Ever wondered why, after the initial infatuation part of a relationship between a man and a woman, the effect of a woman’s tears on men declines? It’s enough to make you go pick up the phone to call a female friend and that is exactly what most women do.
It’s long been known that tears contain stress hormones that are released when a person – male or female –cries. Humans are designed to cry. This is why crying is to be encouraged. Despite what we might be taught by our parents and by our culture, tears are psychologically healthy for us.
However, unlike the beautiful teary heroines portrays in movies who can wind their men around their fingers with a single drop of saltily discharge, recent research has actually demonstrated that crying turns men off. More specifically, it makes a woman less sexually attractive to men.
And it’s more that the big red nose and the swollen eyes, it’s the result of airborne chemical – pheromones – which the male picks up and processes. It was already known that the tears of male mice are attractive to female mice, but what about the other way around? Noam Sobel, from the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel led an investigation which concluded that when a man was able to detect the pheromones in a woman’s tears, he experienced a drop in testosterone levels and hence the woman became less attractive to him.
Another interesting fact is that women are more likely to cry during menstruation. This new finding by Sobel adds to current thinking that the additional crying by menstruating women is a biological means of keeping men away during that time. This is because, from an evolutionary point of view, conception is highly unlikely during menses. Thus a male is likely to turn to another woman who is not menstruating, in an attempt to procreate the species. Of course the latter behavior is frowned upon by most societies but nevertheless illustrates how human biology still underpins human behavior.
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