The Brain Below the Belt

AFTER A messy divorce, my patient Matt was finally getting on with his life, and I was glad to know he was feeling good about himself again. A handsome thirty-four-year-old lawyer, he had first come to see me a few years earlier when his wife filed for divorce. At that time, he was twenty pounds overweight, and his self-esteem was plummeting. But over the past two years, Matt had worked through most of his anger, gotten back into shape, and regained his self-confidence. He had even started dating again.

I've witnessed this "rebound transformation" in many men. After a brief hiatus, Matt's brain biology was once again driving him to seek sex and encouraging him to pursue a variety of partners. Researchers have reported that men want an average of fourteen sexual partners in their lifetime, while the women said they wanted an average of one or two. Researchers surmise that some of the disparity in these numbers can be chalked up to men's interest in one-night stands.

Given Matt's brain reality, I wasn't surprised to hear that speed dating had become his favorite way to meet women. As scientists know, a man's testosterone rises when he pursues attractive women. And when Matt walked into a room full of speed-dating women, it made his testosterone rise even further. Researchers in the Netherlands found it took only five minutes of casually interacting with attractive women for men's testosterone levels to go up.

Six feet tall with dark wavy hair and deep brown eyes, Matt never had trouble attracting women. But like most men, he frequently wished he didn't have to make the first move, and speed dating eliminated that hurdle. When I asked Matt how he could tell if he wanted to date a woman based on a six-minute speed-dating meeting, he shrugged and said, "I just know." He said he could tell if he was sexually attracted to a woman before she sat down at his table or uttered a single word. Researchers at the University of California found that it takes the male brain only one fifth of a second to classify a woman as sexually hot--or not. This verdict is made long before a man's conscious thought processes can even engage. And often it's the brain below his belt that knows first.