- Furthermore, the testosterone levels of married men and unmarried men who were involved in committed, romantic relationships did not differ, suggesting that, at least for this sample, male pair bonding status is the more significant predictor of testosterone levels than is marital status.
So if you thought that you could keep your masculinity intact by not getting married, you were wrong!
Thanks for posting. Here are my questions for the researchers:
Do men in uncommitted romantic relationships have more or less testosterone?
What about committed unromantic relationships?
Were there only binary choices on this study? Committed or uncommitted? Romantic or nonromantic?
Does sexual frequency affect testosterone levels by raising or lowering them? "Committed" and "romantic" seem imprecise. I know a lot of people in committed, romantic relationships who have infrequent sex. Does lower testosterone cause the infrequent sex or is it a result of it?
In evolutionary terms, then, would this suggest that species survival is improved by lower testosterone levels among committed men? (theadvancedapes)
I didn't read the study (just the abstract, which sounds silly). In general I am skeptical of research that reduces human sexuality to presence or absence of certain chemical compounds (as if you were studying groups of lemurs). Moreover, studies of this type, with such a small sample size, on such a strange and obscure human group (Harvard Business School students,...), tells us nothing about the interesting and dynamic nature of human sexuality. Of course we know that testosterone and oestrogen etc play a role in promoting sexual behaviour in pretty much all vertebrates. But when we discuss human sexuality, and whether or not someone choses to engage in a "committed" or "uncommitted" relationship (or however you classify it - which is in and of itself a non-trivial problem), you cannot extract away sociocultural factors (what does society deem acceptable/unacceptable?), socioeconomic factors (resources, stability), sociopolitical factors (class, race, gender identity) etc., not to mention factors that most scientists always totally forget related to individual self-reflection (what type of relationship(s) makes me comfortable/happy/fulfilled?), symbolic imagination (what types of relationship(s) do I want to engage in in the future?), etc. Basically what I am trying to say is that the types of relationships we engage in and why is a very complex topic that requires far more nuance and sophistication than this study would allow with a binary logic and a reduction of human behaviour to hormones. Maybe varying testosterone levels can lead to predictions of "commitment", or maybe they can't. But my hunch is that the higher social, cultural, political, economic, historical affects are much larger. I know that when I think about my own sexual behaviour, the level of testosterone doesn't have so much to say about whether I am in a committed relationship or not, it has much more to do with higher phenomenological and relational complexities.
Sure seems that way, but that wouldn't explain the longing of committed, romantic men that leads to the statistical evidence of extra-marital expressions of testosterone (sports, for example, aggression, and - oh, right, uncommitted relationships). I'd like to know more about testosterone. When my girlfriend started taking testosterone, it was an interesting time.
Masculinity is warped. So it is more than likely that and not the fact you have to be responsible and care for another adult.