How Dads Feel About Lower Testosterone

In the Styles section this weekend, Alex Williams looks at how men are taking that study out of Northwestern University showing that testosterone, the most male of hormones, decreases substantially after a man becomes a father.

While there are jokes to be made (“I knew that my testosterone was at a low point when I found myself wearing my wife’s polka-dotted breast-feeding pillow strapped around my waist in an attempt to feed a bottle of milk to my infant son,” he quotes one father as saying) and insecurities to be confronted (“Not only are you a dork when you lapse into goo-goo talk, but now you’re less of a man scientifically,” another tells him) there is an optimistic message in the end:

The testosterone study inspired crackling debate of discussion on the many daddy blogs cropping up around the country. And in fatherhood support groups, like one called NYC Dads with more than 400 members, many dads dissected the findings with each other and looked for a silver lining to reassure them of identities as strong, contemporary fathers.

“It’s a natural process,” Matt Schneider, a stay-at-home father of three young children who lives in Battery Park City, said of the reported testosterone dip. The finding, he said, was unfortunately being interpreted by some “as a way to emasculate men, when really it should be used as a way to show us all that we’re meant to be part of the care-giving process.”

That, in fact, was a point that the authors of the study emphasized: a minor dip in testosterone doesn’t mean you’re less virile; rather, it seems to be nature’s way of adjusting impulses slightly — to make a man slightly less likely to stray once he has a family to look after, and more likely to focus on the tasks at hand.

You can read the entire study here. Then use the comments to discuss whether this resonates in your own life, and whether the message we need to hear is that nature has equipped men quite nicely for child rearing.

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A Man’s Sex Life May Suffer If His Partner Gets Too Close to His Pals — Studied - NYTimes.com

SOMETIMES a study emerges whose implications for human beings are just plain disagreeable to untangle. In this case, according to several incendiary headlines, new research shows that a woman’s friendship with her partner’s friends ruins their sex life. Time to start finger-pointing?

Let’s clarify for the sake of relations between the sexes. The study, an analysis of data from the National Social Life, Health and Aging Project, a survey of older Americans by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, looked at the relationship between sexual dysfunction among men and the relationships between their friends and partners.

The subjects were men from 57 to 85, ages when men’s social lives contract, male identity is challenged and erectile dysfunction often sets in. When a partner was closer to a man’s friends than he was, his sex life suffered, say the authors and sociologists, Benjamin Cornwell of Cornell and Edward Laumann of the University of Chicago.

And women thought men liked them being pals with their pals! “Partner betweenness,” the name the authors gave the phenomenon, means that when a man’s wife or girlfriend has stronger relationships with his friends than he does, she comes between the man and his friends. This may occur if the wife is a “domineering” personality who acts as the gatekeeper for the household or with couples where the man socializes primarily with her friends.

Whatever the particulars, the man is more likely to have trouble maintaining an erection or achieving orgasm during sex with his partner. About one-fourth of the men said they experienced partner betweenness in at least one of their close friendships.

The authors say the effect is significant. A man whose wife or girlfriend has greater contact with some of his good friends than he does is about 92 percent more likely to have erectile dysfunction than a man who is closer to all his friends than his partner is. The younger men (57 to 64) were two and a half times more likely to have erectile dysfunction. The good news? As men enter their 70s, the negative impact wanes and disappears.

The source of the performance dip isn’t jealousy. The sexual problems, the authors say, are rooted in issues of privacy and autonomy, which are central to male gender identity. But Geoffrey L. Greif, a professor of social work and an author of a forthcoming book, “Two Plus Two: Couples and Their Couple Friendships,” noted that as men age, they are generally less likely to socialize one on one with male friends anyway. “Cross-sex friendships are much more common with younger men,” he said.

So, should women back off for the sake of their man’s sexual pleasure? “I think it’s important to stress that we’re not suggesting men should strike out and form relationships with people their spouses don’t know,” Dr. Cornwell said. “It doesn’t work like that. The healthiest relationships are those that involved shared connections. But it’s important that men also have independent social relationships.”