cycle of sexual highs and lows, while it also exercises the prostate, is the best route to improved overall health.

3. In 1997 The British Medical Journal reported that men who said that they had sex twice a week had a risk of dying half that of men who reported that they had sex once a month. The query was one of many intake questions (designed to uncover heart disease risks) asked of men in a Welch town between 1979 and 1983. Participants entered the study between ages 45 and 59. (The question was dropped halfway through the enrollment interviews because men didn't like talking about their sex lives.)

Frankly, it makes sense to us that higher frequency of sex is associated with increased longevity - because it's generally a marker of harmony in an intimate relationship. Yet, as another scientist pointed out,

Firstly, not even minimal information on partners or relationships was included. Indeed, marital status was not mentioned and they gave no reason for this, despite numerous published studies on the relation between [decreased] mortality and marital status before and since the seventies. It is likely that those men who had regular sexual activity in late middle age were either married or in long term relationships. The greater longevity of married compared with unmarried people has been shown repeatedly and this might be an important confounding factor. Secondly, it was naive to use the term sexual intercourse and orgasm interchangeably. If the authors were mainly interested in the health effect of orgasm, as a purely biological phenomenon, surely masturbation should not have been ignored. Thirdly, it is unlikely that sexual behaviour is static. …Sexual activity is influenced by age, health factors, and psychopathology. To these might be added changes in relationships, loss of spouse etc, which were not addressed, implying that the authors believe one self report measure is adequate to describe a person's sexual activity during an entire lifetime, or at least from the age of 45 to death. Given these shortcomings, the authors should have been more cautious in their conclusions.

4. A Canadian newspaper not long ago reported that that "sex makes your brain grow." Prolactin shoots up after orgasm, and post-coital prolactin is linked with the growth of new brain cells. However, these new cells all migrate straight to the part of the brain that governs smell, where they modify the olfactory bulb. These changes play a role in mothers' recognition of offspring, and an (as yet) unknown role in male/female mating (or post-sex repulsion?), but they don't increase intellectual potential, as the casual reader might conclude from such a headline.

Other studies tout the gains from increased respiration, adrenaline and even cortisol that accompany conventional sex. These studies may be using too short a time frame for assessing any overall changes in wellbeing. For example, using cocaine leads to similar short-term changes, and yet it's easy to see that if one takes into account the complete cycle of excess dopamine followed by a severe neurochemical drop off, cocaine use is not beneficial and also highly addictive. A weary treadmill of highs and lows that sets up an addictive cycle can lead to more dissatisfaction than satisfaction - and worse general health - even if it gets the heart pumping.

In short, research results can leave as many questions unanswered as they answer, and until science begins to investigate the potential benefits of sex without orgasm, we're all thrown upon our own experience and insights to sort out our best course. Rational decision making is a challenge, however, because the reward center (deep in a primitive part of the brain) tells us loudly that orgasm is going to benefit us.

A similar mechanism tells the male praying mantis the same thing...even though the female bites off his head during mating. So if we want to be more than impulsive, expendable gene machines, we may want to focus on sustaining harmonious union. It's very likely that if sex is not promoting deeper, health-giving union, its ultimate costs are outweighing its benefits.