We all know the premise behind hooking up is the idea of "no strings attached," but what if I told you it is never possible to have sex without attachment? Not just for spiritual reasons, but also for very significant scientific reasons- namely, the way our brains are wired to respond to sex.
Most of us don't have a clue that the whole time we're telling ourselves it's "just sex," our brains are busy forming attachment bonds with our partner.
The culprits of this sinister malefaction are dopamine and oxytocin. According to neuroscientific discoveries in the last decade, both of these neurochemicals are released or become elevated in the brain during sex.
Dopamine, which induces feelings of pleasure as well as a desire to repeat the act producing the pleasure, becomes dramatically elevated during sex. In fact, according to the authors of Hooked: New Science on How Casual Sex is Affecting our Children, sex is one of the strongest generators of dopamine reward. Because of this, we can literally become hooked or addicted to sex with our partner. While this is good news for those in monogamous relationships who desire to stay together for the long haul, it becomes troubling for those who are faced with the possibility of a string of casual sexual encounters.
Meanwhile, oxytocin, a neurochemical that active primarily in female brains during four specific times, two of which include intimate touching and orgasm, results in feelings of emotional attachment. It's important to realize these feelings are not just something we can choose to ignore. They are the result of a real physiological process going on in our brains and create an actual, not just perceived, bonding effect.
In fact, oxytocin is the very same chemical that creates a bond between a mother and child and is released by the brain during labor, and, more tellingly, during breastfeeding.
If that doesn't show us that our brains are wired to make loving, long lasting attachments as a result of sex, I don't know what does. As you can imagine, this is a big reason why we can't help but fall for that guy we've been hooking up with, or start to feel confused about that friend with benefits, or struggle with feeling hurt and used after what's supposed to be a simple casual sex encounter (or, on a whole other note, why guys who view porn and masturbate are selfish sexually- they're bonded to themselves through the neurochemical vasopressin...but that's a whole other post).
Something to seriously think about the next time you go for the hookup...
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