September 17, 2007
Is birth control dooming your marriage?
Tanya Diamond bills herself as "the world's only sexual transformation expert". (I'm not sure why, because each time she introduced herself she would have to follow it up by explaining that she didn't transform men into women, she transforms their sexual abilities. Just want to be clear on that.) She was one of a panel of five speakers, including myself, who spoke at yesterday's Seattle Lair meeting, and she brought up some troubling recent research. I was already familiar with the first study. Women were given T-shirts from a number of different men and instructed to smell the shirts and rate which they thought smelled the best. It turned out that universally, women preferred the odors of men whose immune systems most differed from their own.
It was found, by Wedekind and his team, that how women rate a man's body odor pleasantness and sexiness depends upon how much of their MHC profile is shared. Overall, women prefer those scents exuded by men whose MHC profiles varied the most from their own. Hence, any given man's odor could be pleasingly alluring to one woman, yet an offensive turnoff to another. -Psychology Today
It makes sense that nature would engineer us to be attracted to people with a different genetic profile. Encouraging cross-breeding leads to healthier offspring. The catch is that once a woman gets pregnant, her preferences change and she is more attracted to her own tribe. And birth control pills work by manipulating hormone levels to simulate pregnancy. So the men a woman is naturally attracted to change when she goes on the pill.
The Swiss researchers found that women taking oral contraceptives (which block conception by tricking the body into thinking it's pregnant) reported reversed preferences, liking more the smells that reminded them of home and kin. Since the Pill reverses natural preferences, a woman may feel attracted to men she wouldn't normally notice if she were not on birth control - men who have similar MHC profiles. -Psychology Today
The obvious question: well, what happens if my wife and I fell in love while she's on the pill and wired to be attracted to her own family? Scientists have something to say about that, too. Back to Psychology Today:
The effects of such evolutionary novel mate choices can go well beyond the bewilderment of a wife who stops taking her contraceptive pills and notices her husband's "newly" foul body odor. Couples experiencing difficulty conceiving a child - even after several attempts at tubal embryo transfer - share significantly more of their MHC than do couples who conceive more easily. These couples' grief is not caused by either partner's infertility, but to an unfortunate combination of otherwise viable genes.
Conclusion? Before you enter into any serious long-term commitments, have your partner go off the pill for a while. If the chemistry evaporates with the hormones, better to find out sooner than later.
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