Love-Making is Both an Art and a Science

Love-making has always sat at the balancing point between art and science; it is creative yet governed by the nervous system, it is relational yet can be driven by blood flow, and it is expressive yet controlled by hormones. This is why knowing how that delicate balance works is crucial in understanding why many researchers and public thinkers are sounding an alarm on the deepest systems of human connection. Systems that not only connect an individual connection to their lifespan or metabolic health, but to their mental health, relationships, and the interactions of society itself. 

What do the Numbers Say?

Researchers in disciplines such as public health, endocrinology, psychology, and sociology that have measured non-isolated trends in sexual and relational health are seeing concerning numbers in their findings. Numbers such as:

• 3 Months - the amount of time by which female puberty has advanced per decade since the 1970s.

• 1% - How much average testosterone levels in men have declined per year.

• 24% - How many adults report sexlessness.

• 35% - How many adults in the U.S. live with metabolic syndrome.

• 40% - The percentage of adults in the U.S. who meet the criteria for obesity.

• 40% - The percentage of women who report low sexual desire at some point in their lives.

• 42% - The percentage of men over the age of 40 who report some degree of erectile dysfunction.

• 60% - The percentage by which fertility rates have dropped since their peak in the mid-1950s.

  
  

These trends overlap and meet at the balancing point between hormones, metabolism, stress, mood: the tightly interwoven microcosm of sexual health. It’s not strange to ask yourself, and society: “what on earth changed?”

Where the Relational Balance Diverged

As the United States began sliding down the backside of the baby-booming era peak of the 1950s, technology and society began to modernize and shift at an astonishingly fast pace. Food, entertainment, novelty; all shifting at faster and faster paces all the way to the present era of screens where validation is available instantly. 

Sexual arousal has not been spared in this shift.

While ethically viewing pornography can easily be done, it does not mean that porn cannot have an impact on the way the brain learns. As humans, we have fundamentally evolved to pair sexual arousal with human bonding; dopamine, which signals motivation and reward, evolved in our brain to associate itself with oxytocin, which signals attachment and trust. When sexual arousal becomes detached, the brain attempts to adapt as quickly as possible. This evolution in brain chemistry has not exactly been a perfectly-executed balancing act. 

The rapid and repeated, novelty-driven stimulations we’ve endured for decades has strengthened the brain’s reward-seeking pathways, but has at the same time sacrificed its sensitivity to slower stimulations such as relational cues. Over time, the most desired path our brain wishes to take is one of visual novelty and intensity, rather than that of embodied connection. Any repeated stimulation or input can train the brain, and this is why it is important to understand that the mental area in which stimulations interact is incredibly valuable real estate. Your brain favors to give itself what it wants, meaning repeated frictionless arousal teaches the brain to favor the dopamine over the oxytocin, and over time the excessive dopamine begins buying up more real estate inside the brain until it can crowd out the slower-moving physiology of intimacy. This is the very reason porn can seem both overstimulating and at the same time under-arousing. It is exciting, but it is not bonding. 

The Body Still Understands

Despite the quick cultural shifts of the last seventy-ish years, the human sexual response has not changed and arousal still follows predictable biological sequences. Pain, shutting down, and sexual disinterest often reflect an unbalanced relationship between pacing, safety, and physiology. This imbalance is not necessarily due to a lack of attraction or effort, but simply due to a preconditioned nervous system and for a nervous system that has also evolved to be creative, artistic, and curious, it can have trouble re-achieving its equilibrium.

The best way to rekindle that balance is to let intimacy work with the nervous system, rather than against it, and allow the body exercise its basic understanding of human connection.