by Stacey

Marital infidelity among older men and young couples is on the rise. According to this article in the NY Times, researchers are finding younger women appear to be cheating on their spouses nearly as often as men.

The most consistent data on infidelity come from the General Social Survey, sponsored by the National Science Foundation and based at the University of Chicago. The survey data show that in any given year, about 10 percent of married people — 12 percent of men and 7 percent of women — say they have had sex outside their marriage.

Detailed analysis of data from 1991 to 2006, which will be presented next month at the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies conference, show that the lifetime rate of infidelity for men over 60 increased to 28 in 2006, up from 20 percent in 1991. Thank you Viagra! For women over 60, the increase is more striking, the article says: to 15 percent from 5 percent in 1991. Who knows why!

The researchers also see big changes in relatively new marriages. About 20 percent of men and 15 percent of women under 35 say they have ever been unfaithful, up from about 15 and 12 percent respectively.

Wow. What’s up with that?

It is the apparent change in women’s fidelity that has sparked the most interest among relationship researchers. It is not entirely clear if the historical gap between men and women is real or if women have just been more likely to lie about it.

“Is it that men are bragging about it and women are lying to everybody including themselves?” one researcher asked. “Men want to think women don’t cheat, and women want men to think they don’t cheat, and therefore the sexes have been playing a little psychological game with each other.”

There is some good news in all this marital research: Married men and women appear to have the most active sex lives, reporting sex with their spouse 58 times a year, a little more than once a week.

So. Have you cheated on your spouse? Do you know anyone who has? C’mon, I won’t tell anyone. I promise.

by Stacey

There are many reasons that married people have affairs, unhappiness in their primary relationship being the root of the problem. But according to this article in TIME magazine, one couple’s counselor with 30 years experience says the one thing the guilty spouse should not do is fess up.

In her 30 years of counseling couples, Mira Kirshenbaum has discerned 17 reasons that people have extramarital affairs. In a near majority of couples, one partner will cheat on the other at some point. In her new book, When Good People Have Affairs: Inside the Hearts & Minds of People in Two Relationships (St. Martin’s), Kirshenbaum explains the reasons and offers some helpful — and sometimes surprising — advice on how to manage the consequences.

In a Q&A style article, Kirshenbaum says affairs usually begin innocently enough. She says the person who cheats must be unhappy to some degree in order to get involved with someone else, but they usually don’t go out looking for a new relationship. “It’s often an emotional affair to begin with,” she says. “Maybe they have long conversations, whatever. However it happens, eventually they realize that they’ve crossed some sort of line. But they realize it after they’ve crossed it. And it feels wonderful because it was a line they were hungry to cross. But it also feels terrible because they know it’s cheating, and they know they never wanted to be a cheater.”

Ugh. Sounds messy. Why is it that when it comes to love and sex, the forbidden is so enticing? Why aren’t we humans wired for convenience and civility? Instead it seems like we’re programmed to most want the things or people we can’t have.

While affairs are fun in the beginning, (or so says Kirshenbaum I wouldn’t know) they never last. Inevitably the cheater gets caught.

But what if the cheater decides the guilt is too much to bear or he/she wants to work it out with their spouse? Should they tell?

No. I’ve got to tell you that this is very, very important. I’m a person who is just an advocate of truth. I really will do anything to tell the truth, so it took me a long time to get to the point where I say, just don’t tell. Because how does it make a person less guilty to inflict terrible pain on someone? Which is exactly what the confession does. It puts the other person in a permanent state of hurt and grief and loss of trust and an inability to feel safe, and it doesn’t alleviate your guilt.

Your relationship is dealt a potentially devastating blow. Honesty is great, but it’s an abstract moral principle…. The higher moral principle, I believe, is not hurting people. And when you confess to having an affair, you are hurting someone more than you can ever imagine. So I tell people, if you care that much about honesty, figure out who you want to be with, commit to that relationship and devote the rest of your life to making it the most honest relationship you can.

Kirshenbaum says confessing about your affair is the kind of honesty that is unnecessarily destructive. There are two exceptions: one if you have practiced unsafe sex, even one time, she says you have to tell. The other is if you’re about to get busted anyway. It’s better for your spouse to hear it from you then to find out another way.

The good news on this grim topic is that affairs are not necessarily fatal for relationships. If the person who has been cheated on is good at forgiving and the person who did the cheating is truly sorry for it, she says couples can use the experience as a wake-up call and are able to make their marriage better and stronger than it was before.

What do you think? Is Kirshenbaum right? Should a spouse keep an affair secret? Is that what’s good for relationships? It seems like you’d need to clear the air in order to move forward, but what do I know. Also seems like quite a secret to be carrying around with you for the rest of your life.

by Stacey

A few weeks ago I wrote about talking to my four-year old son Sage about sex. According to this recent article in the Washington Post, parents should plan on having “the talk” early and often.

Today, experts urge parents to welcome questions on sexuality by the time their kids can ask why the sky is blue. Recent research has shown that regular discussions of sexuality may improve parent-child relationships and even delay the onset of sexual activity by children. For some parents, that latter effect is taking on new importance in light of a recent study showing that at least one in four teenage girls has a sexually transmitted disease.

“You could do a real disservice with this assumption that you wait until the child asks,” says Baltimore-based sex educator Deborah Roffman, the author of Sex and Sensibility: The Thinking Parent’s Guide to Talking Sense About Sex. “The truth is that we’ve left our children in a vacuum around these topics, and popular culture has just waltzed into this vacuum.”

How do you give your kids the tools they need to safeguard their physical and emotional health? And how much should you tell kids to reassure them about their own sexuality but not encourage risk-taking?

Steve Martino is a behavioral scientist with the Rand Corp. in Pittsburgh, he was the lead author of a study in the February issue of Pediatrics showing that the more frequently parents talked to their adolescents about sex, the closer the teens felt to their parents and the less likely they were to engage in risky behavior, the article says.

Researchers who surveyed 312 teens and their parents in Southern California four times over a year found that parents who took a one-shot “checklist” approach to talking about sex had less influence than those who introduced new topics gradually, returning to them over time. “Parents might think that they can talk about a particular topic once and be done with that topic,” Martino said, “but as your child ages and develops and has new experiences, the topics take on new meaning.”

Often, by the time children are teens, they want to talk to parents not so much about how sex works but about how to negotiate relationships, how to listen, how to say no. That’s what came out of a recent teen focus group at Children’s Hospital about the spread of AIDS, says Maureen Lyon, a clinical psychologist at Children’s National Medical Center.

Don’t worry. Talking won’t put ideas into children’s heads, says Michelle S. Barratt, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Texas Medical School at Houston and a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Adolescence. “There’s this myth that if you talk about something it will be on your child’s mind when it wasn’t before. Most young children could care less,” she said.

Parents can use talk about sex to instill their values, ethics and family beliefs, she said, as well as help children understand their own bodies. In talking about sex, experts say it’s important that parents cover a range of topics, including emotions and acts of physical intimacy, such as oral sex and anal intercourse.

By ignoring the emotional aspects of sexual behavior, parents put their children at risk, says sex educator Roffman, though many parents think they’ve done their duty once they’ve explained the mechanics of intercourse. “That sets [kids] on the road of thinking about sex in purely mechanical and depersonalized ways,” she said.

Choosing not to talk about sex with children also backfires, she said. By third grade, many children from families where such talk isn’t encouraged have concluded that their parents aren’t the ones to ask about sex, so they ask on the playground.

I haven’t broached the subject with Sage since that first time when he claimed it was “quite a story” I had told him about how babies are made. I know there’s a lot left to cover, but for now I’m glad he knows the basics. This article is a good reminder that the basics are only the beginning.

Cross-posted at MotherTalkers

by Stacey

About a week ago I went to hear a lecture on talking to kids about sex by Amy Lang, a parent educator in Seattle. I really was just tagging along with a friend and hadn’t given much thought to the topic since my kids are only four and one-year old.

Well, I got an earful. Here’s some of what she said:

We’re told we should wait until they ask us. That’s not true. It’s not their job to know when they’re ready. We need to be the ones to initiate the conversation. It’s really important to have early, regular, consistent conversations with your kids about sex throughout childhood and adolescence.

How early? Earlier than you might think.

By age five they should know. Up to age five, they’re a blank slate. They come to the conversation with curiosity. It’s really easy to talk to them about it. It’s science, it’s biology.

After that, she says they go to school and hear about it from other kids who may or may not have their facts straight.

You tell them that sex is for older people. Sex is for when you are in love. You get to give them facts and information and a big dose of your family values. Hopefully you’re in their head by the time they start dealing with this.

I sat there thinking about my older son Sage who still talks to his imaginary friends and wonders aloud if he can go surfing soon without realizing he needs to learn how to swim first. And then I thought about how she said this is a matter of health and safety. She said kids who know about their private body parts and understand that sex is something that grown-ups do, may be able to protect themselves better if they are ever faced with a creepy adult. That was reason enough for me.

So I took her advice and bought a book to get the conversation going. The book I got is called “What’s the Big Secret? Talking About Sex with Girls and Boys.” I decided to read it to him this weekend.

The first time we sat down with the book was Saturday afternoon. It starts out talking about the differences between boys and girls.

Actually, the only sure way to tell boys and girls apart is by their bodies. If you’re a boy, you have a penis, scrotum, and testicles.

If you’re a girl, you have a vulva, clitoris, and vagina.

These male and female body parts that show on the outside are called your genitals. Boys genitals are easier to see than girls’, but both are equally important.

Hurray! He was riveted.

Then we moved on to issues of privacy and touching and I noticed that his breathing was getting steady and his body wasn’t wiggling as much. By the time we got to intercourse, he had fallen asleep.

Later that night he wanted me to read the book to him again. He managed to stay awake this time and mostly seemed interested in the explanation of genitals, but he was starting to catch on that there was more to this conversation. It seemed as though it had never occurred to him before to wonder where babies come from. He was intrigued.

The next morning he asked me to read the book to him again and we spent more time on the part about how babies are made. Later on when we were in the kitchen getting breakfast ready, he asked me, “But how does it make the baby?” I knew what he meant. He didn’t understand how all of it translated into an actual person. And honestly, neither do I.

I agreed with him that it’s mysterious and then tried to explain it once more. I talked about how the daddy and mommy love each other and some of the mechanics involved, including the part about the sperm swimming fast to meet the egg. When I was done he said, “That was quite a story mom.” Indeed.

Well, at least I got the conversation started. What do you think? Is four too young to have this conversation? Or is this the right to time get the facts in before he’s too embarrassed to talk to me about it?

by Stacey

I can’t help but ask the same question many are wondering, how can Silda Wall Spitzer stand it? How can she stand up there with her arrogant, cheating husband (now former governor of New York Elliot Spitzer) whose rising political career eclipsed her own, as he apologizes publicly for hiring a prostitute to meet him in a swanky DC hotel? The day before Valentine’s Day no less? How can she stand there and not beat him over the head with bat?

Like I said, I’m hardly the first to ask these questions. This article from the LA Times is just one of many saying the same things.

It was the way she stood there, enduring. Silda Wall Spitzer did not say a word as her husband, Gov. Eliot Spitzer, brusquely apologized to his family and the public after he was allegedly caught on a wiretap doing business with a high-priced prostitution ring. Her face was drawn. But she took her husband’s hand as they left the room.

This ritual of the high-powered, political husband caught in a sex scandal publicly apologizing for his moral failings that quite honestly we all know he wouldn’t be sorry for if he hadn’t gotten caught, has become so commonplace that it’s almost not interesting.

But what is interesting is the fact that the wife always stands there with her jackass husband. Somehow this is the “right” thing to do, to stand by your man when he’s destroyed your trust, humiliated your entire family, and gotten himself kicked out his job.

I wonder how the public would react if she just refused. What if she said, “Screw you, El, you’re on your own. You made this mess. You clean it up. I’m taking the kids and going to visit my parents. See you whenever.”

Right on. I’d vote for her to be governor. Or maybe president. Wait a minute…

I guess the common wisdom is that Hillary Clinton parlayed the public sympathy she gained through the Monica Lewinsky debacle into a successful political career. Maybe standing by your man is just part of the game.

Standing with a disgraced husband may be seen as “one last spousal duty” in a political marriage, said Tobe Berkovitz, of Boston University’s College of Communication. After years of making compromises and sacrifices to advance a spouse’s career, “people just sort of do it,” Berkovitz said.

No thanks. On a lighter note, there was a really funny spoof of this on the Daily Show last night. Like I said before, I love Samantha Bee.

by Stacey

A new rule will soon go into effect in schools across one of DC’s prominent Maryland suburbs that will require school officials to notify parents if they learn that a female student is pregnant. According to this article in last Sunday’s Washington Post, it’s a move health experts say violates a young woman’s right to privacy and jeopardizes health care.

Under Howard [County]’s regulations, approved last month by the Board of Education, any school employee who learns that a student is or might be pregnant is to notify the school counselor or nurse. If the pregnancy is confirmed and the parents don’t know, the counselor or nurse helps the student tell them. Although the rules do not specify a time frame, Frank Aquino, chairman of the Board of Education, said it probably would occur “in a matter of a few days.”

That doesn’t seem like very much time to me. If a pregnant teen has chosen not to turn to her parents for help, perhaps there is a reason. Health officials say the new policy could isolate these young women even more. “There’s no question this will have a chilling effect on kids coming forward,” said County Health Officer Peter Beilenson.

The policy “really pushes the issue of informing the parents, when state law says minors have the right to make decisions independent of the parents,” said Deborah Chilcoat, an education and training specialist for Planned Parenthood of Maryland and co-chair of a county coalition on adolescent sexuality and reproductive health.

According to the article, Maryland’s minor consent law, which applies to those younger than 18, says teenagers do not have to inform parents to receive health services, including pregnancy testing, contraceptives and treatment for sexually transmitted infections.

State law does require that a parent or guardian to be notified before a minor has an abortion. However, it also allows circumstances in which parents need not be informed. They include when the physician has determined that the minor is capable of giving informed consent or when the minor is threatened with abuse, the article says.

Andrew Gavelek, the eight-member board’s student representative and a senior at Reservoir High, cast the lone no vote. He talked to 40 female students and said they unanimously opposed the policy. “If they were going to tell their parents, they would want to do it themselves,” he said.

Does anyone care what these young women think about this? Apparently not. But they should.

Tina L. Cheng, chief of general pediatrics and adolescent medicine at Johns Hopkins University, said research has shown that significant numbers of sexually active adolescents said they would stop using health-care services if confronted with mandatory parental notification. “It may not be in the best interests in some circumstances for the parents to know up front,” Cheng said.

Recently I participated in a very interesting discussion about a similar topic over on MotherTalkers. The post was written by a mother whose middle school age daughter had phoned her from school in tears because she just learned that one of her 13-year old friends was pregnant. At the time, the girl’s parents didn’t know about the pregnancy. We discussed what was the writer’s responsibility vis-a-vis the girl? That is, if she’s the only adult who knows about this, what should she do? One answer was to tell the school counselor.

But if the girl went to a school in Howard County Maryland, which she doesn’t, that wouldn’t be an option if the girl clearly did not want her parents to know about her condition.

What do you think? Would you feel comfortable knowing your child attended a school that had strict parental notification rules? Or would you rather rely on the strength of your relationship with your child to ensure you’re the one they turn to in their time of need?

by Stacey

Nearly 13 percent of parents in the U.S. practiced co-sleeping with their children in 2000 up from 5.5. percent in 1993, according to a series of studies on co-sleeping published in the August issue of the journal Infant and Child Development. And according to this article in the NY Times, the current number may actually be much higher.

Ask parents if they sleep with their kids, and most will say no. But there is evidence that the prevalence of bed sharing is far greater than reported. Many parents are “closet co-sleepers,” fearful of disapproval if anyone finds out, notes James J. McKenna, professor of anthropology and director of the Mother-Baby Behavioral Sleep Laboratory at the University of Notre Dame.

“They’re tired of being censured or criticized,” Dr. McKenna said. “It’s not just that their babies are being judged negatively for not being a good baby compared to the baby who sleeps by himself, but they’re being judged badly for having these babies and being needy.”

Pediatricians generally frown on co-sleeping. The American Academy of Pediatrics has said babies should sleep close to their parents but not in the same bed, the article says. The concern is that a sleeping parent could trap a baby in bed covers or in the space between the bed and the wall.

Although some studies suggest bed sharing puts children at higher risk for sudden infant death syndrome, the data are not conclusive. And some researchers say the risk is higher only if parents smoke, drink too much alcohol and fail to take proper precautions to make sure the bed is safe.

Others raise concerns that children will not develop healthy sleep habits or that marriages will suffer if children sleep between parents. In one study, for example, 139 parents were asked about the sleep habits of their young children. Parents who slept with their children reported a much higher frequency of nighttime wakings than parents who did not. But experts say that kids who sleep solo may have night wakings, it’s just that parents don’t know about it. The crux is whether the co-sleeping parents consider night wakings a problem.

As for the toll it takes on marriages, co-sleeping causes trouble if the couple is not in agreement about the arrangement, the article says. Otherwise, couples report equal levels of happiness in their relationship as couples who do not co-sleep.

There are intentional co-sleepers — those who sleep with their children because they want to breast-feed for a long stretch and believe bed sharing is good for a child’s well-being and emotional development. Another group is reactive co-sleepers, those parents who don’t really want to sleep with their kids, but do so because they can’t get their children to sleep any other way or because financial hardship requires them to share a room with a child.

And then there is a third group that she tentatively calls circumstantial co-sleepers — parents who sleep with their children occasionally because of circumstances like sharing a bed on a family vacation, during a thunderstorm or because the child is sick.

Problems occur most often among reactive co-sleepers, the article says, because the situation feels coerced.

My family falls into that third group, the circumstantial co-sleepers. For the most part I like sleeping with my kids. It’s cozy and sweet. But I think if we did it all the time, we’d need to get a bigger bed. The writer of the article says sleeping with kids is like sleeping inside a washing machine and she has a point. All that twisting and kicking. Oy.

By the way, I’m all for people coming out of the closet. If anyone wants to do so here on Fussbucket, feel free.

by Stacey

An independently-run health clinic at a middle school in Portland, Maine will soon be offering girls access to oral contraceptives after a school committee voted last week in favor of it. According to this NY Times article, the pills could be available to students by the end of the year.

The school’s clinic functions much like a physician’s office and has been offering condoms and testing for pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases since 2000. It also offers dental, mental health and basic care.

Similar clinics run at Portland’s high schools have been offering prescription birth control to students for years, says Douglas Gardner, the city’s director of health and human services. Health officials decided to extend the policy to middle school after learning that 17 middle school students had become pregnant in the last four years, seven of them in the 2006-7 school year.

“These kids are far too young to be sexually active,” Mr. Gardner said. “You can’t argue that any differently. But there is a small group of kids, and thankfully it’s a small group, who are reporting that they are sexually active, and we need to do all we can to protect them.”

The Portland clinic is not the first in the country to offer such services. Four middle schools in Seattle offer reproductive health care through city-administered health centers, said James Apa, communications manager for Public Health-Seattle and King County. Clinics in six Baltimore middle schools offer access to oral contraceptives, said Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, the city’s health commissioner, who said the program had helped to decrease teenage pregnancy rates.

Although one-quarter of the nation’s school-based health clinics offer some type of contraception (most of them in high schools), less than one percent of schools provide oral contraception, the article says.

Parents in Portland who want their children to have access to the clinic must sign a waiver each year that details the services it offers, the article says. Under state law, reproductive health, mental health and substance abuse issues are confidential between medical provider and patient, regardless of the patient’s age. Parents will be asked to sign a new waiver in order for their child to receive the birth control pill.

Of the 500 students at King, 135 have permission to use the clinic, said Principal Michael McCarthy. Of those, five students, all of whom were 14 or 15, reported being sexually active in the last school year. One became pregnant. King is the only one of the city’s three middle schools that has a health clinic.

I’m a little torn about this. One the one hand, I like the progressive intent behind the idea. That is, whether we like it or not, the kids are having sex so let’s do what we can to help them protect themselves. But on the other hand, I think it does kind of send the message that adults are condoning it. In the end, I’d err on the side of offering the birth control, but I’d like to see lots of counseling to go along with it.

In the past, concerns have been raised over the link between teen sex and depression. But a study published last May in the American Journal of Sociology found that in general the two are not connected. However, for a small subset, girls 15-years-old or younger and boys 14 or younger, the study found that mental health problems can arise.

“Being female or younger than the average age at first-time sex among your peers increases the chance of depression, as does a lack of commitment or intimacy within the relationship and what happens to the relationship after first-time sex,” says Ann Meier, a University of Minnesota assistant professor of sociology and author of the study. “For girls in uncommitted relationships, ending a relationship with sex has more of an impact on mental health than ending that same relationship if it did not involve sex.”

In her study, Meier polled 8,563 7th- through 12th-graders students over an 18-month period, according to this online article. She compared the mental health of teens who didn’t have sex to teens who were virgins at the beginning of the study, but who lost their virginity during the 18-month period.

It’s kind of unimagineable to me to think of thirteen-year olds having sex. In truth, I really don’t want to think about it. So I applaud the adults in Portland, Maine for not burying their heads over this. I hope they’ll keep an eye on those kids though.

by Stacey

Judy Blume has updated two of her most memorial novels, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. and Forever with current reproductive health information for young adults. According to Reproductive Health Reality Check, Blume took the menstruation belts out of Margaret and added condoms to Forever. H/t Feministe.

When you can’t count on the government, schools, or dubiously funded clinics for medically accurate and comprehensive sex education, you can still count on Judy Blume.

Known for arresting truthfulness in nineteen young adult novels, Blume’s characters wrestle not only with the usual friendship and family heartaches, but also with puberty, masturbation, sex, and developing bodies—all with an accuracy that’s made Blume, in her own words, “one of the most banned writers in the Americas” for nearly 40 years.

Before we get to the details, I want to pause here to sing some praise for Judy. She was my first favorite writer. In those awkward late elementary and middle school years, she told the exact stories I wanted to hear in exactly the way I wanted to hear them. When I got to the end of one of her books, I’d often flip it back around and start reading all over again.

In Margaret, the 12-year old protagonist eagerly awaits her first period. She practices putting on a menstruation belt, which even way back when I was reading the novel, were out of date. In 1998, Blume changed the belts to pads with sticky tape. According to RH Reality Check, some readers were upset that she’d changed a classic. But I see it as a good thing. Even though Blume’s novels were fiction, they were also educational. At least that was the case for me.

At the time, Margaret helped me understand that menstruation was a normal right of passage for girls my age. When my time came, at least I knew what the hell was going on. This is an important point. My mother was not big on front-end information. Once I got my period she was helpful enough, but she didn’t engage me in any heads-up, here’s what’s coming conversations. But Judy, she had my back.

And my mother’s, come to think of it.

Forever was an entirely different box of chocolates. This was the story of two 17-year olds, Katherine and Michael, who fall in love and decide to have sex. I read this book years before I was seventeen and I’ll tell you, it was riveting. Admittedly salacious and seemingly scandalous, I probably read that book five times cover to cover.

Blume wrote Forever in response to her daughter’s request to see a story about teenagers who had sex without being punished by grisly abortions, miscarriages, or deaths, the RH post says. In the version I read, Katherine goes to a health clinic where she is given a prescription for birth control pills.

It’s that scene that Blume refers to in a one-page preface added to recent editions of the book. She writes: “The seventies were a time when sexual responsibility meant preventing unwanted pregnancy. Today, sexual responsibility also means preventing sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV/AIDS. In this book Katherine visits a clinic and is given a prescription for The Pill. Today, she would be told it is essential to use a condom along with any other method of birth control. If you’re going to become sexually active, then you have to take responsibility for your own actions. So get the facts first.”

The preface refers readers to the websites of Planned Parenthood and Sex, Etc., a by-teens-for-teens online magazine.

According to the American Library Association, Forever was the eighth most banned book in the U.S. in the 1990s, the RH post says. Despite that, The Guardian reports it has sold 3.5 million copies worldwide, since its publication.

In an interview with Teenwire, Blume reflects on what might be so alarming about the book. “If there’s anything groundbreaking about (Forever),” Blume said, “maybe it’s that they’re sexually responsible. Or maybe it’s that Katherine enjoys her sexuality. There are still people who are bothered by that today.”

My mother wasn’t touching that one with a ten-foot pole. So it was books like Forever, and movies and television and my peers that guided me down the path of early sexuality. I understand that it isn’t easy for parents to talk to kids about sex. That’s why I’m glad I had Judy.

So what do you think? Was Judy wrong to change her books? And more importantly, did you love Judy too?

by Stacey

As far as your brain is concerned, falling in love is a lot like being addicted to drugs only without the worry of getting arrested or running out of cash. According to this LA Times story, the harder you fall the more likely you are to experience sleeplessness, loss of appetite, a rush of euphoria, and a willingness to do incredibly stupid things to get more action.

So far scientists have discovered that a combination of certain of neural systems, chemical messengers, and life experiences together to set the process in motion from initial attraction to passionate love and finally to longterm companionship.

For starters, initial attraction between two people often occurs in situations in which people are aroused, either by fear, anxiety, or even laughter. “It’s pretty simple,” says relationship researcher Arthur Aron, psychologist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. “You’re feeling physiologically aroused, and it’s ambiguous why. Then you see an attractive person, and you think, ‘Oh, that’s why.’”

Mutual attraction itself isn’t so rare. People often glom onto each other for the sketchiest of reasons and later wonder what the hell they were thinking. In order to get to passionate love the brain needs to really kick into gear, and that researchers are finding, requires a part of the brain called the limbic system. According to the article, the limbic system is “nestled deep within the brain between the neocortex (the region responsible for reason and intellect) and the reptilian brain (responsible for primitive instincts).”

Studies of people in passionate love using fMRI, which is brain imaging technology, show “activity in the ventral tegmental area and other regions of the brain’s reward system associated with motivation, elation and focused attention,” says Helen Fisher, evolutionary anthropologist at Rutgers University who studies human attraction.

“It’s the same part of the brain that presumably is active when a smoker reaches for a cigarette or when gamblers think they’re going to win the lottery,” the article says. “No wonder it’s as hard to say no to the feeling of romantic arousal as it would be to say no to a windfall in the millions. The brain has seen what it wants, and it’s going to get it.”

Once this part of the brain gets activated, a flood of feel-good chemicals such as dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin go racing to the nucleus accubens. And that’s when the cravings begin.

Biologically, the cravings and pleasure unleashed are as strong as any drug. Surely such a goal is worth taking risks for, and other alterations in the brain help ensure that the lovelorn will do just that. Certain regions, scientists have found, are being deactivated, such as within the amygdala, associated with fear. “That’s why you can do such insane things when you’re in love,” Fisher says. “You would never otherwise dream of driving across the country in 13 hours, but for love, you would.”

Sooner or later, excited brain messages reach the caudate nucleus, a dopamine-rich area where unconscious habits and skills, such as the ability to ride a bike, are stored. The attraction signal turns the love object into a habit, and then an obsession.

This explains a lot. Remember that time you hid out on the street corner just to see if he really was out with his friends? Or the energy you spent staring at the phone willing yourself not to call again? At the time you wondered what happened to your dignity. Well, now you know. Sing it with me!

You can’t sleep, you can’t eat
There’s no doubt, you’re in deep
Your throat is tight, you can’t breathe
Another kiss is all you need
Whoa, you like to think that you’re immune to the stuff, oh yeah
It’s closer to the truth to say you can’t get enough
You know you’re gonna have to face it, you’re addicted to love

Music fades out. Unlike drugs, recovery from love addiction in the brain is relatively painless. If the relationship lasts, after about two to four years the urgency subsides and the mingling of the mundane takes over. People feel stable and committed and they have their wits about them once again. I guess that’s where I’m at in life. I basically have my wits although sometimes I get a bit wistful remembering the time when my wits were gone and I was willing to drive across the country in half a day to see my beloved.