Mating in Captivity

By making herself indispensable, she has hoped to counteract the vagaries of love.

probably don’t let your wife evoke such tremors in you. There’s an evolutionary anthropologist named Helen Fisher who explains that lust is metabolically expensive. It’s hard to sustain after the evolutionary payoff: the kids. You become so focused on the incessant demands of daily life that you short-circuit any electric charge between you.

It is so complete—and our need to feel safe is so profound—that we will do anything not to lose them.

When the erotic mind senses criticism, it goes into hiding. No longer private, it becomes secretive.

But Lena’s niceness is precisely what turns her husband off.

the tension between security and adventure is a paradox to manage, not a problem to solve.

Even more important, he was choosing her again, and it’s the act of choosing, the freedom involved in choosing, that keeps a relationship alive.

lived. The evolutionary anthropologist Helen Fisher says that the hormonal cocktail of romance (dopamine, norepineprine, and PEA) is known to last no more than a few years at best. Oxytocin, the cuddling hormone, outlasts them all.

What makes sustaining desire over time so difficult is that it requires reconciling two opposing forces: freedom and commitment.