I'm in my first serious relationship. It started off super hot and sexual. Now, a year in, it's lovey-dovey and cuddly. Not that my boyfriend and I don't have sex. We do, and it's still good. But we no longer sext or send cute selfies, and the butterflies feeling is gone. Is it all downhill from here?
--Worried
Once you've been together for a while, you may still have vivid fantasies running through your head during sex, like the one where you get to the dry cleaner's before closing time.
The Declaration of Independence proclaimed that we have a right to "the pursuit of Happiness," but it doesn't get into actually having it, which, as you've discovered, can be a bit of a bore. This makes biological sense, considering that there are stages in attraction and bonding and a cocktail of biochemicals behind each. Dopamine, a neurochemical that researchers associate with wanting, "novelty-seeking," and focused attention, is a star player when you're in chase mode (aka "infatuation," "attraction," or, more descriptively, "Who knew you could get a callus down there?").
However, evolution is no fool, and it realized that we couldn't spend all of our time chasing each other around whatever passed for the kitchen table back when "the man cave" was an actual cave. So bonding hormones -- oxytocin and vasopressin -- eventually take charge. And that's why, a year into a relationship, you may be doing "unnatural acts" in the bedroom, but they probably involve things like dusting the miniblinds.
Going from hot sexts to ho-humming along is a result of "hedonic adaptation." "Hedonic" comes from a Greek word for pleasure, and hedonic adaptation describes how we quickly acclimate to changes in our circumstances -- positive or negative -- to the point where they no longer give us the boost (or kick in the teeth) that they first did. Research by social psychologist Philip Brickman and his colleagues suggests that we each have a happiness "set point," and we keep getting pulled back to it. A fascinating example of this is their finding that people who won big in the lottery were (of course) stoked at first, but ultimately, they ended up being no happier than victims of crippling accidents.
Happiness researcher Sonja Lyubomirsky finds that people in relationships can resist hedonic adaptation, but it takes "ongoing effort" to bring in variety. She's talking about varied experiences and, especially, varied surprising experiences. Surprise, Lyubomirsky explains in "The Myths of Happiness," delivers "strong emotional reactions." Remember strong emotional reactions? They're a little hard to come by once you can close your eyes and draw a solar system of your beloved's every birthmark, freckle, and mole.
The good news is that, even now, you can bring surprise into your relationship; you just need to stage it. Try to inject it into every day, and maybe take turns planning a weekly secret date night -- secret from the person who isn't the planner -- so at least one of you is surprised. You might also take turns planning separate sextracurricular activities, on the same model. Without this extra effort, sex may still be fun, but the only way it's likely to be surprising is if one of you tries to sneak out the window afterward.
When I was in my youth, a lot of women I knew fell for bad boys. I'm now a man in my 60s, entering retirement. Amazingly, I'm finding that even women my age prefer bad boys. What's this about?
--Nice Guy
Since older women often end up dating much-older men, this leads to the question, what's the profile of the elderly bad boy? Cheating at bingo? Swearing on the golf course? Shotgunning Ensure?
Some older women -- just like the younger ones -- go for bad boys because they don't think much of themselves and feel most comfortable with someone who seems to share their view. But even older women who aren't emotional shipwrecks can be drawn to the aging delinquent. It turns out that a bad boy's unreliability has a neurological upside. Neuroscientist Wolfram Schultz finds that unpredictable "rewards" seem to be the most satisfying for the brain -- maybe even giving us three or four times the buzz of the experiences that we see coming.
So, as a nice guy, the thing to be is exciting and unpredictable -- without the downside of the deviousness, thieving, and unreliability. Use the element of surprise -- even by hiding small presents (tiny chocolate bars) or funny notes around her house (as opposed to a bag of unmarked bills). Ultimately, even thrill-seeking women prefer a man who says, "Quick, grab your suitcase. I'm taking you to Paris," and not "Quick, duck down. The cops are here, and they have a warrant."
I'm a very successful guy in my 30s. I had a lot of casual sex in my 20s, but I got sick of the disconnection and emotional fallout. I'm looking for a relationship, and I've started waiting to sleep with women (for at least a month). I tell them this, but the waiting thing seems to make them want me more and push to have sex. What I don't get is why some get so angry at me.
--Slow Train
Women are used to men wanting sex right away -- or sooner, if possible. Your being the one with your legs crossed? Well, it's like offering a dog a strip of bacon and having him look up and say, "Aww...thanks, doll, but I'm good."
Now if these women getting angry with you were just lusty, there's an app for that -- one that allows a moderately attractive woman to swipe a sex partner over faster than Domino's can get there with a pizza. The problem here is female sexual psychology. We all want to be wanted, but research by clinical psychologist Marta Meana finds that women, especially, seem to have an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired. This makes evolutionary sense, in light of women's need for reliable signs that a guy would stick around after sex to "provide." A man having an uncontrollable longing for a particular woman is pretty great insurance -- right up there with leg-shackling him to the cave wall.
Not surprisingly, according to research by evolutionary psychologist Patricia Hawley, if there's catnip for women, it's those "bodice ripper" novels. They feature intense male desire for a woman, but not of just any male -- a "powerful, resource-holding" one, like the playboy prince or titan of industry. This alpha god cannot be tamed, until...whoops...up pops our heroine, the apparently ordinary maiden. The hunky royal or CEO is so taken with her unique (and otherwise overlooked) beauty and spirit that he can't help but grab her and "ravish" her. Of course, in real life, we call this felony rape. In romance novels, when the guy is uber-rich and cruelly handsome, it's the start of a beautiful relationship.
So, women's inability to defeat the time lock on your zipper is telling them something -- no, not "Wow...he thinks I'm really worth getting to know," but "Wow...he thinks I'm uggo" and "That two-week sabbatical from Booty Barre has really caught up with me." It may help a little to reassure them that you find them wildly attractive -- like by "confessing" that you have to take three cold showers and stare at pictures of steamed vegetables before every date. For you, this is the only possible way to keep from giving them one of those man-scam long hugs that turns into sex...uh, that is, three weeks and four days later.
I was dating this girl for about three weeks, but I just wasn't really feeling it, so I "ghosted" -- stopped asking her out and just didn't respond to her texts. Some of my friends said I was mean to "ghost," but honestly, I think it's a lot kinder than telling somebody you're not into them. Why have an uncomfortable conversation when you can just slip out and everybody is spared?
--Faded Away
Why take 45 seconds to text a girl that it's over when you can make her obsess about you for two months straight, stalk you on Instagram, and bore her friends catatonic with "Is his phone broken? Is my phone broken? Did he see that drunken Facebook post? Should I have waxed my moustache?"
Wordlessly disappearing on somebody you've spent more than a couple of hours with at a coffee bar is a kick in their dignity -- telling them they aren't even important enough for you to tell them they aren't important. It also makes a person go unnecessarily berserko, due to what's called the "Zeigarnik effect." Russian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik observed that unfinished business causes administrative problems for our mind -- leaving it in a "state of tension" and causing it to annoy us (over and over) to get "closure" on whatever's been interrupted and left incomplete.
This isn't to say you owe a woman a detailed rundown on your feelings; you just need to tell her that you're done. Ideally, open with something complimentary, and then bring down the ax: "Not working for me." "Not feeling it." That sort of thing. She'll cry, she'll eat some cake, and she'll move on. Ultimately, if you want to be kind, a breakup should feel more like ripping off a Band-Aid than hysterically searching for your car for four hours in a multi-level parking structure.
My girlfriend got laid off four months ago, along with many of her co-workers. She is not making a serious attempt to find a job and is just living off unemployment benefits. She stays up until morning watching TV and sleeps until the late afternoon. I figured that she may be depressed, so I encouraged her to go to counseling and to volunteer or take a course so she would feel productive, but she refused. She has a great work ethic when she's employed, so I'm very puzzled by this. Worse yet, I'm quickly losing respect for her.
--Disturbed
Unfortunately, drooling while napping is not considered a form of multitasking.
It's understandable that you're losing respect for your girlfriend, given her newfound leadership in the Occupy The Couch movement. Now, maybe she is just lazy, or maybe, like dieters who decide to eat like walruses over the holidays, she's decided to take some lazytime. However, because you describe her as pretty industrious when she's working, it's possible that her descent into human slipcoverhood comes out of how frustratingly scarce jobs are in certain professions. When you're hardworking and good at your job, the answer to "Where do you see yourself a year from now?" isn't supposed to be "On a corner with a cardboard sign, begging for change."
The sense that productivity has become unproductive can trigger an emotional response called "low mood," marked by fatigue, deep pessimism, feelings of worthlessness, changes in appetite and sleep, and a slowing of motivation (symptoms also seen in depression). Psychiatrist and evolutionary psychologist Randolph Nesse believes that low mood evolved to stop us from wasting our energy by persisting in fruitless endeavors, like waiting around for our bison dinner to grab a drink at a watering hole that's run dry. (Pointless persistence was especially likely to be fatal a million or so years before the creation of 7-Elevens and fast-food drive-thrus.)
To understand why our psychology would be set up like this -- to stick its foot out and trip us -- it helps to recognize that our emotions are basically traffic directors for our behavior, designed to maximize our survival and reproductive success, not our happiness. Accordingly, Nesse explains that the "disengagement" from motivation that accompanies low mood serves a number of purposes: to immediately prevent further losses, to make us rethink what we're doing, and to signal to others that we need care. (Ticket to Hugsville, please.)
The psychiatric bible of mental disorders, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, doesn't bother to differentiate between the "adaptive" low mood Nesse is talking about and depression caused by malfunctioning brain chemistry. The DSM's diagnosis of depression just involves taking count: Five or more almost daily symptoms (fatigue, pessimism, etc.) lasting for more than two weeks? Congratulations! You're depressed. But what's important to note from Nesse's work is that depression isn't necessarily a sign of brain dysfunction. And there's a lot of hope in this, because if your symptoms have an environmental reason, maybe you can see your way to an environmental remedy.
If your girlfriend is experiencing low mood, the last thing she needs is the sense that her job loss will soon have the loss of her boo to keep it company. Let her know that you love her and are there for her, and then tell her about Nesse's thinking on low mood, which might help her scavenge enough hope to start thinking outside the, uh, bed.
Physical action is another emotion-changer -- even if you have to force it. For example, research by psychologist James Laird finds that busting out smiles actually makes people happier. Research by biopsychologist Timothy Puetz finds that acting energized -- like by regularly doing 20 moderately paced minutes on an exercise bike -- actually energizes, with the ensuing raised heart rate and various surging biochemicals basically standing in for force-feeding a 5-Hour Energy drink to that ugly low mood.
Cognitive-behavioral therapy, which uses reason to help people dig out of their emotional problems, could also be helpful. However, because your girlfriend's idea of productivity now seems to involve simply sitting in the dark rather than lying in the dark, you might take on the therapeutic preliminaries: Find the therapist; make the appointment; and be there to drive her at the appointed time. However, you should also be prepared for her to refuse to get in the car when that time comes. That said, your being something of a pushy jerk for the woman you love will probably mean a lot. It just might be the pushy she needs to start living through FOMO -- fear of missing out -- instead of fear of missing out on an afternoon of making paisley patterns on her face with the couch.
I'm a woman who's both loving and seriously hating Tinder. Guys on this app mostly want to hook up, and even those who say they want a relationship are flaky, often disappearing after a single date. Sure, this sometimes happens with guys I meet in real life, but not at the rate of my Tinder dates.
--Annoyed
Welcome to the Hookupatorium!
Tinder takes all the wait and effort out of speed dating. No need to put on pants -- or pull them up, if you're on the john. You just "swipe right" on your phone to match with somebody -- and maybe even swipe 'em right into your bed 20 minutes later. Plus it's fun -- less like a dating site than a video game. "Call of Booty," anyone?
However, for anyone seeking "happily ever after" instead of "hookupily," Tinder can pose a problem, and that problem is too much choice. But...choice is a good thing, right? The more the better! It's the principle behind those "endless options!" deli menus -- you know, the ones with a page count that makes you forget whether you're supposed to decide what to have for lunch or whether Ayn Rand was a bad writer.
Unfortunately, our psychological operating system evolved in an environment where the level of choice was more like "Sir, can I bring you the grubs or the grubs?" So research finds that we're easily overwhelmed by a slew of options -- often choosing poorly and being bummed about it afterward or feeling too snowed to choose at all. Social psychologist Barry Schwartz explains that these problems with choosing are about protecting ourselves from regret -- the pain of blaming ourselves for making the wrong choice. But having a lot of options isn't necessarily unmanageable -- if we have enough information to differentiate between them and narrow the field. However, on Tinder, there's minimal info -- only age, location, pics, and a few lines about a person -- making it an endless swipestream of "she's hot" and "she's hot in a slightly different way."
Also consider that Tinder is not designed to help you find love (that lasts for more than a few sweaty hours); Tinder is designed to keep you Tindering. The psychological hook is "intermittent reinforcement." Predictable "rewards" -- like if you swiped and always got a match -- quickly give us the yawnies. But Tinder's unpredictable rewards -- the random ding! "It's a match!" -- turn you into a coke-seeking lab rat, relentlessly swiping for your next high.
You may decide to keep nibbling at Tinder's mobile-global man buffet, but dates that come out of real-life meetings are probably more likely to lead to second dates, and maybe more. At a party, you're, say, one of eight single women, five of whom a guy isn't that attracted to and one of whom he broke up with last year. And finally, there's how face-to-face meetings come with behavioral constraints that Tinder convos lack. You should find it's the rare guy at the coffee shop who immediately follows up "That a soy latte?" with a casual "Wanna see my dick?"
My girlfriend has been feeling neglected and keeps worrying that I'm mad at her. I love her, but I have big business problems now, and I don't want to burden her with them. Also, since we have a good thing, doesn't it make sense to focus on the stuff that's a mess?
--Startup Guy
Unfortunately, it isn't possible to outsource your relationship to some guy in the Philippines: "Please stay on the line. Your feelings are very important to us..."
Men and women tend to deal with crisis in different ways. Women manage their emotions by expressing them; men just hope theirs will go away. Evolutionary psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby explain that men evolved to be the defenders of the species, and in battle, it would have put them at a disadvantage to show their feelings -- especially those reflecting vulnerability, like "Yikes, I'm totally out of my league!"
Being predisposed to bury your feelings in the backyard doesn't mean you should -- assuming you don't want your next startup to be a new relationship. This isn't to say you need to blather on about everything, Oprah's-couch style. You just need to share the bad as well as the good, even just by texting, "tough day, babe." You might even put reminders on your phone to send brief sweet messages a few times daily. Maybe that seems dumb and unromantic. What's dumber and more unromantic is adding breakup problems to your business problems because you didn't put in 46 seconds a day telling a woman that she matters. Sure, misery reportedly "loves company," but let's not be hasty in filling the flower vases and putting out the good towels.
I'm a 35-year-old woman, and I've been involved with a guy around my age for almost two years. It's been "open." Well, that is, he's had the freedom to sleep with other people. I haven't wanted to. I finally realized that I am not happy with this and want more, but he made it very clear that he's not interested in being monogamous -- with me or anybody. I'm having a very difficult time cutting things off, as there's a lot that's great about our relationship. How do you leave somebody you really care about who you know is bad for you?
--Stuck
It isn't exactly a shocker that the thing you want to be asking your boyfriend when he comes home is not "Hey, cuddlebug, how was your booty call?"
There's this notion that being sexually sophisticated means being all "no probski" about your partner having sex on the "I love a parade" model. But it turns out that jealousy isn't so easily disabled. Research by evolutionary psychologist David Buss suggests that jealousy is basically love's burglar alarm -- an evolved psychological warning system that goes off in response to threats to a relationship. So, sure, you can try to talk yourself into being cool with the sexual variety pack -- just like when you hear your downstairs window breaking, you can try to roll over and catch a little more shut-eye while the burglars ransack your house.
It must seem kind of unbelievable to be so miserable yet so unable to keep enough of a grip on that to get out. You can probably blame the limits of what's called "working memory." It's essentially a mental workspace -- a kind of whiteboard in your head -- where you lay out and kick around a few sets of information. These info sets are called "chunks," and one example might be the experiences that make up the idea "he cooks me these wonderful dinners!" But according to research by psychologist Nelson Cowan, working memory holds only about four chunks at once. We also tend to give priority seating to info sets that justify the choices we've made. So, all aboard for the he's a great kisser chunk, the he was really sweet when I was in the hospital chunk, etc., etc. And whoops -- whaddya know -- seems there's no room for he insists on having sex buffet-style.
You need to look at all the information at once, and this requires a piece of paper and a pen. On either half of the page, list the pros and cons of being with him, giving them blocks of space that correspond to their importance. For example, his home-cooked meals should probably get a sliver of space on the pro side, while his need to go home with Linda should get a big block on the con side. Carry this paper around and look at it until it becomes clear to you that you need to be somebody's "one and only" and not just the one before their Tuesday tennis lesson.
I'm a 32-year-old guy, and my girlfriend has been complaining that the only time I'm cuddly or affectionate is when I want to have sex. I don't really see the problem. It's my way of initiating versus...I don't know, asking her...which would be weird.
--Confused
Aw...how sweet...cuddling that comes with a trap door to the sex dungeon!
From a woman's point of view, it's nice to have your boyfriend, say, grab your hand, and not just because he'd like you to put it on his penis. This isn't just some mysterious form of sexual etiquette. It comes out of how women evolved to be "commitment skeptics," as evolutionary psychologist Martie Haselton puts it. Erring on the side of underestimating a man's level of commitment was how ancestral women kept themselves from ending up single mothers with a bunch of cave-lings to feed.
Economist Robert Frank calls love "a solution to the commitment problem." As he explains it, being emotionally bonded keeps you from making a coldly rational calculation about who's got more to offer, your girlfriend or the new neighbor with boobs so big that each should be sending a delegate to the U.N. So, because women are on the lookout for signs that you love them, a hug is a hug is a hug needs to be the deal much of the time. Otherwise, whenever you're affectionate, it'll just seem like the boyfriend version of a wino telling a woman she's beautiful -- because it would be really beautiful if she'd give him the last dollar he needs to get drunk on cheapo aftershave.
