Going the distance on August 24, 1998…

Dear Breakup Girl,

Please help me. I haven’t ended a relationship, it’s just in suspended animation; which makes it harder because when you break up you move on and there’s some kind of closure. My boyfriend of three years is a military guy and just got transported to the other side of the earth for one year. Before he left he refused to make a commitment and told me it was “highly probable” he’d come back to me. (The issue of remaining monogamous prompted his response, said he didn’t know if he could). I made it clear that monogamy is what I expect even from 10,000 miles away. (Hey, if I can do it, so can he, right?) I was prepared to say goodbye when he left.

Anyway, now that he’s been gone for 8 weeks, he’s like a different person. He e-mails me the most sappy lovesick notes everyday, tells me how much he misses me and how lonely he is. He reassures me he’s not interested in being with anyone else because he loves me and doesn’t want to lose me. Hey, he even wrote me a letter with tear marks on it because he got emotional writing the thing. What am I to do? Believe the nonchalant man than was noncommital before our separation? Or, believe the emotional wreck that seems to have realized what a good thing he has? I am so confused at this point I’m going crazy. Help!

— Michele

BG clears things up after the jump!

If you are not yet sick of science stories that tell us Love is strictly a chemical reaction, Monday’s New York Times had an interesting piece on some research being reported in the new issue of Nature.

When a female prairie vole’s brain is artificially infused with oxytocin, a hormone that produces some of the same neural rewards as nicotine and cocaine, she’ll quickly become attached to the nearest male. A related hormone, vasopressin, creates urges for bonding and nesting when it is injected in male voles (or naturally activated by sex). After Dr. Young found that male voles with a genetically limited vasopressin response were less likely to find mates, Swedish researchers reported that men with a similar genetic tendency were less likely to get married.

Writer John Tierney is much more interested in using the research to develop an anti-love vaccine that could inoculate people against quickie marriages and other ill-advised pairings. Is there something he’s not telling us?

Adultery lurks everywhere, among celeb couples and political leaders, our neighbors and even, on a bad day, our own relationships. New York Magazine, following up on the Spitzer scandal in its own back yard, recently weighed in on the matter, with a lot to say about American culture and the perhaps untenable emphasis we put on monogamy.

According to writer Susan Squire, marriage wasn’t made to handle all this pressure in the first place. The average life span is far greater now than it was 100 years ago, and back in those days, marriage was a more formal institution for breeding and family purposes only. It’s becoming more and more difficult for partners in a marriage to get the variety and sexual attention that they need. The American burden is the ideal that marriage should provide romantic love forever. “Marriage involves routine, and routine kills passion,” Squire says. Sometimes partners see an affair as the only way out of that rut.

That’s why Mira Kirshenbaum, clinical director of the Chestnut Hill Institute in Boston, suggests that not all cheaters are evil trolls. (more…)