Sex Before Marriage Changes Brain Chemistry

In our culture today, we’ve come to believe that sex equates to love – and the better the sex, the better the love. In her new bestseller Love Sense, Dr. Sue Johnson warns:

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“Vaulting sex to such primacy has, alas, distorted its role in relationships – and with harming consequences. Instead of drawing people closer together, all the emphasis on sex is instead driving us farther and farther apart. We’re abandoning living partners for screen sex.”

Today, 68 percent of Christian men watch porn and according to a recent survey by Covenant Eyes, about half (49%) of young adult women in the study agree that viewing pornography is an acceptable way of expressing one’s sexuality. What are these statistics telling us about the way we look at sex?

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Three Sexual Attachment Styles

For over a decade, there have been numerous studies that reveal three different attachment styles in the way people bond sexually: secure, anxious and avoidant. The latter is what’s interesting as it reflects the behavior we see in the statistics above.

According to Dr. Johnson: “

Those of us who are avoidant, that is, uncomfortable with emotional closeness and dependence on others, are more likely to have what I term “sealed-off sex”. Sex is self-centered and self-affirming, a performance aimed at achieving climax and confirming one’s own sexual skill. Technique is prized; openness and vulnerability shunned. There is little foreplay, such as kissing or tender touching. And no cuddling afterward – once the Big Bang occurs, there’s nothing left…Because pleasure without emotional engagement is shallow and fleeting, this kind of sex needs continual boosting to be thrilling.”

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Understanding the Sexual Brain

So if we’re not emotionally bonding with our partners during sex, who are we bonding with?

To answer that question, you have to understand how the brain works. Sex is a powerful brain stimulant. There are several neurochemical processes that occur during sex, which are the “glue” to human bonding. When someone is involved sexually, it makes him or her want to repeat that act. Their brain produces lots of dopamine – a powerful chemical, which is compared to heroin on the brain. Dopamine is your internal pleasure/reward system. When dopamine is involved, it changes how we remember.

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The other part is oxytocin, which is designed to mainly help us forget what is painful. Oxytocin is a hormone produced primarily in women’s bodies. When a woman has a child and she is breastfeeding, she produces lots of oxytocin, which bonds her to her child. For this reason, mothers will die for their child, because they’ve become emotionally bonded due to the oxytocin that is released when they’re skin-to-skin with their child.

The same phenomenon occurs when a woman is intimate with a man. Oxytocin is released, and this makes her bond to him emotionally. Have you wondered sometimes why a woman will stay with a man who’s abusing her? We know now that it’s partly because she bonded to him emotionally because of the oxytocin released during sex.

Men produce vasopressin, which is also referred to as the “monogamy hormone”, and it has the same effect as oxytocin has on a woman. It bonds a man to a woman. These “bonding” agents narrow our selection to one person. That is wonderful in a marriage relationship but really bad in a dating relationship because you lose your objectivity when you’re searching for your potential lifemate. And equally harmful when you’re using pornography as a married person, as the synthetic is setting you up for an adulterous affair. Sex, whether physical or vicarious, hooks us into relationships.

Related Article: How Viewing Porn Is Wounding Your Wife & Hurting Your Family