Ah! TGIF!! It has been a long week here at the PPP. WE had incredible ups and downs this week and are happy to have the weekend here. I am sure you do too.
Today I was home watching Oprah (you don't have to be a bitch to like Oprah) and the topic today was "The Laws of Attraction". It talked about all these studies on why people are attracted to each other.
Now for us dogs, it is very easy; when a bitch is in heat she lets out a scent with a hormone and any dogs within whiff is welcome to come and enjoy the party and try our best to procreate. Well, now science has found out that is actually quite similar for humans as well.
Research has found that when women are ovulating, they produce copulins, a scent that attracts men. The researchers believe when a man gets a whiff of copulins, his testosterone levels rise. As a result, he secretes androstenone, an odor that repels women who aren't ovulating.
Sex therapist Dr. Laura Berman says attraction has a lot more to do with science and evolution than people might think. "We are innately all puppies in heat," she says. "We are capable of discerning 10,000 different scents consciously. But then there's a whole realm of unconscious scents that we're not even aware that we're smelling."
These odors let people know when a woman is fertile and when a man's testosterone levels are high, Dr. Berman says. As a result, individuals can tell when someone else is most ripe for reproduction. "It's all about survival of the species," she says.
My mommy thinks this explains so much. It explains all the weird combinations of couples, the older men going after the younger women who are ovulating still whilst their older wives may have stopped. This makes so much sense! Hormones really do rules the world.
One common complaint Dr. Berman hears among women with relationship problems is that they love their partner, but they're not in love with him. "There is a difference between love and chemistry," Dr. Berman says. "Take a really good whiff of him without cologne when he's relatively clean. If that smell turns you on, that's a really good cue of chemistry." My mommy agrees, she always says that if she doesn't like how a man smells she cannot have a relationship with him. We dogs are a little less picky but we seem to all operate on the same level.
In one recent study, Dr. Berman says researchers had women smell men's T-shirts. The women were most attracted to the shirts of men with a different major histocompatability complex (MHC) from them. MHC is a collection of genes that are related to immune systems. "We unconsciously want to mate with someone who has a different immune system than ours because that helps with the survival of our offspring," Dr. Berman says. Again my mommy agrees as she loves to smell the t-shirts of the men she dates.
The T-shirt study also found that women taking hormonal contraception were attracted to men who had similar MHC as they did. "If you're on the pill, your body is being tricked into think you're pregnant, so you're not ovulating," Dr. Berman says. "The bad news there is that they have looked at these couples who have similar MHC, and not only do they have higher levels of infidelity and higher levels of marital discord, but they also have higher infertility issues." So see gals, you really did not have bad judgement, it was the pill's fault.
Science has also shown that women physically change during ovulation. An unexpected factor that has been found to directly affect attraction is voice pitch. Dr. Gordon Gallup, a professor at the State University of New York at Albany, says that women with higher estrogen levels have higher voices, which makes them more desirable to men. "When females are midcycle, when they're the most fertile, the most likely to conceive, their voices are rated as being significantly more attractive," he says.
Besides your voice, a females face changes during ovulation. It's hard to pinpoint what distinguishes a gorgeous face from an average one, but some researchers are getting pretty close. Psychologist Dr. Lisa DeBruine of the University of Aberdeen in Scotland says she's found that women's faces get more attractive to men when they are ovulating. "We're not entirely clear why there's this difference, but we think that the women might look healthier, have a bit of a healthier glow when they are ovulating."
Not everything that goes into finding a partner is biological. Researchers have also found that if a woman looks at the face of a man whom she knows nothing about, she will give it a rating on a scale of 1 to 10 that's different than if she is shown the same face and a corresponding income. When a man makes a lot of money, a woman will rate him higher on an attractiveness scale than she would that same man with a smaller income.
Dr. Berman says this isn't a case of women being gold diggers. "It goes back again to evolution. When we were having babies who were very dependent on us, we couldn't hunt and take care of ourselves, so we were looking for the man who had the most social status, who was the best hunter, who was going to bring home the biggest chunk of meat for our babies," she says. "It's the same thing today." I am sure that if the tables were turned that men would do the same thing too as we have evolved to that stage these days.
Smell, voice pitch and face symmetry might be unconscious detectors of attractiveness, but if you're trying to consciously assess the future of a relationship, Dr. Berman says there's one surefire way. "You really learn a lot from a kiss. … Sixty-six percent of women say they would dump a guy after a bad first kiss," she says. "It's not only because you're getting that good whiff of him so you're seeing if you like the way he smells. All your senses are engaged, and you get a sense of his sensuality, his connection, whether he's a take-charge kind of guy or more of a stepping back kind." I myself am an avid licker with a darty tongue.
When it comes to relationships, Dr. Berman says kissing frequency is a direct indicator of happiness. "It turns out that couples who kiss and cuddle regularly are eight times less likely to be stressed and depressed than couples who don't get that," she says. "You have to have a minimum of a 10-second kiss every day." Well that explains why my mommy and me love each other so much, I like to lay on the kisses all day and she seems to love them.
Well, it would be just like Oprah to explain how the world works and why humans chose their mates. Now it all makes sense. I hope this post will help you understand how you attract your mate. I know you ladies are going to be looking for copulins this weekend. I know my mommy will :)
Hope you have a good weekend, Chow for now!
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