Communication is always a great place to start, but here’s a biological trick you can use to jump-start intimacy and bonding with your spouse: play with the wife’s breasts. Breast-play releases the hormone oxytocin which stimulates bonding and feelings of intimacy.
Larry Young, a professor of psychiatry at Emory University and co-author of The “Chemistry Between Us” (2019), believes that men’s love of breasts is simply that human evolution has co-opted an ancient neural circuit which was originally designed to strengthen the bond between mother and infant.
Oxytocin is nature’s “love drug,” and nipple stimulation, be it from an infant during breast feeding, or from a man during coitus, floods a woman’s brain. This helps the woman focus on the task at hand. Quite simply, when men bit, nibble, suck, or caress women’s nipples, he helps her body release oxytocin in the woman’s brain producing a bonding experience.
According to Young, attraction to breasts “is a brain organization effect that occurs in straight males when they go through puberty…Evolution has selected for this brain organization in men that makes them attracted to the breasts in a sexual context, because the outcome is that it activates the female bonding circuit, making women feel more bonded with him. It’s a behavior that males have evolved in order to stimulate the female’s maternal bonding circuitry.”
What’s more, nipple stimulation for women apparently triggers the same areas of the brain as genital stimulation.
For many women, nipples are erogenous zones. A new study may explain why: The sensation from the nipples travels to the same part of the brain as sensations from the vagina, clitoris and cervix.
The study, published online July 28 in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, is the first to map the female genitals onto the sensory portion of the brain. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), researchers noted which brain areas become active when women touch various parts of their bodies. The genital-sensing brain areas in women roughly correspond to the same areas in men, but the nipple finding was a surprise, said study researcher Barry Komisaruk, a psychologist at Rutgers University.
“My speculation is that this could be the basis for many women saying that nipple stimulation is erotogenic, because it stimulates the same area as the genitals,” Komisaruk told LiveScience.
So if you’re feeling distant or disconnected from your spouse, along with communication invest some quality time in breast-play. The oxytocin released will help you bond together and strengthen your relationship and intimacy.
(See also: How to play with breasts.)