Dopamine is the brain’s pleasure chemical. It plays a role in gambling, drug use, and, well, love. When we fall in love, dopamine is released, making couples feel elated and energetic about each other.

“That someone takes on special meaning to you and you focus on this individual because the dopamine system has been activated,” says Helen Fisher, PhD, a biological anthropologist. “It is what triggers very goal oriented behavior, where no one else matters but your new partner.”

Dopamine can be present in both early-stage and long-term romantic love, she says.
“O” is for oxytocin

Oxytocin is a chemical that calms and bonds couples together by promoting intimacy. “It is what hugging, kissing and touching are made of,” says Fisher, a visiting research associate at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ.

Oxytocin levels also rise in new moms, promoting milk production and bonding with babies.
So, if you feel the urge for a stay-at-home movie night to cuddle with your beau, it may be oxytocin at work.

The major histocompatibility complex (MHC) is a set of genes that controls cell-surface molecules, which the body uses to tell self from foreign invaders.

Our bodies exude MHC levels through sweat and body odor, as well as saliva. There are a wide variety of MHC types, but they tend to more closely match in people who are related.

Based on scent and taste, studies suggest we can pick up on MHC levels in other people, and it’s thought that the more you differ in MHC, the stronger the attraction.
Follow your nose

The saying is usually love at first sight, but your nose plays a part too. Pheromones, which are chemical messengers, are theorized—but not proven—to play a part in human sexual attraction.

Fisher says she isn’t a fan of the pheromone theory, but believes smell is a part of love.
“Once you fall for someone, their smell can be a powerful thing,” says Fisher. “Women will wear their boyfriends T-shirts and throughout tales in history men have held on to their lover’s handkerchief.”

Although Buddhists are Thailand’s majority population, Valentine’s Day is one of the most popular festivals that is widely celebrated by numerous lovers, especially youngsters. Among them, a considerable number of juveniles planned to have sexual activities or first sexual experience which triggered widespread anxiety among parents and related agencies.

According to a survey conducted by the University of the Thai Chamber of Commerce (UTCC), 15.2 percent of respondents said they planned on sexual activities while 20.6 percent were uncertain. Some 54.9 percent of the surveyed were university students while 27.8 percent school students and only 17.3 percent working age.

This reflected the attitude towards sexual relations which has been dramatically changed in Thai society in which premarital and adolescent sexes were considered unacceptable in the past. However, the world has changed, so have Thai traditional practices and values. Sexual relations have unavoidably become personal rights. But the rights should come with greater responsibility for individual family and the society as a whole.

The most common and severe problem resulted from irresponsible sexual behavior found most in teens is the spread of HIV and AIDs. Bangkok Metropolitan Administration (BMA) revealed last week that the number of population living with HIV and AIDs nationwide has accumulated to some 481,770 and about 10,097 of these caught the virus in 2011. In another word, 28 new faces are being infected with HIV everyday. In Bangkok only, there are approximately 55,525 AIDs patients, said BMA.

“Love, arguably the most positive of all human emotions, also comes with a dark side,” study researcher Jon Maner, a psychologist at Florida State University, said.

In a trio of studies involving 130 people in long-term relationships, Maner and his colleagues found that to protect their own commitment to their partner, people would lash out at potential threats.

In the first study, researchers asked students at Florida State University in long-term relationships to write about either a time when they felt intense love for their partner or a time when they felt intense sexual desire for the person – both positive relationship-related experiences.

Next, the students looked at pictures of either an attractive or an unattractive man or woman, followed by a picture of a Chinese character.

They were then asked to rate the appeal of the character; since the Chinese character is neutral, this question was meant to gauge the participants’ leftover feelings about the real target of the study – the pictures of the men and women.

The students also filled out questionnaires about their basic levels of jealousy, answering questions such as, “How likely are you to surprise-visit your partner to see who is with him/her?”

The results showed that jealous sorts and more laid-back types rated the characters as about equally attractive when they’d thought of intense sexual desire for their partner.

But when they thought about intense love for their partner, the jealous sorts suddenly became very negative about other attractive people, rating them much less appealing.

In a second study, the researchers upped the ante. They again had people in long-term relationships reflect on their love or sexual desire for their romantic partner, or some other non-relationship-related story.

But this time, the participants were told they were going to play a computer game with a partner in another room. Whoever lost got blasted with painful, but ultimately not harmful, bursts of white noise through headphones.

For one thing, love addicts are lying and manipulative, too. Take me, for example. I’m the kind of woman who would show up on the doorstep of some unfortunate one-night stand, two weeks later, with a suitcase and my dog in tow. I managed to do this across state lines, knowing only the guy’s first name and a musical preference. The denial mechanism that made it seem like a good idea must have been gargantuan; undoubtedly, I told the best lies to myself.

“I’m not looking for a relationship; casual is fine with me” is as common a whopper as “My wife and I are separated,” “I had a vasectomy” and “I promise I won’t …” well, you know the rest of that one.

 At the same time, I’m the kind of woman whose number hits three figures, because after a while being the victim gets really old. A girl just needs to go out and conquer something: The love addict flips and becomes the sex addict. Or you use sex as a coin to buy affection, assuming that if someone becomes your lover, there must be love involved. Or you discover that once you start making out with someone, it triggers a craving that isn’t going to be satisfied until you’re in that person’s bed.

Hang on. I’m remembering some favorite beds. After all, if there wasn’t something fun about acting out — whether it’s sleeping around or slamming back tequila shots — no one would do it long enough to get to the not-fun-anymore stage. The not-fun part is when you really don’t want to play this game any more, but you keep doing it anyway.

For men, the flip might manifest after years of happy-ending massages, phone sex hotlines and internet porn, when the unfaithful husband finds himself paying some stripper’s utility bills and following her from work, only to end up parked outside her boyfriend’s house in a tearful rage. The sex addict becomes the love addict, as desperate to be someone’s knight in shining armor as someone else is to find one.

Just as both the binge-eater and the anorexic suffer from an eating disorder, both the love addict and the love avoidant suffer from a relationship disorder. The love addict craves affection; no amount will ever be enough. The sex addict craves stimulation; no amount will ever be enough. Both are trying to feel, to connect to something… but the mechanism of connection is stunted, or twisted, or broken entirely.

Can those connections be healed? I think yes. Neuroscientists are investigating how genetics may have short-circuited those connectors. Therapists explore looks at the way early childhood experience may have warped them. Philosophy looks at the need for a wider connectivity altogether. The first step, as with all addictions, is to stop using.

It’s like the joke about the man who goes to the doctor, raising his arm over his head and complaining, “Doctor, it hurts when I do this.” The doctor raises his own arm over his head: “So don’t do this,” he shrugs.

“The more one’s partner was likely to fall asleep after sex, the stronger the desire for bonding,” researcher Daniel Kruger of the University of Michigan said in a press release.

The researchers noted that period of time after sex can be important for couples to bond and establish their commitment to each other.

Their study, published in the December issue of the Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology, examined the responses of more than 450 online survey participants. The participants were asked a number of questions about their relationships, including, who falls asleep first after sex, and about their expressions of bonding, affection and communication.

The researchers found women rated sleeping with their partner after sex as more important than men did, and that women tended to be the ones to initiate sharing some shut-eye.

“Sleeping together may be an anti-philandering strategy that reduces the likelihood of abandonment,” the researchers said.

They also suggested that falling asleep before one’s partner could be a “non-conscious mechanism” to stave off any conversations about commitment after sex. In other words, it could shield you from seeing your partner in a negative light.

“If men actively avoid commitment promises in post-coital conversation, this could increase the likelihood of women ending the relationship due to perceptions of undesirable partner characteristics and/or uncertainty about the future of the relationship,” the researchers wrote. “Hastening sleep onset may evade this adverse effect.”

“He’s the most charming, loving, fun, gentlemanly, inspirational man I could have wished for,” Klum said back in May in an interview with Good Housekeeping. “He always makes me feel I’m the only woman in the world.”

The 38-year-old supermodel and the “Kiss from a Rose” singer, 48, met in 2003 and began dating in 2004. They got married on May 10, 2005 on a beach in Mexico.

Klum divorced from her first husband, Ric Pipino, in 2002, She briefly dated Flavio Briatore for about a year, and gave birth to her fist child, Leni, now 7, in May 2004. Seal was present for the birth of Leni, and officially adopted her in 2009. The couple also have three biological children together: Henry, 6, Johan, 5 and Lou, 2.

The simple fact is that the male orgasm typically comes easily during sex and female orgasms do not. The late Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey, famous for interviewing thousands about their sex lives, declared that 75% of men ejaculate within two minutes of penetration in over half of their sexual encounters.

It should come as no surprise, then, that researchers from the University of Chicago have declared that men reach orgasm during intercourse far more consistently than do women, and that three-fourths of men, but less than a third of women, always have orgasms.

According to Drs. Kim Wallen and Elisabeth Lloyd who recently published a study in the Journal of Hormones and Behavior entitled “Female Sexual Arousal: Genital Anatomy and Orgasm in Intercourse,” there’s one striking difference between men’s and women’s ability to orgasm: female orgasmic ability develops more slowly over time and with less predictability.

In fact, the researchers have found that, as a man moves from puberty to adulthood, his odds of ejaculating (and therefore, presumably, climaxing) increase from 5% to 100% within just 5 years. This increase appears to be much more gradual in women: According to Kinsey, a woman’s chances of experiencing orgasm slowly rise over the course of 25 years but never even approach 90%.

This “orgasm discrepancy” between the sexes may help explain why, in the recently published National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior, 85% of men said that their partner had experienced an orgasm during their most recent sexual event, while only 64% of women reported actually having had an orgasm.

But why is the female orgasm so inconsistent during intercourse? For generations, it was widely believed that a woman who couldn’t orgasm as a result of intercourse had psychological inhibitions or was sexually frigid.

Much of this misunderstanding goes back to the legacy of Freud, who could not reconcile himself with the powerful role of the clitoris in female sexual pleasure. Freud perpetuated the myth that the clitoris was an immature source of sexual pleasure, a mere launching pad for the more “mature” vaginal orgasm, which, of course, should be produced via genital intercourse.

“With the change to femininity the clitoris should wholly, or in part, hand over its sensitivity and at the same time its importance to the vagina,” wrote Freud in the New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis.

Fortunately, today we are becoming more aware of the role of the clitoris as the powerhouse of the female orgasm. The clitoris has over 8,000 nerve fibers – more than any other part of the human body – and interacts with the 15,000 nerve fibers that service the entire pelvic area. In their landmark work, “A New View of a Woman’s Body: A Fully Illustrated Guide,” the Federation of Feminist Women’s Health Centers identified 18 structures as part of the clitoris, both external and internal.

Even what we think of as the G-spot may simply be a part of the clitoris. As science writer Natalie Angier describes in her book “Woman: An Intimate Geography” the area of soft tissue just inside the vaginal area, “the roots of the clitoris run deep, after all, and very likely can be tickled through posterior agitation. In other words, the G-spot may be nothing more than the back end of the clitoris.”

In their recent study, Wallen and Lloyd analyzed years of data that support the notion that the distance between a woman’s clitoris and her vagina influences the likelihood that she will regularly experience orgasm solely from intercourse.

According to Wallen and Lloyd, women who reported experiencing orgasm more regularly had a shorter distance between their clitoris and vagina – less than 2.5 centimeters – than did women who reported not experiencing, or less regularly experiencing, orgasm during intercourse.

“Thus, some women may be anatomically predisposed to experience orgasm from intercourse, while the genital anatomy of other women makes such orgasms unlikely,” write the researchers.

Why does this distance matter? A shorter distance provides for more stimulation of the external structures of the clitoris during intercourse, and may also reflect that the internal structures are more densely packed and pressing closer to the vagina, and therefore more receptive to sensation during intercourse.

As Angier writes of the clitoral network, “Nerves are like wolves or birds: If one starts crying, there goes the neighborhood.”

When you have a shorter distance between clitoris and vagina, you’re more likely to get those nerves howling. But regardless of the variation of this distance on a specific woman, Wallen and Lloyd’s study helps render the female orgasm less elusive (and hopefully more consistent) by showing us, from an anatomical perspective, why intercourse on its own may not consistently lead to female orgasm.

As he neared the end of his life, Freud acknowledged his incomplete understanding of female sexuality and said, “If you want to know more about femininity, you must interrogate your own experience, or turn to the poets, or else wait until science can give you more profound and more coherent information.”

Today, sexual science is finally providing us with the information and, hopefully, we’ll act upon it. By understanding the role of the clitoris in producing the female orgasm, and knowing that intercourse does not always directly stimulate the clitoris depending on its position, men and women need not fault themselves when intercourse fails to produce mutual satisfaction, but rather can focus on extending foreplay (and those activities we associate with foreplay) into fuller acts of love-making.

Usher and I grew up together, so to speak. He was one of the many tween boy crushes I professed my love to when I was young. I’m not ashamed to admit that I had a poster of him next to my bed that I actually kissed goodnight. All the things that made him the object of my desire back then still stand true today: a guy who can sing and dance is hot. Mos Def may not seem like the typical heartthrob but he’s loaded with sexy. First of all, there’s his Brooklyn accent. That’s an appetizer to his intelligence, which amps his loveability. I fell in love with him when I heard him say “the upper echelons of academia.” Phew. Fan me.

George Clooney is the total package: handsome, charming, and confident, and I hear he’s a good actor, though I can’t rightly remember seeing him in anything besides ER. His passion for social issues also makes him sexy. It’s one thing to be hot and rich. It’s another to have a heart.

Idris Elba will always be on any list I write about hot guys. Typically, if I see a bandwagon is already crowded, I’ll hop on another and ra-ra someone else instead. But I’m right in there with the legions of other ladies holding a fantasy love affair with his debonair wonderfulness.

Mario Lopez has adorable dimples. Mario Lopez has an impressive collection ofmuscles. Mario Lopez has flexing his around-the-way-boy brand of sexy since Saved By the Bell, which — can we be honest? — was way corny, even as kids’ shows in the 90s went. Yet Slater made the 30 minutes worthwhile, curly mullet and all.

Ryan Gosling makes me watch The Notebook when it’s on and between TNT and TBS, that is all. the. time. He’s got quiet, laid-back appeal, like the guy who only talked when he had something snarky to say in high school. And I always liked the guy who only talked when he had something snarky to say in high school.

Lance Gross is the best thing about House of Payne. I love Tyler Perry’s movies but his TV shows leave me feeling empty. If I mute the volume, I can feast my eyes on Lancey Poo in peace, indulging in his heart-melting smile and beautiful, chocolatey complexion. Hell, I might even buy it on DVD just to have regular access to him.

Josh Duhamel smolders and I don’t even think he tries to. And that kind of accidental, who-me? hotness is a hundred times more sexy that the rehearsed sexy that publicists and managers try so hard to bring out of their clients.

Will Smith was cute in the 90s as The Fresh Prince and he’s cute now as a blockbuster maker. Any role that requires him to wear a tank top makes the movie worthwhile, but even in a Styrofoam superhero suit, his fun-loving personality and sense of humor add to his mmm hmm.

Djimon Honsu is deep and introspective. I love a guy I can engage in heated debate with who can teach me new things.

Trey Songz is too young for me. But that doesn’t mean my values wouldn’t buckle like a cheap card table if I had a chance to stand next to him. Watch the “I Invented Sex” video if you don’t know why.

T.I. clearly has trouble staying out of trouble, but that wanna-do-right-but-keep-doing-wrong conflict is the essence of his swagger and bad boy flavor. But at his core, he’s generous — he’s always giving back to his community.

Anderson Cooper impresses me as a fellow journo with his commitment to getting his story, no matter what. But he does it with a sensitivity to the subject matter that makes it obvious that he’s not just self-serving. Integrity is sexy. Plus he’s just cute, plain and simple.

A recent letter to The Daily Mail relationship expert asks this very question: Can a relationship survive when you have everything in place but the good sex? The answer, sadly, is a resounding no. If the sex is bad, the relationship must end.

Oh I know. I can hear the groaning from here. But the answer holds firm. Try as you might to believe otherwise, sexual chemistry is an absolute deal-breaker in a relationship. It may seem shallow, but it really isn’t.

The fact is, in any relationship with the opposite sex that is more than platonic, it’s the sex itself that distinguishes it. Sex is the mortar that holds the bricks together. It can keep you stable when all else is failing and it’s what the two of you share that makes it intimate and just between you.

This is obviously not the only thing that makes a relationship stick. Humor also matters as do similar values. There also has to be mutual respect and the sense that you both get one another as well. But there is no denying the fact that any of these latter qualities can be shared with a good friend whether of the same gender or the opposite. What sets a romantic relationship apart is the sex.

Good sex doesn’t always have to mean the same thing. Everyone’s idea of good sex is different. The whole point is that you have sexual chemistry and compatibility. The woman who wants sex every day isn’t going to go well with the man who wants it once a month. The man who likes to experiment with costumes and role play isn’t going to like the woman who is only comfortable with missionary style sex in the bedroom.

This isn’t to say that couples can’t go outside their comfort zone, but the general compatibility ought to be there. The relationships I have seen most often end because of sexual reasons. We can convince ourselves otherwise and for good reason. Loving someone does force a person to try to make it work. But circles can’t be squares, people. Let’s try to keep some perspective and understand that chemistry comes from within.

Back in my dating days, there were more than a couple men who were perfect on paper and with whom I now have good friendships with whom there was zero sexual chemistry. With the man who became my husband, it was explosive from day one. Dating someone with whom the sex is only bad to mediocre is asking for a heartbreak. Beware, ladies (and gents), it’s the truth.

1. Anal sex Anal sex gives a different pleasure compared to regular sex, and it’s getting all the more common these days with couples, but you are advised to never shock her with it. There are women that don’t get aroused by anal stimulation. So men should always know what kind of women they are in bed. If it has been a bad experience in the past, she’ll be off it for the rest of her life.

2. Getting pregnant Men always prefer sex with their partners without a condom. But it’s a headache for women if they are not ready to have babies. Having sex and pulling out before ejaculating may not be the best way out. And women don’t like to take birth control pills or pregnancy test all the time. So men should never impose unprotected sex on their partners.

3. Extreme sex Before you experience kinky sex understand your partner well. We know sex toys, handcuffs, ropes, satin ribbons, dirty talks, and whips are a great stimulant, but not if you are using them at a wrong time or with a new partner as it can scare the hell out of her. So, stop acting like a porn star!

4. Sex during periods It may be okay to have sex during periods but women always feel uncomfortable or unsafe while doing so. Sometimes it becomes messy and turns out to be a big turn off. So be patient, wait for the monthly break to be over and enjoy smooth love making.

5. Sex with no passion Sex without love or passion happens only in porn movies. Men can do it but women can’t. Jumping into the bed without kissing your partner or doing a little warm up to arouse her will make her all the more uncomfortable. Don’t forget that women always associate sex with love and emotions.