by Marnia Robinson
Marnia Robinson is the author of Cupid’s Poisoned Arrow: From Habit to Harmony in Sexual Relationships. See full bio July 27, 2009, Sex
What If She Were Always in the Mood? The Coolidge Effect can trump our best intentions. Excerpts!! A few years ago German researchers reported that as the duration of partnership increases, sexual desire generally declines in women—while desire for tenderness generally declines in men. Usually the more frustrated partner (of either gender) quite logically assumes he would be perfectly happy if only he could have as much sex as he wants. In fact, the situation is a bit trickier than that. Mates are actually up against a rather nasty subconscious genetic program, which often pushes them out of sync sexually—and even onward to novel partners.So what would happen if your mate were always in the mood? Chances are good that you soon wouldn’t be…at least with her/him. The sad truth is that if your spouse isn’t having orgasmic sex with you as often as you’d like, he or she could be preserving your union by preventing you from satiating yourself sexually too frequently. This is not an ideal situation, however, because without frequent affectionate contact, the emotional bonds between couples weaken, and, unfortunately, many couples drift into engaging in conscious affection only when pursuing orgasm.How can sexual satiation drive mates apart? When scientists looked into the brains of mating rats, they discovered that a neurochemical called dopamine (the “I gotta have it!” substance) was behind the phenomenon of mate fatigue. As a rat copulates repeatedly with the same partner, less and less dopamine is released in the reward circuitry of its brain.
Yet when a novel potential mate shows up, dopamine surges again. It’s the same mechanism that causes you to say “yes” to a sugary, fat-laden dessert even when you’re full of turkey and mashed potatoes. Dopamine surging in your reward circuitry can override your feelings of satiety, regardless of what your rational brain may think about overeating or infidelity. Surging dopamine is a “yes!” while low dopamine is a “not so much.” As we’ll see in a future post, dopamine also naturally drops after orgasm, which plays right into this phenomenon. Our genes can be heartless puppeteers.
When I was young we used to say that variety is the only real aphrodisiac!
Scientists call the tendency to tire of a mate with whom one sexually satiates oneself, while mechanically perking up for a new one, the Coolidge Effect. They have observed this phenomenon widely among mammals, including females. Some female rodents, for example, flirt a lot more—arching in inviting displays—with unfamiliar partners than with those with which they’ve already copulated. In keeping with this phenomenon, when couples divorce because their sex lives have gone out of sync, the formerly uninterested spouse is often startled by a raging libido when a new lover enters the picture.
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Are we doomed to allow biology to make us restless? In future posts we’ll look at an option that various cultures throughout history employed: a way to make love that helps stave off habituation. It’s based on the idea that exhausting our sexual desire frequently speeds up the Coolidge Effect by setting us on recurring quests for surges of dopamine to counteract the periods of low dopamine that naturally occur after sexual satiation.
Don’t Hold your breathe!!
The Gypsy Kingsd have a song called “Quiero Saber,” that captues this idea, but I cannot find it on Youtube.
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