If you’re feeling as if staying close is not so simple, that’s because the male and female brain are very complex.
Very.
And that’s not just my opinion. According to Louann Brizendine — professor of psychiatry with an expertise in neuroscience — WOW – what a difference a chromosome makes!
Brizendine in her writings explains how a man’s hypothalamus – the brain area which governs sexual pursuit — is said to be potentially as much as seven times larger than a female’s hypothalamus – making it a fact that men have sex on the brain more than women – in a literal sense. Plus, it has also been estimated that the sex circuits in a typical man’s brain light up once a minute — much more often than a woman’s – only in the particular Brizendine article I read, she didn’t say how much more.
One thing men and women actually do share in common – the natural decline in dopamine and oxytocin (the two male and female stimulators of feelings of emotional attachment). It’s both a male and female phenomenon that as length of a relationship increases, the plentihood of dopamine and oxytocin decrease.
However Brizendine shares a silver lining within the midst of this dark neurological cloud: “Anything that brings the two of you together –reading on the couch with her legs stretched across your knees, or watching TV with your heads resting together — can produce a splash of (dopamine and oxytocin).”
A quick tip in particular for men: “Studies have found that a hug from a partner will produce an oxytocin rush in a woman’s brain–but only if that hug lasts 20 seconds or more. And just about everything that falls under the general heading of ‘foreplay’ is likely to produce a similar effect.”
A quick warning in particular for women: “The effects of oxytocin can be incredibly disarming to a woman. Female animals injected with the stuff seem to throw caution to the wind and cuddle up with the first available male. And that is why, when women ask me for advice about men, I warn them, "Don’t hug the guy unless you plan to trust him."
One particular story Brizendine shared truly stood out …about a couple seeking marital aid.
In Brizendine’s words: “The woman–let’s call her Jane–had virtually stopped having sex with her husband, whom we’ll call Evan. They had both begun new jobs, and the hot wires that connected them had gradually gone cold. Jane never felt in the mood. Evan suspected she had a lover. Jane was thunderstruck. How could Evan imagine such a thing?”
“Never in the mood,” says Brizendine, is one of the most common complaints women bring to her office, and one of the easiest to fix. It’s simply what happens when male and female brains – being so different — miss the point with one another.
Brizendine explains: “It was natural for Evan, with his male brain bleating for sex once a minute, to assume that his wife had similar appetites that were being satisfied elsewhere. Jane had no idea that to the male brain, sex is as essential to a relationship as TALKING.”
The couple hashed out their problems in Brizendine’s office. When they returned two weeks later, their sex life was as hot as ever.
How?
The couple together had decided to stop referring to sex as "sex.”
Instead the husband and wife had good humorously re-named sex as: "male communication."
Brizendine joked back to all of her male readers of her work that she wished them “an abundance of male communication.”
I agree – and would like to add a note to all of you women readers out there. I wish you all plenty of multiple male communication!
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