| Q: How do love and lust relate and and do we often confuse the two?
A: Love and lust are different emotionally and physiologically. Romantic attraction and feelings of love for someone elevates our dopamine and serotonin levels, which causes feelings of elation and loss of appetite. When we get to the point of feeling attachment and a more long-term phase of love, our bodies generate more oxytocin (known as the "hormone of love").
Lust, sex drive and an appetite for sex can visit during this process and is generated by increased testosterone levels in both men and women. Heightened levels of testosterone inspire a feeling of focused attention and sexual arousal.
Q: Is infidelity a natural phenomenon?
A: We do have the makeup to be adulterous. If a man has two children with one woman and more children with another, more of his DNA will be present in the next generation, which includes the genes associated with adultery! It perpetuates itself. It does not however, make it ok!
Q: Who are more adulterous, men or women?
A: About 25 percent of men and 15 percent of women are adulterous during marriage. Adultery seems pretty common amongst bother genders. However, adultery does seem to be decreasing.
Q: Why’s that?
A: This is most likely to do with both men and women being more independent and able to leave an unhappy marriage more easily nowadays. Both genders are marrying later, divorcing more and living longer, leaving them single for more of their adult lives. They are less adulterous as a result of spending less time married.
Q: Do love and sex mean different things to men and women?
A: Men are more prone to have one-night stands, and women tend to connect love and sex to a greater degree. Women relate sex to romance and intimacy, while men focus more on the physical side.
Q: Does how old you are influence your sexual interests?
A: Young men have 10 times more testosterone in their early 20s, and this is the peak of their sex drive. It tends to level out after that. On the other hand, a woman's sex drive peaks in her late 20s and early 30s. As a result of decreased testosterone as men age, they tend to become more compassionate as their levels go down. On the other hand, a woman's estrogen level decreases with age and she becomes more assertive. This has to do with the fact that the proportion of testosterone in a woman's system plays a larger role as the estrogen decreases.
Q: What role does attractiveness play in this love/lust equation?
A: Highly attractive couples tend to divorce more. This could be due to the fact that they have more opportunities to form new relationships. On the whole, we tend to couple with people who have a similar level of attractiveness. We also find that men tend to fall for pretty faces, while women can be attracted to financially loaded men.
From an evolutionary viewpoint, it would appear that men are looking to improve their gene pool while women are looking for men who will help to support their children.
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