Is It Love or Lust



Is It Love or Lust?

By Amy Bowles Reyer, Ph.D.

"There's nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman; it's a thing no married man knows anything about." — Oscar Wilde

So how can you tell if it's love or lust? To get developmental perspective, we posed the question — and a few others — to anthropology professor Helen Fisher of Rutgers University:

|Q: | |What is the relationship between love and lust and do we often confuse the two? |

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|A: | |There are different emotional and physiological components to both love and lust. 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. |

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|Q: | |Is infidelity a natural phenomenon? |

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|A: | |We definitely have the circuitry to be adulterous. There are Darwinian reasons why cheating has evolved. 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. |

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|Q: | |Who are more adulterous, men or women? |

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|A: | |Roughly 25 percent of men and 15 percent of women will be adulterous during marriage. This is really hard to quantify, but it is |

| | |fairly common in both sexes. What is interesting is that adultery seems to be decreasing. |

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|Q: | |That's surprising, why? |

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|A: | |Possibly because both men and women are more independent and can leave an unhappy marriage more easily these days. We also find that|

| | |men and women 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. |

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|Q: | |Do sex and love mean different things to men and women? |

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|A: | |Men are more inclined to have one-night stands, and women tend to connect love and sex to a greater degree. Women connect sex with |

| | |romance and intimacy, while men focus more on body parts and functioning. What's interesting is that men tend to consider sex a more|

| | |intimate act than women do. From an evolutionary standpoint, this makes sense because women are actually giving men a gift during |

| | |copulation — the opportunity to spread his seed. It is also easier for women to find sexual partners. |

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|Q: | |Does age influence our sexual interests? |

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|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. Conversely, as a woman's estrogen level decreases with age, she will|

| | |become 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. |

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|Q: | |What role does attractiveness play in this love-lust equation? |

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|A: | |We find that highly attractive couples tend to divorce more — probably because they have more opportunities to form new |

| | |relationships. In general, 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 are highly attracted to men with fat wallets. From an evolutionary standpoint, this makes sense |

| | |because 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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