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.