Out of Love

Saturday evening was spent on a bucolic retreat. A liquor cabinet melange led virtually everyone that came out to commit cardinal sin by leaping from a mushroom and mustard cream over chicken and pasta with Stella straight to a dry, wooden Négrette. The courageously stupid present were cavalier enough to linger on for a couple of hours longer than everyone else and ended up wasting a perfectly good blanc Meursault that would have been better appreciated by sober tastebuds.

We enjoyed one of those gloriously ambitious sexual conversations that only ever happen at the height of a car crash between emotional ectasy and frivolous intoxication, where everyone seems eyelocked and primed to share the most personal details of their private lives as if they were railway anecdotes. If you called them John Steinbeck Characters Talk Sex and staged things around a flaming tire fire and a tipped over caboose, you could probably get these sorts of conversations on the backend of a book-themed NPR programme.

It turned out I was the only person in a room full of seven that had remained friends with ex-lovers. Even stranger, it turned out that I was the only person in a room full of seven that thought it even possible to remain friends with ex-lovers. I wondered aloud, ‘Since when did ASKMEN.com become the ruling authority over the dos and don’ts of jiggydom and what comes afterwards?’ I don’t know, but I summoned up my best offensive and tried to find out…

After a half hour’s worth of interrogation, all I could get out of my conversational foes was that they believed it’s only natural to concede yourself to your sexual chemistry, whatever that means, and move past your erstwhile sex partners. Two of my friends, leading the charge into my Gaza, were quick to argue that your neurological reward system leads you to associate the smells, the taste, the sight, and the hormones of a lover with a need for sexual gratification. After developing a chemical bond with someone in a sexual relationship, they suggested, you’re no longer capable of functioning with that person in a traditional friendship role because your body and your mind will never accept them as an ends to anything that doesn’t involve dopamine.

See, I think most people that are afraid of staying friends with their exes and rationalize their choices to this end with chemistry are full of shit. The logic is basically, ‘Well, we’ve seen each other naked and had sex and that sort of intimacy can never be replicated and our relationship will never be satisfying without it, so maybe we just shouldn’t see each other anymore.’ That logic has a lot of loopholes, emotional and scientific. And I honestly just don’t buy the assertion that past intimacy is a strong enough undercurrent to interfere with, if not derail, a human relationship.

I wasn’t really that surprised my friends weren’t interested in post-coital friendship, since they were arguing sexual psychology. The overwhelming majority of the publicity neurology research gets in mainstream press is related to the chemistry of the brain engaged in sex or engaged in the act of seeking a partner for sex. This has been the case for, I would say, as far back as the publication of Adaptation and Natural Selection in the mid-60s and maybe even as early as Simpson’s Tempo and Mode in Evolution in 1944. Kinsey’s work at Indiana in the 50s was also very important in shaping the popular dialogue on sexual pschology (and we needn’t go as far back as the psychology wars between Adler and Freud, although those battles were essential to the shaping of the modern and postmodern interpretations of sexuality). Anyway, my friends were arguing what they’d been told to believe: that you can’t separate the neurology of sex from a relationship and that most relationships are dependent on that neurology anyway. This belief makes salvaging a friendship with an exlover seem unworthy of your while.

I feel bad because most people I talk to seem to think this way, even though it’s way off-base.

Sexual habits and the chemistry of the brain in love only give us a fragment of what, I think, is a comprehensive body of evidence that suggests remaining friends with your ex-lover isn’t only possible, but that it’s a really good thing.

We all know about dopamine, the primary neurological trigger for sexual arousal. What dopamine actually does is prevents another hormone called prolactin from making its way out of your pituitary gland. When you have an orgasm, the dopamine ‘recedes’ and prolactin is the new drug that fills your head in its aftermath. Prolactin, unlike dopamine, is a relaxant, which explains the layoff period most have after an orgasm, especially more intense ones. It’s a hormone strongly associated with impotence, which also explains why the majority of males lose their erection in the moments following orgasm.

The attitude towards dopamine, supposing that it’s merely a sexual motivator, is wrong. You’re right to say that dopamine is something your body uses to motivate you to do things in a naturally Pavlovian reward for action system, but that system doesn’t exlude itself to sex. In addition to getting jiggy, you also get dopamine when you need to exercise, eat food, or do most anything that is for personal benefit. When you need to do something, your head feeds you dopamine, and, when you’re finished, you get sedated with the relaxant. Why is this important? Because dopamine is tied to limbic functions and unitasking. The chemical only really comes into play when you think you need something or when you’re inclined to focus on a manual task. So it’s kind of ridiculous to say that you should withdraw from knowing someone and regroup at Valley Forge, just because you can’t get one thing your neurochemistry might induce you to believe you need. If you apply personal want for instinctual, sexual gratifcation to a person and can’t get over it then you have a problem. I think, if this is the case with a lover, it shows that you were either a bad couple or are both immature. This is especially true when you realize there are other, more important, chemicals at work.

I talked about oxytocin a while ago, about how its a hormone that acts as a neurological trigger for building trust and comfort. It’s associated with all sorts of acts, including sexual intercourse, orgasms, breastfeeding, and giving birth. The longer you know someone and engage in any kind of relationship, the stronger your hormones become comfortable with them and the better you’re able to relax in their company. I don’t buy the intimacy argument as something against staying friends with an ex. Intimacy is a mutual bridge that literally inspires neurological and hormonal trust that is just as strong and powerful as chemical lust. Dopamine is something your mind gives you to compel you to complete certain actions, whereas oxytocin is part of a much more moving chemistry that can come from both sexual intimacy and emotional or intellectual closeness. If you aren’t able to reconcile the two, you’re probably immature. If you don’t have a strong enough bond with an ex-lover to merit continuing a relationship, the two of you together were probably never good to begin with (or, worse I think, your relationship was for primarily sexual benefit).

Unless you’re in an abysmal relationship, you and your partner should be laughing all the time and doing wonderful things. My lovers have always started out as friends, and they’ve gone on to stay that way no matter what. Most of them are among my best friends because of and not in spite of our past. If you’re genuinely good together, you should both have high oxytocin levels and be chemically sedate around one another in an almost identical manner to when you’re with regular friends and family. Actually, with some exes, your bond can become stronger than what you would have with a conventional friend or confidant because they know more things about the whole of your personality than most others do. This is also something that doesn’t go away with a breakup. What will come with a breakup is a dopamine rush, compelling you to have sex and possibly making you disoriented about your personal mindset. If, like me, you believe there is more to love and friendship than pure chemistry, you’ll also know that it makes perfect sense to want someone you love in your life to have and to hug and to talk to and to laugh with as a friend. Anything else, to me, seems absurd. If you can’t justify a friendship after having been with someone, then there was no justification for that relationship at all.

I like to look at the chemistry I’ve shared with all my lovers as a whole. I don’t discount that there may be sexual urges in either of us that are more rooted in the limbic quarters of our brains, but I’ve never understood why not being able to act upon animal desires is enough to strip away the emotional bond you have with someone you love. It seems ridiculous to think that human relationships can be explained away as easily as a plot device in a Hideo Kojima video game. When you break up, your dopamine and opiates might go into overdrive and make your brain read somewhat like David Berkowitz’s, but I don’t see how that initial discrepancy can’t be quickly overcome. If I love someone, it’s not because I’ve been in the sack with them.

A couple of years ago, a study at the Einstein College of Medicine in New York sought to chart the parts of our brain that go haywire when we’re beginning to fall in love. To no one’s surprise, M.R.I. scans found that the caudate nucleus and the ventral tegmental were the most active areas of the smitten brain. The reason no one was shocked was because both of these areas are massive producers of dopamine and opiates, explaining where all the giddiness and excitment comes from when you’re head over heels. Even more interesting, get this:

This passion-related region was on the opposite side of the brain from another area that registers physical attractiveness, the researchers found, and appeared to be involved in longing, desire and the unexplainable tug that people feel toward one person, among many attractive alternative partners.

So who we desire and what we find attractive end up having little to do with one another. Desire is rooted in a much more powerful, chemical connection than mere physical interpretation. I find this really fascinating and think it rebuffs the argument that someone you’ve been in a relationship with and been sexually intimate with isn’t worth your time once that period of coupling has ended. We seek romantic relationships, it seems, for much more legitimate reasons than sex and our best partners are far better described as friends than lovers, despite what we think about the message those sort of semantics might send out to others. Sex is important and powerful and wonderful, but you’re in a bad place if your relationship with someone depends upon it. As a matter of fact, the studies have gone on to reveal that a brain in love and a brain in lust look almost nothing alike. Love is something that can, obviously, exist outside of sexual gratification and I can’t comprehend anyone’s decision to simply abandon someone they’ve been with in the past because their lust or their discomfort with what was once their sexual appetite makes them unable to communicate. Really, just get over it.

Interesting, too, is what researchers called the ‘expansion of the self.’ The longer you’re involved with someone, the more you absorb their characteristics and the more in synthesis you become. Sex is, of course, a ritual act of unison, but so is emotional development. The opinions, tastes, and shared history of everyone you involve yourself with in life wears off on you and yours wear off on them, meaning you become more compatible with time. Having another person with whom your whole emotional being is interwoven is a very comforting thought to me. I don’t understand why anyone believes we need to lose the ‘expansion of the self.’ I know that once a romantic relationship between two people is ended, their orientation towards one another can no longer conform to the same algorithm that it once did, but that doesn’t explain to me why they can’t still continue to share and trade experiences.

The way we approach attractiveness, as mentioned above, has very little to do with our romantic desires.

When it comes to physical attractiveness, women are all about context. Women tend to find men attractive because other women find them attractive, sort of playing off of one another as biological measuring instruments. Men are far less cohesive in defining attractiveness, as they tend to feel put off by the ‘intrusion’ that is another man’s interest in someone. This stems from the territorial attitude males approach sexuality with in virtually all mammalian species. A study in Scotland recently comfirmed both these attitudes. It’s funny, but men came of the study looking like the Romantics and and women came out looking like the Pragmatics. Women tended to incorporate the judgement of their peers into their intepretations of attractiveness, making finding partners and objects of desire much easier. The researchers learned that males develop “negative attitudes towards men who are the target of positive social interest from women,” making finding that special someone a much more difficult objective.

Another newish study revealed that males, when asked to rank the attractiveness of facial portraits of five women, overwhelmingly picked the youngest face as their top choice. In a binary experiment, a plurality of women ranked the second oldest of five facial portraits of males as the most as the most attractive. The fact that women have a shorter reproductive lifespan than men do draws the male sexuality towards youth and guaranteed fertility. Because of this phenomenon, younger women tend to rate themselves as more attractive than their older counterparts. There is a steady decline in self-rating polls as women get older (I seem to be way out of the park on all these trends— I love 35 year olds).

However, this doesn’t quite translate on the prowl. Men tend to be more sheepish about rating their own physical attractiveness. Only a fourth of the males who chose the face rated most attractive believed they could date the pictured woman, while nearly all of the women who chose the highest rated male believed they were good looking enough for him. Men also show a much greater skepticism when asked to rate their own attractiveness after being shown photos of physically beautiful members of the same sex than women do. The study also bucked the trend that says women who engage in ‘too much’ sex probably have low self esteem, as those polled as having more than 50 sex partners rated their desirability at high levels.

When you actually sit down and look at the way the mind approaches human sexuality, it seems to me as though what exists in the limbic realms of your head is far less compelling than what stirs you to emotion. I know it can sometimes be difficult to bring a relationship with a lover to an end, but that doesn’t mean that you’re no longer compatible and are better off without each other’s company or without each other’s comfort. In my experience of the world, I’ve found that building a close, emotional friendship with someone and letting it evolve organically into a place where you become lovers has allowed me to stay friends with everyone I’ve been intimate with. Sexual relationships build trust through physical closeness, but they aren’t ever good unless you apply the positive chemistry you get out of sex to advancing your relationship. I’m grateful to all my lovers because I don’t have to view them as triggers for dopamine or playing pieces in a neurological rewards game. They’re quite often my closest confidants and have turned out to be some of my best friends.

Why isn’t it this way for more people? I couldn’t really say. But I do think it has something to do with maturity and with the legitimacy of a relationship. You’re never actually going to become chemically dependent on one another, need to be friends, unless there’s real love that will outlast anything and everything sexual.

Maybe I’m just weird.

MUSIC FOR THE DAY

I’ve only been listening to two things lately: doom metal and French pop. I’ll go easy on you…

Émilie Simon is a French electronic musician who started out as a composer and student of ancient music at the Sorbonne. She tried her hand at jazz and rock, but eventually settled on electronic music as the genre she felt most comfortable with expressing herself in. Simon’s roots in formal composition show through in her mainstream work, for good reasons, and her two solo albums have recieved lavish praise from European media outlets. She put out a compilation in North America recently, called The Flower Book, that was also welcomed to generous reviews. If you caught the popular documentary La Marche de l’empereur, you’ll know that hers is the icy voice etoliated against the snow and filling the air between penguin puffs in the movie’s soundtrack. After the release of her self-titled debut album, Simon’s electro-pop style turned noticeably darker, adding rough guitars and hushed strings on top of the already desert-dry drum machine beats. There are moments where Végétal, her sophomore effort, makes me think of what Nine Inch Nails would sound like if that fat midget Trent Reznor grew up, started acting 40, and put his classical training to good use.

“Dame de lotus” and “Fleur de saison” from 2006’s Végétal

Besançon’s Audrey d’Ithaque makes these incredible Casio-style disco tripouts that sound like Hypo hooked up with La Toya Jackson at FAO Schwarz (seriously THAT good). According to her website, d’Ithaque studied piano and some classical music as a child before becoming interested in pop and learning how to moonwalk. She cites Pharcyde, the Wu-Tang Clan, and Roni Size as influences, but her repertoire consists entirely of retro-minimalist Jackson family freakouts. If you’re having a party anytime soon, I strongly recommend you put this stuff on at happy hour and watch the girls have fun.

“Des hauts et des bas” and “Le soleil” from 2006’s Petite Odyssée.