[PLUG-TALK] Visiting from Tacoma

glen e. p. ropella gepr at tempusdictum.com
Mon Jan 5 23:12:48 UTC 2009


Thus spake Michael Robinson circa 05/01/09 02:26 PM:
> You are so misguided.  Sex releases chemicals all right, chemicals that
> bond you to the person you are having sex with (heterosexual sex mind
> you).  So if the person you are having sex with leaves you, that doesn't
> make you happy.  It is hard to break a sexual bond, very hard.  If a
> person is left by one sex partner after another, their ability to bond
> is impaired and the net effect does not make them happier.  It's like
> sticking tape on your skin and pulling it off over and over and over
> again.  Eventually, the tape won't stick anymore.  The tape is a
> metaphor for one's ability to bond sexually.  The human mind is made
> for one sex partner for life.  You can't "get some" from just anybody
> and be happy.  Use and abuse is just that, use and abuse.  

You're absolutely right that we have some (controversial) animal model
evidence that some endorphins create emotional bonds with other people.
 But you're absolutely wrong that this bond is automatically broken when
that someone "leaves you".

I feel a very close bond with all the women I've had sex with.  But that
doesn't mean we must live, eat, play, study, work, and rear children
together in order to preserve that bond.

One of the same chemicals (oxytocin) plays an equivalent role in sexual
and maternal bonding.  But just because a mother has a very close
(chemical) bond with her child, doesn't mean that child shouldn't move
10,000 miles away to pursue a career or family elsewhere.  Just because
the child "leaves" the mother, doesn't mean the bond is broken like an
oil saturated piece of tape.  (What a crappy metaphor.)

The experience you're talking about comes from _misunderstanding_ the
role of chemicals in the emotional state of the human.  Because you put
all your faith in the flying spaghetti monster, you tend to search for
and find supernatural or mystical explanations for natural physical
phenomena.  It's your fantasy of a non-physical spiritual bond that's at
fault, here, not the sex nor the chemicals released during sex.

Get over your childish _anger_ and recognize and cherish the healthy
bond that you and your ex-girlfriend will always share.  The more bonds
you have with the people around you, the happier you will be.  (Note
that doesn't necessarily imply promiscuity because it takes focussed,
long-term attention to build the endorphin-based bond between mother and
child or between couples.)

Also note that since the endorphin-based bonds are (hypothesized as)
physiologically tied to sexual arousal, they will work regardless of
whether the couple (or triple ... or any tuple, I suppose) is of the
same or different gender.  That means that homosexual couples can
develop exactly the same physiological bond heterosexual couples can
develop, as long as they stay in a committed relationship long enough
for the correlation to stabilize.

-- 
glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095, http://tempusdictum.com




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