What is the coolidge effect and how does it influence relationships?
The story goes that the name of this sexual behavior "Coolidge Effect" was thanks to an anecdote of the thirtieth president of the United States Mr. John Calvin Coolidge and his wife Grace, who on a visit to a farm in Kentucky noticed that a The rooster used to mate with a hen dozens of times in a day, but when they asked the keeper they realized that it was not the same hen every time, instead the rooster was going around copulating from one to the other repeatedly. Already with this, the term was coined by the team of researchers led by behavioral endocrinologist Frank A. Beach.
This effect has mainly been studied in men and male animals of many species, although recently it is believed to be a behavior that can involve both sexes.
The study 'Hormones and the Coolidge Effect' by Elisa Ventura Aquino and collaborators published in the scientific journal Molecular and Cellular Endocrinology suggests that this effect can be defined as the renewal of the motivational and appetite components of sexual behavior due to sexual novelty, after to repeatedly mate with a single partner.
So that you understand it without so much chanting, imagine, you are married and repeatedly have sex with your wife but, if you don't put a little ingenuity and creativity into it, this will eventually become monotonous and boring. Then a day comes when you are presented with the opportunity to have sexual relations with another girl/woman (who is obviously not your wife) and more than wanting to be unfaithful to her, for you within the only sexual and not sentimental context it represents the perfect opportunity to renew and motivate yourself in sex, because it is not like it always happens, it is rather the novelty that is presented to you at the moment. In fact, if you think about it, this sounds like one of the benefits offered by practices such as polyamory that suggest that by having sexual encounters with several people, you remove the monotony and in a certain way this will benefit your relationship, because it distracts you, you It amuses you, it takes you out of the family nucleus, the environment and others.
The Coolidge Effect and infidelity.
So the Coolidge effect could explain your inability to commit to a person because you like to be an alpha male or unfaithful, yes, but we must also understand that as a non-monogamous species, it is also something natural that we could experience as a process of habituation and mediated dishabituation. due to neural and biological changes, then it is possible that there is a loss of sexual interest after always exposing ourselves to the same stimulus. Even psychologically, it sounds congruent, right?
