The Science of Boring Sex

 

You know you’ve been there…perhaps you were in a relationship for a while, you settled into a slow, comfortable, predictable groove, and then, suddenly, everything the other person did just drove you up a wall. They looked different, more matte, they lacked that characteristic glow that used to turn you on — they probably even smelled different and in a very bad way. You just couldn’t get turned on by them no matter what you tried. You switched up your routine, worked more, worked less, tried scheduling sex, tried spontaneous sex, you did everything you could, but, the passion just never found its way back home and into your bed.

Or perhaps you were on the opposite side of the fence, you tried and tried and tried to turn your partner on, long after things had slowly and unannouncedly gone stale, but all to no avail. Your partner just couldn’t find themselves “in the mood” and thus your sex life — not to mention your self-esteem — sustained some pretty severe damage. It might have ruined your relationship or marriage. You are not alone and this is perfectly natural.

If you’ve been either of these people you’ve experienced The Coolidge Effect, a very well documented phenomenon that mammals go through after mating with the same partner for too long. I don’t pretend to be the bearer of good news, a blind optimist, so I’ll just serve you this drink straight up, it’s virtually inescapable and everyone experiences it, to greater or lesser degrees. Stick with the same partner long enough, you will get bored with the sex at some point.

The old story goes that once upon a time, United States President Calvin Coolidge was walking with his wife and a guide through a chicken coup. As the two were checking out the birds, the guide was asked to get the president’s attention and said to him, “Your wife would like me to let you know that a chicken can mate up to five times per day.” The president replied, “Five times?” The guide said, “Yes, sir, that is true,” to which the president casually replied, “With the same hen?!”

This story cuts through us to the core and it resonates with us on a deep level, especially us men, but also women, as well, and it does so because we all know this feeling all-too-well. This is called The Coolidge Effect, this legend being where the effect gets its name, when having sex with the same partner seems to turn into a long careening down a path of diminishing returns and it’s prevalent throughout the animal kingdom. We humans have all experienced this, too, obviously, at least once in our lives; in fact, you’ve probably experienced it in every single relationship you’ve ever been in, especially if you’re a man, and I’m here to tell you that if you have you aren’t alone — pretty much every other human being and animal has experienced the same thing.

The Coolidge Effect resonates with our deepest intuitions about sex, yet, we humans seem to fight it every step of the way, don’t we? It’s like we fall in love or find a new sex partner and, every single time, without fail, we just want it to last forever and ever. We want it to never go away, never get stale, never get old…but we always find ourselves inevitably let down in almost all cases. Rarely do we find someone who can keep both our pace and attention. The Coolidge Effect makes us raise the question within ourselves — supposing we’re brave enough — are we really cut out for monogamy? Or is it just a massive case of wishful thinking? I tend to view almost all relationships that see us succumb to this belief as the latter, merely wishful thinking, a closing our eyes to what is true and to the results that all of our previous experiences have guided us to in order that we may finally find some sense of security, even if it’s the security and comfort we keep in the false hope of high expectations. While The Coolidge Effect speaks specifically to events where male sexual motivation declines across repeated encounters with a familiar female, I think it applies the other way around, too, if we’re honest, though there may be something to the idea that it’s somewhat less likely. Women can get bored with the same man as well.

Getting Honest About Sex

I think it’s time we get honest with ourselves and others about The Coolidge Effect when we experience and perhaps knowing the language we can use with one another might change how we view sex and our relationships with one another. It seems to me, at current, that the running myth (it is a myth) is that we don’t ‘get bored’ with the right partner and thus everyone we’ve gotten bored with is just ‘the wrong’ partner for us. I think this is misguided thinking. I’ve also seen people make up all sorts of crazy excuses to avoid telling their partners the simple truth that the sex has gotten boring, and it’s no wonder why, that’s a harsh thing to hear for any of us. Nobody wants to be told that the person they love and they’re into has gotten bored with them and wants to explore other options without them. But in framing our notions of relationships like this, we’ve inadvertently set up some extreme expectations that are inevitably going to come crashing down on us. Not to mention, we’re likely to make other people’s lives absolute hell by not addressing the real problem at hand, instead of asking, or even demanding, that we change routines, schedules, and more, rather than just accepting that we have some very real and understandable biological limitations. To me, this is denialism.

Anthropologist Margaret Mead alluded to the idea that, of all the different types of relationship and sexual dynamics, monogamy is the hardest of all human arrangements. It’s important that we get honest about the deep-seated and evolutionarily developed biological limitations that we have so that we don’t set ourselves and others up for failure, even unknowingly. I believe that most people who set out on the course of monogamous love do so with the intention of it lasting; but at what point do we need to admit to ourselves that maybe monogamy isn’t for us (or anyone else)? How many partners must we get bored with before we admit that we too may be susceptible to sex becoming stale? And if that’s the way we want to live, that’s fine, we can live a sexless life, I can only urge my readers, however, to be honest with people when getting into relationships. If the last three relationships have gotten boring at the six-month mark, don’t you think we have an ethical responsibility to be as clear and honest as possible about this fact and expect it from our next relationship? I think so.

The Science of Boring Sex

The science and historical literature that evinces the fact that mammals are mostly non-monogamous are both pretty lengthy and well-endowed. The great artist Michaelangelo once complained that he couldn’t keep his horses mating after a certain period of time and would have to change out the horses to prevent the males from getting bored with the females. I remember my eyes widening as if I was watching an accident in slow motion the first time my eyes scanned the great Roman poet Ovid’s Love Poems at a young twenty years old and reading him say that from the time you fall in love until it burns out and your eye begins to wander off toward other omen, you likely have six to eighteen months, tops. I felt like it was the first time I’d ever heard anyone mention this phenomenon that I’d already experienced several times, which means the bulk of society isn’t even talking about it — though everyone is likely experiencing it. But, it’s no secret to the brave souls of humanity who’ve chosen to speak out, sex has a tendency to dull when it’s with the same partner all the time. For more on this, I highly recommend the book The Myth of Monogamy: Fidelity and Infidelity in Animals and People, found on Amazon through an affiliate link here.

The Coolidge Effect has been studied and observed in everything from

Syrian hamsters, to humans, to snails and it’s virtually a constant in the animal kingdom, especially mammals. For the record, snails don’t have a preference for novel mates, I’ll just get that out of the way now since I’m sure you were overflowing with anticipation to find out about the sex lives of snails. To understand it all a little bit better, we must first travel down the dark path of strategic mating, but before your mind conjures up ideas of manipulative tactics and pick-up artists with their arrogant ways, strategic mating is quite simply when humans and animals mate in such a way that will create the most viable, healthy, likely-to-live offspring which can then flourish and survive and thus replicate as their parents had. There is nothing wrong with this process, it’s how all life comes to be and how all species sustain themselves.

The way this works in hamsters, for instance, is all done by pheromones. That’s right, it’s all taken care of by way of their sense of smell. When mammals mate, they release a bundle of hormones and pheromones which flood their brains and the atmospheres around them, the latter of which, becomes an identifiable marker of that individual member of the species. Much like we humans can sometimes identify our lovers by their characteristic smell that they and only they possess, other mammals virtually all have this same basic function. Through the smell alone, individual males come to know individual females (it works the other way around, too, though for biological reasons the studies are mostly done on males) and, over time, if a single male is left in a cage with even several females, his mating sessions will tend to become less frequent, will last longer, and in most mammals, will tend to release less ejaculate as time goes on. In short, our sex sessions tend to become investments where the returns diminish. It’s been noted in hamsters also that females tend to exhibit a renewed sexual excitement at the possibility of mating with novel males (you’re not alone out there, ladies).

With flies, interestingly, it’s also done through smell and experiments have demonstrated that this effect disproportionately affects the males of that species, noting:

We found that males preferentially courted novel females over directly or phenotypically familiar females. By contrast, females displayed a weak preference for directly and phenotypically familiar males over novel males.

https://medium.com/moments-of-passion/why-sex-becomes-mind-numbingly-boring-daad10dcb7

Not only does the same partner get boring with repeated sexual encounters, but similar partners get boring and elicit less of a response in animals that rely on olfactory cues to determine whether or not a partner is a good match. We humans also use olfactory cues to stimulate arousal, to quote another study:

"Several studies indicate that humans indeed seem to use olfactory communication and are even able to produce and perceive certain pheromones; recent studies have found that pheromones may play an important role in the behavioural and reproduction biology of humans. In this article we review the present evidence of the effect of human pheromones and discuss the role of olfactory cues in human sexual behaviour.”

Smells cause us to experience emotions that we cannot consciously perceive, just like animals:

Olfactory signals seem to induce emotional reactions whether or not a chemical stimulus is consciously perceived. We theorize that the importance of human non-verbal signals is based upon information processing, which occurs in the limbic system, and without any cognitive (cortical) assessment.

Take two flies and put them in a cage together and you’ll see mating become less and less frequent until it stops. Introduce a novel (female) fly for the male and a novel (male) fly for the female, and you’ll see the male much more likely to jump at the chance of having sex with a new female; conversely, the female fly will much more likely prefer the same old male. Now, these are just flies and shouldn’t be constituted to mean that’s how we should base our own sex lives, but I’ll let you use your own intuition as to how you feel on the subject when it comes to us humans, though keep in mind, we too use smell to detect our partners and it is smell that delivers the most prominent blow to the limbic system of the brain, causing human arousal, just as women unconsciously use pheromones to sync menstural cycles when they are around another woman often.

In fact, even birds, animals which were once thought to be paramount of monogamy, are now turning out to be anything but. See, birds are socially monogamous species, which means they implement strict monogamy in their social relations, much like we do, but we’re starting to find out through genetic experiments that birds birth a lot of chicks through extra-pair copulations, or, from instances of infidelity. They’re socially monogamous but not sexually monogamous. A disproportionate amount of some bird species are born through instances of infidelity, meaning they have one standard for what they ‘tell’ one another, and a completely different standard for what they actually do behind one another’s backs. Birds are big-time cheaters and so are humans. Of red-winged blackbirds, for example, up to 20% of chicks born are born from extra-pair copulations, so many so, that with instances, being a single male, one can father more chicks than a monogamous male who sticks with the same female.

Only 3% of mammalian species are monogamous and humans are not one of those species. We employ a mixed mating strategy that utilizes elements of both fidelity and infidelity. On a whole, irrespective of culture, we’re pretty major league cheaters, though not the biggest cheaters. There is a very good reason for this. If we had been a truly monogamous species, the human race (or any other species for that matter) would have died out. In the chaotic and risky world that our ancestors lived in, mating with multiple people mixed things up in such a way that we could maximize procreation. Otherwise, what would have happened when one partner linked up with an infertile partner, male or female? What happened when women died during childbirth or men died during the hunt? Had humans truly been wired to be monogamous, those people wouldn’t have been able to move on after such a loss and thus wouldn’t have reproduced to eventually create us. Think about what it would mean to truly be a monogamous species, the ramifications would be pretty staggering, we wouldn’t be able to date around and find the right person, as we do, so even with our socially instituted monogamy, we’re hardly monogamous in practice.

Hormones and Boring Sex

This is all believed to take part on a hormonal level. Dopamine is one response that has been noted in animals. Rats have a particularly long history with The Coolidge Effect and have been demonstrated to lose their hormonal gusto when the same partner is all that’s available to them. Hormones, and, in the brain neurotransmitters, are what drives the human machine, including our sexual desire, and though we reach around for things in the environments of our lives which might influence us and our sex lives, a lot of what controls us is invisible — it’s what’s inside of us. I think we’re going to someday come to measure the human hormonal response to sexual novelty and sexual consistency and see that we too succumb to The Coolidge Effect on a deep, biological level.

While studies on humans are scarce and thus haven’t documented our neurological changes that take place over the course of our sex lives with any particular partner (that would be tremendously difficult to do, especially trying to have “normal sex” inside of a lab and then measuring the sex response; could you imagine being hooked up to a bunch of wires and being asked to have sex, but only after they take 100ml of blood?!); stop and think about the fact that there are products advertised to men and women alike which claim to treat low libido. Is it just me, or are we that afraid of admitting that sex might have diminishing returns that we insist on having monogamous marital relationships to the point of, at least for some, drugging ourselves and trying to force ourselves into a sexual arrangement we just aren’t interested in anymore? Think about how powerful the institution of monogamy is and how much it affects our lives like this.

All of this says, to me, that it’s time for a change and a big part of that change is relinquishing this idea of ownership over our partners and their bodies. In this way, feminism and non-monogamy go hand-in-hand, nobody is entitled to anyone else’s body and that should be a universal right for us to have in our relationships.

The Destruction of the Ideal Family

We’ve all spent much of our lives at least thinking about the picture-perfect family, whether we think about it and recoil in horror or we begin to glow with unprecedented warmth, most of us have feelings about the traditional nuclear family unit. And though conservative pundits and radio hosts would like to convince you that the family is under a newfound assault by way of gay marriage or an erosion of our moral character, the truth is, the assault on the family unit comes from within ourselves; that’s right, we have only ourselves to blame.

How dare we demand monogamy, demanding that someone shed their sexual selves and liberty for only us for the rest of their lives? How dare we pretend that we get to own them and ought to deserve the sole and exclusive rights to their body? The truth is, even just on voluntary reporting (which is likely to be heavily under-reported) many, many people out there simply cheat. We have socially instituted monogamy, an institution that we fight for and defend, yet, we cheat our way around it at the same time? I can’t make sense of this process. What if we considered non-monogamy? What are we so afraid of? Why can’t we admit to ourselves and to others that we enjoy sexual variety? What’s so difficult about this type of honesty that forces us to shy away from it? Think about how narcissistic it all is, that we all believe that we deserve a person wholly dedicated to us, more like a slave, less like a person with their own thoughts and feelings. I think if we’re honest with ourselves, we’re willing to admit that something is amiss with the monogamy picture and it requires a pitiful amount of deception to maintain the illusion.

I suggest we take a moment of consideration and seriously ask ourselves what we’re so scared of. Are we afraid of hurting people’s feelings? Well, let me tell you, no matter who they are, we’ll hurt people a whole lot more when they discover that we’ve taken matters into our own hands and cheated on them behind their backs, after kids, the house, the cars, the marriage and all came into the picture. I’m not even asking that we all switch to non-monogamy tomorrow, what I am suggesting is that we learn how to have the conversation healthily about our needs, our wants, and our desires.