This is your brain on sex

Writing help you to better understand what you really think.Yesterday I was listening to the radio show On Being and thinking about Taking Cover, the novel I wrote about Kuwait.

 Krista Tibbets was interviewing Helen Fisher on the Sunday morning radio program.  Fisher is an anthropologist of love and sex and has done a lot of TED talks about the brain and romantic love.  Fisher also does studies for Match.com.

  The gist of the interview was that we are lied to by our love songs.  Lust is a kind of madness, to paraphrase Julian Fellows, the creator of Downton Abbey.  Fisher described how the brain shuts down when we're in love, allowing us to overlook everything in order to procreate.  This madness, created by hormones in a metabolic stew, ends after about 18 months, or maybe sooner.  It  would have to end or we'd simply run out of energy.

Fisher said that in these times, we're shedding 10,000 years of a farming lifestyle in which men were the head of the family, women stayed home, and patriarchy reigned. In the Kuwait novel, Taylor is a teenager in love with a rich Kuwaiti.  She comes from divorce, an American culture that's confused about rules,  and parents who have no religious background.  Without rules, Helen Fisher said, we live in a world where nobody knows what to do.  Taylor, who is very lonely in Kuwait, yearns for the old ways she sees there.  She wishes for a strong family, a man to be in charge, and the covering and protection given to women in a Muslim society.  She doesn't trust her own impulsive nature, and the culture she sees in Kuwait would offer her safety, she thinks.

Krista Tibbets spoke of growing up in a very religious background where you save yourself for marriage.  She said, looking back, having boundaries wasn't all bad.  Fisher agreed that casual sex with someone you're not serious about is a trap.  Our hormones go to work and create an attachment to this person. Best to be picky.

Fisher said that some of her research with younger people on Match.com has focused on what the younger generation truly wants.  Often they have seen their parents divorce and they don't want to repeat the same mistakes.  They believe a partner is all you've got because families are less important in a world of such mobility.  She said the young look for a  partnership of  transparency, trust, humor, respect, time devoted to each other, and physical attractiveness.  They want to go very slowly, stay rational, live together, have kids outside of marriage until it becomes apparent that their relationship can weather child-rearing.  They don't want to fail at relationship and, instead,  take off the rose-colored glasses we wear when we fall in love.

The thing is, we're all victims of nature, which wants the genes to continue on through the generations.  As Fisher said, we might know all the ingredients in a chocolate cake, but once you start eating it and feel that rush of joy, it's off to the races.