Romance: How Do Men's and Women's Brains and Hormones Affect Relationships?
July 28, 2015
Hosted by Virginia L. Colin, Ph.D.
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Guest Information
Episode Description
Fueled by unsustainable hormone surges, romance ordinarily has a limited life span. Recognizing how men and women differ in brain structure and hormone flows can help people create and continue the kinds of relationships they want. Oversimplifying, a woman’s oxytocin and a man’s testosterone promote opposite behaviors and attitudes. That can make magic for a while, but people who expect courtship behavior to continue indefinitely are usually disappointed. Two out of three divorces are initiated by women, often because women want and expect something different from what men deliver. Dr. Kathy Foster explains that a profound brain change in females causes them to “feel their thinking” in ways unavailable to men. Men and women differ in their thoughts and feelings about sex, connecting emotionally, communication, and conflict. To find what they want in romance and in relationships, both men and women must learn about these gender differences.
Family Matters
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Our goal is to share good ideas about helping all kinds of families handle the challenges and problems that are common in today’s world. We seek to help people heal, grow, and thrive in a culture in which marriage, parenting, and other family relationships are under great stress.
We will feature experts on a variety of family matters. Topics may include building and maintaining healthy relationships, family mediation, divorcing with minimal damage, strengthening marriages, LGBT families, forming and maintaining stepfamilies, single parents, creating constructive separation agreements, addiction, preventing or ending abuse, and other Family Matters.
Virginia L. Colin, Ph.D.
Virginia L. Colin, Ph.D is an author, speaker, professional family mediator, Director of Colin Family Mediation Group, and a Founding Member of the Academy of Professional Family Mediators (APFM).
Having survived a nightmarish divorce, Dr. Colin actively supports divorce reform efforts, teaching people how to take a lot of the pain, financial cost, acrimony, and trauma out of divorce. She also loves learning and teaching about building healthy relationships and solving family problems long before anyone has a reason to consider divorce. She has been a foster parent, a married parent, a divorced single parent, and a remarried stepparent.
Formerly a research psychologist studying attachment and other aspects of human development, Dr. Colin has been providing family mediation services since 1999. She specializes in helping couples and ex-couples develop co-parenting plans and financial agreements that support their children’s security, self-confidence, and healthy development as well as their own adult well-being.
Dr. Colin has published two books, “Human Attachment" and "The Guide to Low-Cost Divorce in Virginia: How to Do It Yourself.” She has also written a variety of articles published in journals and on the Internet.
