Hot MedFax

Wouldn't you just know? When women are scarce , men will do just anything to get one.  That's according to a new study of, of all things, the Makushi people in Guyana, which showed that men are more likely to seek long-term relationships when women are in short supply, as reported by newswise.com. In my experience, it's the woman who's always looking for the commitment, while the man, looking over his shoulder to make sure he hasn't missed someone cuter. “Commitment to a relationship is influenced by the availability of partners. So we can think of the number of men and women in a population as a potential mating market where the principles of supply and demand hold sway,” says University of Utah anthropologist Ryan Schacht, first author of the study published online Wednesday, Jan. 14 in the journal Royal Society Open Science .  I suppose that's true.  I haven't been on the dating scene for quite a while but I seem to remember that the more la...

When our son was small, my husband and I used to fight all the time.  Who fed him last?  Who changed him?  Whose turn was it to go off by themselves for a while?  A lot of the time we yelled at each other until someone just gave up and walked away. But the most damaging fights were the ones when we stopped talking to each other.  Now a new study has found that the “silent treatment” can ruin a relationship. As a child, my mom pulled the same sort of thing.  She was great at withdrawing.  When I was older, I learned that it was from depression and numbing herself with alcohol and painkillers.  But she just wasn't there.  I learned to get around it but I'd have to say it affected me for life. They say you marry your mother (even women), and my husband, sad to say, used to share a lot of qualities with her.  It didn't take much to make him mad, and when it did, he would retreat into silence for sometimes days. I think we even went fo...

I'm almost a little too embarrassed to write about this but today's NYT had a story about how men enjoy sex with or without a commitment, while women don't.  Big duh, I know. But what was really interesting was the point Natalie Kitroeff made: that women like hooking up with men casually as much as men do, just wish they had more orgasms . "Like generations before them, many young women . . . are finding that casual sex does not bring the physical pleasure that men more often experience," Kitroeff writes. "New research suggests why: Women are less likely to have orgasms during uncommitted sexual encounters than in serious relationships." At the same time,she notes, researchers say that young women "are becoming equal partners in the hookup culture, often just as willing as young men to venture into sexual relationships without emotional ties." I grew up in the '70s when "free love," or sex, was everywhere.  We had Woodstoc...

Who'd have thought it? A new study says kissing, not sex, helps romantic partners feel more connected. According to The New York Times' Jan Hoffman, while sex might be an outcome of kissing,"Researchers did not find sexual arousal to be the primary driver for kissing." Hoffman reports that participants in the survey were asked about their attitudes toward kissing in different phases of romantic relationships -- before sex, during sex and after sex.  They were also asked whether they were more inclined to have many casual sexual relationships, or more committed ones. Experts earlier thought kissing had something to do with finding mates.  The kiss could help people decide whether the "kissee" was mating material. But the truly interesting part (to me, at least) was the stage of a relationship at which kissing was felt to be the most important.  Past research has shown that women, those who rate themselves as highly attractive, and those who favor cas...