“Inspired” by comments from a sports talk radio host, I began looking up some material on testosterone levels (I’ll get to the comments in a moment). I was wondering at what age do the levels begin to drop for men, and I found this interesting piece from the Harvard Gazette dated about four years ago:
It’s a basic summary of a research study that was to be published in full later. The focus in the study was not about age, but about marriage. The study confirmed what would seem to be common sense, from an anthropological perspective: married men have lower testosterone levels than unmarried men.
While there is evidence that men who hold babies – or even baby dolls – will lower their testosterone levels, the key indicator for the study was marital status. Again, this makes some sense: once the male of the species has found his mate, there is less of a need for that hormone (pardon the Nature Documentary language). And indeed, those men studied who were just divorced had higher levels of testosterone. The desire to be in a family, to “settle down,” is a key factor.
Lowered testosterone levels are not a negative sign for men’s health; indeed the older we get the greater our risk of prostate cancer is if our levels are high. That’s one of the many reasons there is a “tail-off” in the hormone levels – as we get older we don’t have the same needs to compete or fight, so we don’t produce as much. This is not to say we can’t be dads at sixty — there is no real “male menopause,” the article reminds us – just that we can get along without the same amount of gas in our tanks.
So back to the radio talk show host. He was (somewhat humorously, somewhat seriously) commenting that the twenties are a really bad period for guys. Guys in their twenties are kinda stupid, he said, and it’s about the testosterone. When you’re in your twenties, you drink all the time, play hard, work hard, date women named Kitten (the host tells us he in fact had a girlfriend with that name when he was in his twenties), and you have little sense of real responsibility: little time in on your job (if you have a job), no bank roll, no mortgage to take care of, etc. Look at who’s in prisons, he said: men in their twenties! His advice to women: don’t marry a guy in his twenties, he’s not ready for it. You can say all you want, “oh, no, not MY man!” but you’d be wrong! A guy in his thirties has a much better sense of where he’s going, what he wants to do, and what he’s willing to do to make that happen.
Part of his commentary is aimed to entertain and be funny, as I mentioned, but it made me wonder if guys should wait to settle down! That’s what led me to looking up stuff about testosterone levels, and from the looks of this research age is not necessarily a factor, but instead investment in a family lifestyle: wanting to make a marriage work and have a family. And given the shenanigans of guys like Bill Clinton, this should also come as no surprise!
Men can do lots of really stupid things, and maybe some of it you can blame on the testosterone. The report, in comparing testosterone levels from their study to those of other studies done on men from different parts of the world, suggested that cultural and environmental factors can also contribute to the differences in testosterone levels. Bottom line: you don’t have to be afraid your husband’s going to cheat on you just because he’s in his twenties and still virile!