Love, sex, and health

We pay tribute to love on St. Valen-tine’s Day, but is the hoopla really warranted from a health standpoint? After all, love and its libidinous soul mate, passion, have led to countless calamities — some of them spectacularly tragic but most anonymously sad: the unrequited romance, the bad marriage, the ill-fated affair. As a mental state, love really can’t be considered healthy: no one in his or her right — which is to say normal, rational — mind, is ever in love. To be in love is to be madly so. In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud goes out of his way not to stigmatize love as a pathology. Yet, he also describes it as having the pathological quality of blurring the boundary between the ego, the sense of self, and the external world. “Against all the evidence of his senses,” wrote Freud, “a man who is in love declares that ‘I’ and ‘you’ are one, and is prepared to behave as if it were fact.” Harvard psychiatrist Lester Grinspoon quips that “romantic love and adolescence are the only two socially acceptable forms of psychosis.”

“People compose poetry, novels, sitcoms for love,” says Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, and something of the Queen Mom of romance research. “Some people live for love, die for love, kill for love. It can be stronger than “the drive to stay alive.”

Sexual Healing

The fact is, love and sex leave their mark, not just on the mind but on the body as well. Researchers have begun to explore their effects on almost every part of the body, from the brain to the heart to the immune system. Studies show that arousal and an active sex life may lead to a longer life, better heart health, an improved ability to ward off pain, a more robust immune system, and even protection against certain cancers, not to mention lower rates of depression.

Here is what doctors and scientists have learned so far about the positive effects of sexual activity on health:

• Heart disease. Lovemaking is good aerobic exercise that improves the circulation and works the heart. Sexually active people tend to suffer from fewer heart attacks, possibly owing to their better fitness.

The act of intercourse burns about 200 calories. During orgasm, both heart rate and blood pressure typically double. It would be logical to conclude that sex, like other aerobic workouts, can protect against heart disease, but studies to support this link have yet to be done.

• Pain control. Endorphins released during orgasm can dull the chronic pain of backaches and arthritis, as well as migraines.

In the 1970s, Dr. Beverly Whipple of Rutgers University, identified the female G spot, the vaginal on-switch for female arousal. Whipple showed that gentle pressure on the G spot raised pain thresholds by 40 percent and that during orgasm, women could tolerate up to 110 percent more pain. But she could not explain the link until the advent of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Using fMRI to view the brains of orgasmic women as they climaxed, Whipple found that the midbrain is activated during peak arousal. Signals from this part of the brain instruct the body to release endorphins and corticosteroids, which can temporarily numb the raw nerve endings responsible for everything, from menstrual cramps to arthritis and migraine for several minutes. Activating the region also reduces anxiety and has a calming effect.

• Immunity. Frequent intercourse may boost levels of key immune cells that help fight off colds and other infections.

A trial involving more than 100 college students in 1999 found that the levels of immunoglobulin, a microbe-fighting antibody, in students who engaged in intercourse once or twice a week were 30 percent higher than in those who were abstinent.

• Cancer. Early studies hint that oxytocin, and the hormone DHEA, both released during orgasm, may prevent breast cancer cells from developing into tumors.

In addition, frequent sexual activity has been tied to lower risk of breast cancer in women and prostate cancer in men, a relationship that is still not fully understood but may involve some interaction between oxytocin and the sex hormones estrogen and progesterone, and their roles in cell signaling and cell division.

• Longevity. It’s well known that married folk tend to live longer and suffer less depression than singles do. But is this because of more frequent sex, simple companionship or some benign aspect of personality that lends itself to marriage? Teasing apart such matters is difficult, but sex itself appears to be a factor. A study of 3,500 Scottish men, for example, found a link between frequent intercourse and greater longevity.

Romantic Love

The giddy state of sexual activity is one thing, long-term romantic love is another; surely, the steadier state must be good for us, too. Indeed, married people do enjoy better physical and mental health than unmarried people, according to a wide range of health studies.

But not all married couples live in conjugal bliss, and marital conflict can be a source of tremendous stress, which has a variety of well-documented negative effects filtered by the body’s nervous and hormonal systems. Several years ago, Ohio State University researchers set out to measure the consequences of marital squabbling. They organized a study of 31 older couples whose average age was 67 and who had been married for an average of 42 years. An interviewer led them to and through a discussion of acrimonious issues like in-laws and finances, and then their blood was tested for hormonal and immunological responses. Among the women, these lab-orchestrated spats led to several stress-related hormonal changes and a marked dampening of the immune system. Among the men, only the immune system was affected. The researchers concluded in their 1997 article in Psychosomatic Medicine that abrasive marriages may make some older people more vulnerable to infections and slower to heal.

Social And Emotional Support

In recent years, health researchers have assembled a large body of evidence that argues that older people embedded in social networks of friends, relatives, children, and confidants tend to be healthier and recover faster from many illnesses.

A recent social network study hints that, at least among the elderly, being liked may be more important to health than being loved, which can lead to an intense, but often problematic, relationship. A study of disability among 2,812 elderly residents of New Haven, Connecticut, found that lower risks for disability were not associated with emotional support from children or confidants, the very relationships that seem most likely imbued with love. Instead, emotional support from friends and relatives was the key. The researchers speculated that relationships with friends and relatives promote motivational and coping strategies, such as a sense of control and self-efficacy which help fend off depression, anxiety, and other psychological states that feed into disability. Relationships with children are less discretionary, they noted, and may therefore be associated with both benefits and strains.

Love Medicine

But don’t give up on the health benefits of love as yet. It is possible, and maybe even probable, that it is really love, and not just congeniality, that is circulating through those health-conferring networks of friends and relatives.

Parental love seems to be a very potent preventive medicine. Results of the Harvard Mastery of Stress Study published in 1997 showed that 87 percent of male participants who rated their parents as uncaring had had a major medical illness by the time they reached their mid-50s. Only 25 percent of the men who rated their parents as loving and caring had had a major illness.

And finally, of course, there is sex. We already know that you could fill a truck with studies that have shown that sex is good for your health. Of course, some people have sex without love all the time, but no one has yet invented a better aphrodisiac than falling in love!