Why Women Have Sex by Cindy M. Meston, David M. Buss

studying the brain concluded that love is like a mental disorder or a drug addiction? Can we change a person’s ability or desire to bond to someone by changing his or her brain chemicals in the same way we are able to in animals? Can having sex with someone we are only mildly attracted to make our brains release chemicals that keep us attached? In this chapter we explore the powerful emotions of love and bonding and how and why they are integrally linked to women’s sexuality.
What Is Love?
     
    According to the well-known psychologist Robert Sternberg’s “triangular theory of love,” love consists of the distinct components of intimacy, passion, and commitment.
Intimacy
is the experience of warmth toward another person that arises from feelings of closeness and connectedness. It involves the desire to give and receive emotional supportand to share one’s innermost thoughts and experiences. Here is how one woman in our study experienced this dimension of love:
I feel that sex can be one of many physical expressions of love, though sex is not always an expression of love. When I make love with my husband, it is an intimacy, trust, and exposure of myself that I share only with him . . . because I love him. Sex can be a way of fulfilling my husband’s needs (physical, emotional, psychological) that can’t be achieved any other way and [it] lets him know that I love him and vice versa. Though I have been physically intimate (kissing, petting, etc.) with other people whom I did not love, I have had sex only with people I loved.
    —heterosexual woman, age 29
     
     
    Passion
, the second component, refers to intense romantic feelings and sexual desire for another person. Elaine Hatfield, a distinguished psychologist at the University of Hawaii, has spent decades studying passionate love and how it is expressed. She defines passionate love as a “hot intense emotion” characterized by an intense longing for union with another. It is the “lovesick” part of love that Hatfield believes exists in all cultures. In fact, some cultures even have specific diagnostic criteria for the “symptoms” people get when they fall passionately in love. For example, Hatfield reports that in South Indian Tamil families, love-struck persons are said to be suffering from
mayakkam
, a syndrome characterized by dizziness, confusion, intoxication, and delusion.
    When reciprocated, feelings of passion are often associated with feelings of fulfillment and ecstasy:
Honestly speaking, sex has never been just a satisfied action for me. It has always expressed something more. . . . I feel so happy having the most wonderful man. . . . Probably it happened because while living far away, for quite a long period of time, we had a great opportunity to realize what we mean for each other, and what true love is, and when I look into his eyes while making love, it is always something which is so difficult to express bywords . . . but it’s like the fullest flowering of the blossom of our love.
    —heterosexual woman, age 38
     
     
    For one woman in our study, feelings of romance and passion served an added bonus—they helped her ignore her boyfriend’s less than desirable housekeeping habits:
For [my] twentieth birthday, my boyfriend took me out to an amazing seafood restaurant and we had a really incredible time. He treated me like a princess. I felt so loved, and I was so in love, and all the feelings [from] the romantic atmosphere of the restaurant carried over to his grungy apartment and we made love on his bed. That may have been the best sex we’ve ever had.
    —heterosexual woman, age 20
     
     
    Commitment
, the third component of love, requires decision making. A short-term decision involves whether or not one actually loves the other person, while the long-term decision involves a willingness to maintain the relationship through thick and thin. Many women in our study talked about how commitment was an essential component of love