A Natural History of Love (29 page)

THE CHEMISTRY OF DIVORCE

“Philandering,” we call it, “fooling around,” “hanky-panky,” “skirt chasing,” “man chasing,” or something equally picturesque. Monogamy and adultery are both hallmarks of being human. Anthropologist Helen Fisher proposes a chemical basis for adultery, what she calls “The Four-Year Itch.” Studying the United Nations survey of marriage and divorce around the world, she noticed that divorce usually occurs early in a marriage, during the couple’s first reproductive and parenting years. Also, that this peak time for divorce coincides with the period in which infatuation normally ends, and a couple has to decide if they’re going to call it quits or stay together as companions. Some couples do stay together and have other children, but even more don’t. “The human animal,” she concludes, “seems built to court, to fall in love, and to marry one person at a time; then, at the height of our reproductive years, often with a single child, we divorce; then, a few years later, we remarry once again.”

Our chemistry makes it easy to follow that plan, and painful to avoid it. After the seductive fireworks of first attraction, which may last a few weeks or a few years, the body gets bored with easy ecstasy. The nerves no longer quiver with excitement. Nothing new has been happening for ages, why bother to rouse oneself? Love is exhausting. Too much of anything feels overwhelming, even too much thrill. Then the attachment chemicals roll in their thick cozy carpets of marital serenity. Might as well relax and enjoy the calm and security, some feel. Separated even for a short while, the partners crave the cradle of the other’s embrace. Is it a chemical craving? Possibly so, a hunger for the soothing endorphins that flow when they’re together. It is a deep, sweet river, just right for dangling one’s feet in while the world waits.

Other people grow restless and search for novelty. They can’t stand the tedium of constancy. Eventually the ghost of old age stalks them. They are becoming their parents. Elsewhere, life is storied with new horizons, and new flanks. Everyone else seems to be enjoying a feast of sensual delicacies, and they want to smother themselves in a sauce of sensations. So they begin illicit affairs or divorce proceedings, or both.

One way or another the genes survive, the species prevails. Couples who stay together raise more kids to adulthood. When couples part, they almost always marry again and raise at least one child. Even when the chemical cycle falters and breaks, it picks itself up and starts again. Both systems work, so both reward the players. As Oscar Wilde once said, “The chains of marriage are heavy and it takes two to carry them—sometimes three.”

APHRODISIACS

In the second half of the nineteenth century, French doctors wrestled with a strange dietary mystery. Soldiers stationed in North Africa, after dining on frogs’ legs, developed severe cases of priapism, a prolonged and painful érection of the penis. In 1861, Dr. M. Vezien, making his rounds in a field hospital, was impressed by the
“érections douloureuses et prolongées”
with which several legionnaires returned his salute, and he questioned them about their menu. Could these men have been poisoned? Frogs’ legs are a popular French delicacy, and the soldiers had eaten a local variety of frog that lived in a nearby swamp. When Dr. Vezien collected some of the frogs and dissected their stomachs, he found remnants of meloid beetles. In 1893, another military doctor in North Africa reported a similar case: same steely erections, same frogs, same frog guts filled with same beetles.

Cornell biologists have solved the mystery of the erect penises and the aphrodisiac frogs. Meloid beetles contain cantharidin, a urinary-tract irritant otherwise known as “Spanish fly.” Many men—most notably the Marquis de Sade—have dosed themselves with it to boost their virility, and dosed ladies with it to win their consent.

When a man’s potency flags, he’s willing to try almost anything as a pick-me-up. Oysters, caviar, powdered rhinoceros tusk, cocks’ combs, figs, eggs, “Love Potion Number Nine,” ambergris, bull’s blood (drawn from the testes), camel’s milk, phallic-shaped fruits, or such “lascivious”
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vegetables as asparagus. These remedies sometimes work, either because the user
thinks
they will or because they provide a vitamin or trace mineral the person lacks. People don’t feel very sexy if they’re unhealthy. For example, oysters contain zinc, and men with diets low in zinc tend to have a low sperm count. That doesn’t mean that a plate of oysters will make a man feel sexy … unless the texture of the oysters excites his imagination, suggesting a woman’s nether petals, as well it might. In the grand opera of the imagination, everyday foods may suddenly become succulent and magical. If he is dining with his ladylove, and the oysters remind him of a bicycle trip they took along the windswept dunes of Cape Cod, and an afternoon when they made love on a secluded beach, their skin lightly scoured by the sand, the surf loud as a freight train, and the briny smell of the ocean rich in their nostrils, then simply eating the oysters will touch off a sensual circus.

Ginseng, a nutrient plant native to Korea, Russia, and China, is reputed to be a tonic for the nervous system in general and thus a boon to potency. A spicy bowl of bird’s nest soup, also said to be an erection special, is made from the nests that sea swifts build in caverns along the coast. The nests provide much phosphorus and other minerals. Asparagus is a rich source of potassium, phosphorus, and calcium—all of which are essential for energy—and it stimulates the urinary tract and kidneys, which may be why seventeenth-century herbalist Nicholas Culpepper advised that asparagus “stirreth up bodily lust in man and woman.” The Japanese claim that
unagi
, raw eel, makes a fine aphrodisiac, and there are thousands of restaurants in Japan that specialize in eel. The dish is often served with some form of pickle, the most expensive and prized coming from a phallic-shaped plum.

Men have often presented women with flowers, chocolates, perfumes, music, and other pleasurable treats to put them in a romantic mood. “Awaken her senses first” seems to be the unstated motto of suitors. In any case, flowers are the plants’ sex organs, and they evoke the sex-drenched, bud-breaking free-for-all of spring and summer. Chocolate contains mild central nervous system stimulants, as well as an amphetaminelike chemical the body produces naturally when we’re in love. Montezuma drank fifty cups of chocolate a day, to boost his virility before he visited his harem of six hundred women.
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Most perfumes contain the essences of flowers mixed with secretions from wild animals (musk, civet, ambergris, and the like), or laboratory versions of them. Smelling a randy pig might not sound sexy, but we are sometimes remarkably simple about what turns us on. Seeing or hearing or smelling other animals having sex can be inspiration enough. Truffles contain a chemical similar to the male pig sex hormone, which is why hot-to-trot sows eagerly dig them up. But the chemical is also similar enough to a human male hormone that its mustiness appeals to human diners, too. It has even been used in various popular perfumes.

Although the celibate Capuchine monks invented cappuccino, that exquisite frothy typhoon of whipped hot milk and espresso, coffee drinkers are statistically more sexually active than other people. But then, they’re more active about everything. Tried and true, alcohol works well at the outset, by relaxing inhibitions, but then it depresses the nervous system just when it should be jubilant. It was Shakespeare (in
Macbeth)
who warned that alcohol “provokes the desire, but takes away the performance.” The ancient Egyptians claimed radishes were aphrodisiacs. Ovid swore by onions, perhaps because of Martial’s epigram: “If your wife is old and your member is exhausted, eat onions in plenty.” But a more popular Roman aphrodisiac was a sauce made from rotting fish entrails, and prettied up under the name of
liquamen
. Travelers to Pompeii bought it at a famous factory owned by Umbricus Agathopus. They relied on live snails cooked in peppery liquamen sauce; mushrooms coated in a honey-and-liquamen sauce; roasted venison eaten with a caraway, honey, vinegar, and liquamen sauce on the side; soft-boiled eggs stewed in a pine kernel, honey, and liquamen sauce; wild boar basted with liquamen sauce; and, for variety, a sort of shish kebab of truffles dipped in liquamen sauce.

Medieval men and women preferred a concoction of the flowers and leaves of myrtle marinated in wine. Eighteenth-century women used “angel water”—a mixture of one pint of orange flower water, one pint of rose water, and half a pint of myrtle water. The mixture was shaken well, and mixed with musk and ambergris. Then they applied it to their bosoms, which were pushed up and displayed by a bra which hid only their nipples. Sometimes they also attached a jeweled brooch to the center of their décolletage, to make sure a glance fell between the hillocks. This was the era when gems were cut in facets for the first time, revealing the brilliant fire we now associate with gemstones, and they were bound to waylay the eye. Similarly, a dab of perfume on the slopes, giving off vapors as it warmed on the brazier of the skin, would lure a wayward nose.

The ancients believed in the magic power of the purplish-flowered mandrake root, probably because its branched shape was thought to resemble the human body. In
The Odyssey
, the sorceress Circe drops mandrake into her potent brew, and as late as the seventeenth century it was used in love potions. That’s why John Donne, in his sad, despairing “Song” about the infidelity of women, all of whom seem bound to betray him, says to a confidant:

Go and catch a falling star, Get with child a mandrake root,

Tell me, where all past years are, Or who cleft the Devil’s foot;

Teach me to hear mermaids singing …

Even if his friend can do these miraculous things, and travel far and wide, he will not return from his travels having met even one woman who was true, or at least, if she was true when he left her, by the time John Donne meets her she will be false. His anguish, though soul-sapping, is temporary. One day, he’ll be finding a little Eden in Twickenham Garden, where he longs to be the stone fountain, “weeping” all year so that lovers may come with crystal vials and drink his tears. Next, he blasphemes “Love, any devil else but you”! Another day, he’s celebrating a new affair, and eloquently revealing, in “Love’s Diet,” how he restricts himself to one sigh a day, to stay somewhat in control of that ever-alert, transcendent, black-angel raptor, his “buzzard love.”

Catherine de Médicis’s love diet included many artichokes, and Paris street vendors used to cry their commercials: “Artichokes! Artichokes! Heats the body and the spirit. Heats the genitals!” Another incendiary food, garlic, is universally celebrated as an aphrodisiac because, as Culpepper wrote, “Its heat… is vehement.” Because they create minifireworks that arouse the lower organs, black beans have always been a favorite aphrodisiac of Italian peasants. The fourth-century cleric St. Jerome would not allow the nuns under his spiritual direction to eat black-bean soup for that reason. But sometimes a concoction of rarities is the best stimulus of all. Here’s a surefire aphrodisiac from the medieval “Black Book” of “venereal pastimes”:

Burdock seeds in a mortar pound them. Add of three-years-old goat the left testicle and from the back hairs of a white whelp one pinch of powder, the hairs to be cut on the first day of the new moon and burned on the seventh day. Infuse all the items in a bottle half filled with brandy. Leave uncorked twenty-one days to receive astral influence. Cook on the twenty-first day until the thick consistency is reached. Add four drops of crocodile semen and pass through a filter. Rub mixture on genitalia and await the result.

Crocodile semen? I may be willing to travel far and endure hardship for a great aphrodisiac, but masturbating crocodiles is where I draw the line. An article in
The Aphrodisiac Growers Quarterly
(yes, it really exists) analyzed over five hundred seduction scenes in literature and found 98 percent of them preceded by a stimulating meal.

When it comes to high-tech pharmaceuticals, cocaine is reported by many to be a sexual stimulant, albeit one with grave side effects. Errol Flynn, who claimed to have slept with women on 13,000 of his swashbuckling nights, liked to apply a touch of cocaine to the tip of his penis as an aphrodisiac. Some prescription drugs seem to work well with people suffering from impotence or aversion to sex. Wellbutrin is recommended for both men and women, and is most often used in conjunction with psychotherapy. Yocon or Yohimex, made from the bark of the African yohimbine tree, restores erections for some impotent men. There are various drugs being studied that affect the levels of dopamine and serotonin in the brain. Men can also get pumped for sex by using a tiny inflator implanted in the penis. Perhaps a man stepping into the next room for minor hydraulics sounds unromantic, but no more so than a woman taking her leave briefly to insert a spring-loaded diaphragm or inject spermicide from a plastic caulking gun. Lovers might even pump up together as a part of foreplay.

The “goat’s eyelid” favored by the Mongols of the Yuan dynasty in China (late thirteenth century) was more of a sex aid than an aphrodisiac. Also known as a “happy ring,” it was literally the eyelid of a dead goat, with eyelashes still attached. It was first placed in quicklime, then steamed and dried until it reached just the right texture. A man would tie it onto his erect penis, so that it tickled his lover during intercourse. In many parts of the world, it’s still common for men to scar or insert objects into the penis to excite their women. For instance, men in Borneo pierce the end of the penis with a piece of bamboo or brass wire; and men in Sumatra make holes in their penises and press small stones into the wounds—the flesh grows over the stones, leaving a knobby and presumably enticing texture.