Why Women Have Sex (12 page)

According to the well-known psychologist Robert Sternberg’s “triangular theory of love,” love consists of the distinct components of intimacy, passion, and commitment.
Intimacy
is the experience of warmth toward another person that arises from feelings of closeness and connectedness. It involves the desire to give and receive emotional support
and to share one’s innermost thoughts and experiences. Here is how one woman in our study experienced this dimension of love:

I feel that sex can be one of many physical expressions of love, though sex is not always an expression of love. When I make love with my husband, it is an intimacy, trust, and exposure of myself that I share only with him . . . because I love him. Sex can be a way of fulfilling my husband’s needs (physical, emotional, psychological) that can’t be achieved any other way and [it] lets him know that I love him and vice versa. Though I have been physically intimate (kissing, petting, etc.) with other people whom I did not love, I have had sex only with people I loved.

—heterosexual woman, age 29

Passion
, the second component, refers to intense romantic feelings and sexual desire for another person. Elaine Hatfield, a distinguished psychologist at the University of Hawaii, has spent decades studying passionate love and how it is expressed. She defines passionate love as a “hot intense emotion” characterized by an intense longing for union with another. It is the “lovesick” part of love that Hatfield believes exists in all cultures. In fact, some cultures even have specific diagnostic criteria for the “symptoms” people get when they fall passionately in love. For example, Hatfield reports that in South Indian Tamil families, love-struck persons are said to be suffering from
mayakkam
, a syndrome characterized by dizziness, confusion, intoxication, and delusion.

When reciprocated, feelings of passion are often associated with feelings of fulfillment and ecstasy:

Honestly speaking, sex has never been just a satisfied action for me. It has always expressed something more. . . . I feel so happy having the most wonderful man. . . . Probably it happened because while living far away, for quite a long period of time, we had a great opportunity to realize what we mean for each other, and what true love is, and when I look into his eyes while making love, it is always something which is so difficult to express by
words . . . but it’s like the fullest flowering of the blossom of our love.

—heterosexual woman, age 38

For one woman in our study, feelings of romance and passion served an added bonus—they helped her ignore her boyfriend’s less than desirable housekeeping habits:

For [my] twentieth birthday, my boyfriend took me out to an amazing seafood restaurant and we had a really incredible time. He treated me like a princess. I felt so loved, and I was so in love, and all the feelings [from] the romantic atmosphere of the restaurant carried over to his grungy apartment and we made love on his bed. That may have been the best sex we’ve ever had.

—heterosexual woman, age 20

Commitment
, the third component of love, requires decision making. A short-term decision involves whether or not one actually loves the other person, while the long-term decision involves a willingness to maintain the relationship through thick and thin. Many women in our study talked about how commitment was an essential component of love for them. In fact, some said that they used having sex as a way to try to ensure commitment from a partner they felt they loved:

My first sexual experience with a [man] was because I wanted the relationship to be committed. We were both sixteen-year-old virgins and had been dating for three months. I pushed for us to have sex because I wanted to show him that I loved him. I wanted to give him something that no one else could have.

—heterosexual woman, age 25

The reason I had sex with my ex-husband? I was young, I was sixteen years old, and I wanted him to stay with me. I thought by having sex it would ensure a committed relationship. It didn’t, but at the time you could not have made me see that. I equated sex
[with] love. And the more that we made love, I thought, the more he must love me. I was a fool.

—heterosexual woman, age 41

Some researchers believe that the “amount” of love a person experiences depends on the absolute strength of the three components, and that couples are best matched if they possess similar levels of intimacy, passion, and commitment.

Sternberg has identified seven different “love styles” based on the possible combinations of intimacy, passion, and commitment in a relationship. For example, he calls love where there is commitment but no intimacy or passion “empty love.” These are the people you see eating together silently in restaurants, who love each other largely out of a sense of duty or lack of options. Love where there is passion and commitment but no intimacy is “foolish love.” These are the whirlwind courtships that burn brightly at first and then fizzle out when one or both partners come to the sad realization that they do not have anything—other than sex, perhaps—in common. “Liking love” is intimacy without passion or commitment and, as the name implies, it typifies a close friendship. Its opposite, love with passion and intimacy but no commitment, is what Sternberg deems “romantic love.” “Infatuation love” has passion but no intimacy or commitment, while “companionate love” involves intimacy and commitment but is short on passion. Companionate love is quite typical of long-term unions, in which sexual desire can fade with time and familiarity.

Of course the seventh and final love style described by Sternberg is the ultimate, “consummate love,” which is the perfect blend of intimacy, passion, and commitment. Few couples who have been together for a long time consistently experience “consummate love.” In most relationships, levels of intimacy, passion, and commitment wax and wane with time and circumstance. Thus, it is not uncommon for a couple to experience several forms of these love styles throughout the course of their relationship.

Much to the dismay of people who believe that defining love should be left in the hands of poets and songwriters, or, better yet, on the lips of lovers who experience it, scientists are exploring whether love—from infatuation to the consummate style—can be explained by a person’s biology. Neuroscientist Niels Birbaumer and his colleagues were the first current-day scientists to examine this possibility. The researchers placed electrodes on the scalps of men and women and measured their brains’ electrical activity using an electroencephalograph, or EEG, machine as the participants envisioned a joyful scene with a loved one, a jealous scene, and a control scene—an empty living room. Half of the men and women were passionately in love at the time; the other half were not emotionally involved with anyone. When the researchers compared the brain waves of the people who were and were not passionately in love, they found huge differences in brain activity during imagery of a scene with a loved one. Those who were passionately in love showed much more complex brain-wave patterns and much more widespread activity throughout the brain. As noted by the authors, “Subjects in love carry their emotional ‘burden’ like a snail’s house into the laboratory of a physiologist.” And on the basis of their findings, the research team concluded that passionate love is like “mental chaos.”

In 2003, a decade after Niels Birbaumer’s discovery, Andreas Bartels and Semir Zeki, two neuroscientists in London, began scanning the brains of young lovers to see what it means to “fall in love.” They selected seventeen men and women who met the criteria for being “truly, deeply, and madly in love” and observed their brains using a functional magnetic resonance imagery, or fMRI, scanner, which is able to record changes in blood flow to various parts of the brain. When nerve cells in the brain are active, they consume oxygen. Oxygen is carried to the brain by hemoglobin in red blood cells from nearby capillaries. Hence, blood flow to the brain and amount of brain activity are closely related.

As the participants’ brains were being scanned, the researchers showed them pictures of either their beloved or nonromantic friends. Only when they were gazing at the photographs of their loved ones did the participants’ brains show intense activity in areas associated with
euphoria and reward—and
diminished
activity in brain regions associated with sadness, fear, and anxiety. In fact, the pattern of brain activity that occurred when the participants viewed their lovers was not unlike the pattern of brain activity seen when a person is under the influence of euphoria-inducing drugs such as cocaine. The brains excited with love also showed decreased activity in regions associated with critical thought, which might explain why people who are acutely in love often appear to be “spaced out.” Or maybe, as the study’s authors suggest, when a person decides he or she is in love, critical thought to assess the loved one’s character is no longer considered to be necessary.

The “love is a drug” connection has also been noted by psychiatrist Michael Liebowitz of the New York State Psychiatric Institute, who compares passionate love to an amphetamine high. Both can create a mood-enhancing giddiness, and withdrawal of either can cause anxiety, fear, and even panic attacks. Indeed, the body releases a host of chemicals when a person first falls in love—dopamine, norepinephrine, and especially phenylethylamine, or PEA, which is considered a close cousin to amphetamine. The “natural high” caused by these brain chemicals, unfortunately, does not last forever. Liebowitz believes that is why some people, whom he calls “attraction junkies,” move from relationship to relationship seeking their next “love high.”

In addition to all the wonderful emotions passionate love can cause—euphoria, excitement, contentment—it can also cause intense emotional turmoil. People in love often describe feelings of anxiety, depression, and despair when they are not with their loved ones—even when they are only separated for a relatively short period of time. They tend to spend hours and hours obsessively thinking about their loved ones in much the same way that a person diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD, experiences intrusive thoughts.

In the late 1990s, psychiatrist Donatella Marazziti and her colleagues from the University of Pisa in Italy speculated that people who are passionately in love and people who suffer from OCD may have something in common—a decrease in the brain chemical serotonin. Decreased
levels of serotonin have long been linked to depression and anxiety disorders such as OCD, and antidepressants such as Prozac work primarily by trying to increase the body’s serotonin levels.

To test their hypothesis, the research team selected three separate groups of men and women. One group consisted of people who had fallen in love within the past six months but not yet had sex, and who obsessed about their new love for a minimum of four hours a day. A second group comprised people who were diagnosed with OCD and were not receiving medication. The third, “normal” group was made up of people who neither met the criteria for OCD nor were passionately in love. The researchers took blood samples from each of the participants and tested their serotonin levels. Not surprising, the people who were neither love-struck nor diagnosed with OCD had normal levels of serotonin. The people who were diagnosed with OCD had significantly lower levels of serotonin than did this control group. But most shocking was that, like the OCD group, the love-struck group had levels of serotonin about 40 percent lower than the control population.

A year later, the researchers again tested some of the lovesick participants, and sure enough, once their initial intense phase of passionate love had passed, their serotonin levels returned to normal. Fortunately, the depletion was not permanent.

Helen Fisher, a researcher at Rutgers University who has used fMRI imaging to scan the brains of many people in love, also believes that passionate love—or lust as she refers to it—resembles OCD. Fisher believes that it may be possible to “treat” or inhibit this state if the person “in lust” were to take an antidepressant such as Prozac early on, when the feelings begin, to offset the low levels of serotonin characteristic of OCD. But, she says, once the lust turns into romantic love, it is such a powerful drive that no small Prozac cocktail is likely to stifle it.

Whether love is a feeling of intimacy and connection, a passionate emotion, or a complex scrambling of brain chemicals, one thing is certain—love is persistent and universal. Proof of love’s persistence can even be found in societies that have attempted to undermine it by allowing a
man to take more than one wife. For example, members of the Oneida Community, a utopian commune founded in New York State in the nineteenth century, held the view that romantic love was merely sexual lust disguised. The Oneida subscribed to “complex marriages,” whereby members were not allowed to have exclusive sexual or romantic relationships with each other, but rather were to keep in constant circulation to prevent a “special love” from forming. Early Mormons also viewed romantic love as disruptive and sought to discourage it. In both of these groups, however, romantic love often persisted among individuals, sometimes underground, hidden from the eyes of the groups’ elders.