When I first saw this meme, it irked me. I posted some comments on good old FB land, but my ideas were too complex to tie into a few short sentences. So let’s delve in.

The Science Stuff

Oxytocin is a hormone. For the non-nerds out there, hormones govern our body. They are chemicals that tell your organs when to speed up, slow down, turn on, or turn off. There are more hormones than just sex hormones. In fact, there are hormones involved with the working of every part of our body. Oxytocin is a hormone that is associated mainly with childbirth and lactation. It stimulates that contraction of the uterus to push the baby out during labour. It also stimulates the breast tissue to push milk out during lactation. Less well known is that the same hormone also stimulates the vas deferens to push semen out during ejaculation.

Oxytocin is also known as the “cuddle chemical“. Its effects are more fuzzy than just stimulating the contraction of certain muscles. It also produces a warm fuzzy feeling that promotes bonds between humans; mothers and children, partners and even fathers and children. There is even research that suggests that a certain level of oxytocin in the blood helps to lower anxiety and improve mental wellbeing. So the meme is partly correct. Oxytocin helps to create a bond between sexual partners.

The Relationship Stuff

There seems to be this pervasive idea that monogamy is the gold standard of relationships. That being fully connected to and involved with only one person is the only way to live our life. Any other type of relationship is, at best, questionable and at worst, downright unnatural and will send you straight to hell. Popular culture is full of cautionary tales about what happens when people, especially women, dare to break the mould and have more than one romantic partner at a time. Let’s not get into the even more icky world of having sex with more than one person.

Reading between the lines of this meme I think this is another example of this. I mean, does the author really expect an intelligent person to believe that multiple casual encounters will damage trust and make it impossible to have a healthy (monogamous) relationship? There are so many more obvious things that can damage a human’s ability to have empathy. Things like being disrespected, gaslighted, abused, lied to etc, etc. All things that happen in ‘normal’ monogamous relationships. Hell, things that happen between parents and children. Childhood experiences can remove the ability to have empathy before oxytocin fully comes along.

My Experiences with Casual Sex and Oxytocin

I have casual sex. This happens in several settings. Sometimes Mr Jones and I have group sex either with longer term friends or with people we have just met. Sometimes I have sex with people, men and women by myself. This can also happen with people I have just met and won’t see again or with people I am in a longer term friendship with. After these encounters, I often feel the warmth of the cuddle hormone. Unless the sex was really bad, I often have the urge to have more encounters with the same people. There are bonds there. The more often we meet, the stronger the bond. This is why it stings when circumstances cause them to leave my life. However, I wouldn’t say that breaking these tentative bonds or even the slightly stronger ones has caused me to mistrust or have difficulty having empathy for people. Being called names or lied to has though.

Casual sex is a great stress reliever. There is something about sex with no strings. You can be totally free to live in the moment. I could write a lot about that, maybe in another post. The point here is that casual sex is healthy and can be a very positive thing. Hormones will happen, but they do not cause lasting emotional damage. At least nothing compared with the stuff that other humans can do to us.