Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

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"Fucked out"

That's the phrase I use to describe it.

If you're not done with your share of sex when you get married, you are at risk of giving in to temptation when you're married. Mostly from a guy's point of view because a guy tends to have more opportunities when he gets older, but the same logic works for women to a degree.

One of my friends would get laid constantly in our 20s. Not just bragging about it, he provably had the gift for it when we were out. He was banging chicks constantly, to the point where he had to phone me from work to stop his various chicks from finding out about each other. I thought for sure this guy would not be able to hold out in a marriage.

15 years on and he hasn't cheated on his wife, that last of this parade of women.

My boss married his high school sweetheart. He started going to a lot of meetings with a broker. I was joking that he was having an affair. Turned out to be exactly what happened.

My other boss also got married early. Religious guy, 5 kids. I go to see him a decade after we last worked together, what does he do? He wants me to wingman him. Also shows me all his messages from various women. (He's also in politics, so maybe it's par for the course.)

Sex is pretty powerful by nature, but like many things evolution has left us, there's a point where our curiosity is satisfied. We can move on with forming relationships when the urge is not quite so strong.

I can't relate to this - with most things I enjoy, the more I am able to do them, the more I want to do them. When I go without for a while, I forget about the pleasure something brings.

Backpacking for a year didn't get me "traveled out", it made me want to travel more.

I married young and certainly would have found a lifetime of monogamy challenging. At the same time, I don't believe I could have gotten the desire for different partners out of my system before marriage. It's an itch that doesn't appear it can be scratched. Fortunately my wife and I discovered swinging, and get the best of both worlds: a lifetime partnership built on a deep love and years of shared experience, and the occasional opportunity to have sexual variety.

Basically nothing else in life works that way. If you punch or yell out your anger, you get angrier over time. The biggest predictor of donating to charity is past donations. The more marriages someone has, divorce rate dramatically rises (almost twice as high for a second marriage).

I strongly suspect the ladies man, statistically, is more likely to cheat during marriage.

Anecdotally, I've been with the same woman since I was 15 and neither of us would dream of cheating.

Yeah your logic makes sense. It just doesn't seem to agree with what I see among people I know, admittedly a small section of the world.

> I strongly suspect the ladies man, statistically, is more likely to cheat during marriage.

The weird thing is that the cheaters I know of are all guys with weak game. It's the opposite of what common sense would suggest, and I'm not sure of the mechanism, other than what I proposed. Perhaps another way to say it is that if you've had enough, you don't think it's worth the risk. I mean to be quite honest, it often isn't even worth the bother when you're a free man.

My experience some people with weak game settled with who they thought would take them but aren't 100% happy they did and will jump at expanded opportunity. If I want a Porsche and buy a Toyota it doesn't stop me from wanting a Porsche. If I have a Porsche I get over it and I want a Toyota for my daily vehicle.

> Basically nothing else in life works that way.

Have you never played a song so many times on repeat that, even years later, you're still sick of it?

Have you never heard of someone suffering from burnout at work for several years?

The things you list in your post are not inherently exhaustible.

I'd argue that even though sex is not inherently exhaustible, a craving for sexual variety likely is.

Chronic users of pornography often report a dying down in interest after reaching the peak of extreme(s) within their fetish(es).

It's common enough it has its own generic word: jaded

Our genes don't care bout our beliefs, only that we procreate with a partner whose immune system is different from ours, which is signaled via pheromones. It does not matter to them if we are able to form a stable bond. My ex is still a pain five years after breakup, even though she has a new partner and child with him. Our son is doing fine.

Not that this is really the core of your point at all - but I believe the state of the science currently suggests that pheromones in humans are a myth at worst, at best unproven. We only have a vestigial vomeronasal organ, which no longer functions - as I've understood it:

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160509-the-tantalising-...

Do you think it's a coincidence that almost every perfume uses some pheromone-like ingredients?

Musk and civet are the most famous examples but also see hedione, a major ingredient in perfumes since the 1960s, because it enhances pretty much any floral smell. Hedione seems to directly stimulate the vomeronasal organ (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S003193842...).

There's also the case of sandalwood, a perfume ingredient since antiquity. It just happens to smell almost like androstenol, an androgen believed to act as a pheromone, even though it's not really chemically related.

PS, fwiw my wife sometimes tells me she married me because of how I smell like. Apparenlty I smell like violets to her.

Another one would be a very popular taste/smell: Vanilla, chemically close to human pheromones as well. Never used perfume, but my Ex loved my smell too.

Well, do you know the experiment where women were asked to smell shirts worn by men overnight? When they were ready to conceive they liked the smell of male sweat, otherwise they'd say it stinks. When women get off the pill to have children, it happens that they don't like their partners smell anymore.

[edit] Seems i expressed myself badly in my original comment. It quite possibly is my central point and i feel sorry for scientists believing this. I fear they have an antisexual religious upbringing like i had.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vomeronasal_organ?wprov=sfla1

Why should the organ which tasked to find a mate, to have healthy children with, not work in us anymore? It can be damaged in people having their nose done, it gets broken in the process.

> Why should the organ which tasked to find a mate, to have healthy children with, not work in us anymore?

I can't member where I read this, but I have read that the human sense of smell stopped being hugely important for food when we developed three colour vision.

It's conceivable that vision enhancements also gave us a different path to mate-finding than smell; if so, the smell genes can randomise without much risk to reproductive success.

Thanks for the article!

> The question is, can we do the same for humans? It seems highly unlikely. “In humans it would be pretty much impossible to do the classic isolation of a pheromone,” says Hurst.

Sounds like saying "i have no clue how to do it" and protecting the ego to me, could be wrong though.

Pheromone perfume feels like a scam to me. If they work, and a male succeded in having sex, she might notice she does not like his real smell later, that she got tricked.

Pheromone parties sound like a great idea to me!

How much is this like the "vestigal <appendix> which no longer functions" according to decades of scientific consensus until people discovered the gut microbiome?

Changes in testosterone levels and the effect o sex drive probably also play a role as men get older.

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