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Pure Gold: "Engaging, wise, and chock full of ideas ~ Paul Coleman, Psy. D., author of "How to Say It for Couples: Communicating with Tenderness, Openness, and Honesty" |
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The summer after they graduated together from High School, somewhere between the shower and the sheets, Gavin asked Paige if she would marry him. The only certain thing Gavin knew about his future is he thought it would be too lonely without Paige. The only certain thing Paige knew about Gavin was ...well, actually Paige didn't know anything for certain about Gavin ...other than he always came back for more. Plus, they both knew they were just alike because neither of them grew up with a father. So of course, she said, "yes!" It's not surprising that their marriage ended up in divorce. What is surprising is it lasted ten years before they parted in a bitter child custody battle. It's so easy to look at Gavin and Paige and see they were making a huge mistake. They had good intentions. They thought they were in love. At least, what they were doing in private sure felt a lot like love. Are Gavin and Paige unlike so many other young couples? If you look at the divorce statistics, you may have to conclude there must be some strong similarities. We need to take a close look and have a mini-lesson in neurobiology and human sexuality to understand what happened with Gavin and Paige and with so many other couples. Question: What happens when people touch people? Answer: Well, if the touch is good-touch, meaning you are participating of your own free will, then being touched feels nice. In addition, touching another willing person also feels good. Okay, this may not yet sound like rocket science; however, there are some scientific reasons why it feels good. Since this is only a mini-lesson, we are going to skip all the big words such as neurotransmitters and serotonin, which is a phenolic amine neurotransmitter found in your brain. You don't need to know all the scientific names to understand this. What you need to know is this. When two people are actually in love, you understand ...real love, and when they are engaged in intimate touching, the emotional feelings they experience are caused by chemical reactions going on inside their brains. It is all related to the neurotransmitters we are not going to discuss. Okay, let's pretend you could make a love pill that did exactly the same thing inside your brain like what happens when two people are in love and they engage in intimate sexual touching ...not the physical pleasure, but the emotional feelings of falling in love. So, this love pill would make you feel like you were emotionally in love. Now, imagine that you were at Disneyland on some fabulous ride. That ride has nothing to do with being in love. The ride may well be the thrill of a lifetime, but it is not like being in love with a real person. Imagine, just before you got onto the ride at Disneyland, you took this love pill that felt just like real emotional love. Okay, imagine that as you get on the ride, you begin to feel the love pill taking affect. You begin to feel like you are falling in love with the ride as if it was a living, breathing person. But you know it is only due to the love pill that you took. That is why you feel that way. Now, if something strange happened to the ride and they closed the ride permanently, you may feel like you lost a real loved one. You may cry and mourn just as if you lost a husband or a wife. But it was all because of the love pill that you took. The truth is this. Whenever two people engage in intimate touching, those brain chemicals start pumping inside our heads. Those brain chemicals make us feel emotionally like we are in love. It makes us feel just like we would feel if we had taken a magic love pill. That is what sexual touching does inside our brains. Our brains don't know how to separate the emotional feeling of being in love from having a sexual relationship. Okay, please, pay attention; scientists have actually studied this stuff. If a man goes to a prostitute, especially if he goes to the same prostitute repeatedly, there is a strong chance that he is going to end up feeling as if he is in love with the prostitute. However, common sense would tell us that it is absurd for a man to fall in love with the prostitute he just hired. Now, you may remember the movie named Pretty Woman with Julia Roberts. The movie was about a prostitute and a rich man that fall in love. In this movie, they told us about the rule that prostitutes are never supposed to break. The rule for prostitutes is that they are never supposed to kiss their customers. |