AT THE 50TH birthday party of a friend in my neighborhood, her husband of 25 years made a heartfelt toast. “You are the yin to my yang,” he said. “I can’t wait to be with you for the next 25 years,” and he looked like he meant it. I tried to appear cheerful, which was hard, because my own 25-year-marriage had shattered six months earlier when my husband decided he wanted a fresh start. I bolted for the back deck, where a guy named Sandro was passing around a large bong. I knew Sandro by reputation. He lived across the river, in Virginia. A jazz bassist, he was a man of appealing trapezoids, from his muscular calves to the solid cabinetry of his trunk.
We both liked rivers, and camping. He offered to take me and some friends to camp overnight on an island in the middle of the Potomac. No one was sure if the island was private, or even which state it was in, but he’d been there before. So one Sunday evening when I didn’t have the kids, Sandro and I set out. e friends had all bailed, smartly so, because it was late fall, and freezing. We paddled out in the last light, landed, and built a fire in a waiting firepit. He had stashed a tent there on an earlier expedition, and we set it up. We stayed up late, talking by the fire, eating spoonfuls of peanut butter out of a jar.
Awkwardly, we splayed our sleeping bags close together in the large tent. It was seriously cold. Inside, our down-wrapped bodies touched. then they moved closer against each other, and closer. He smelled like smoke and loam and peanuts. Gradually, the sleeping bags opened. Sandro’s body burned like a furnace. Where I was frenetic and twitchy, he was solid-mass geometry. With him, I stopped uttering. I grew warm and steady.
My body wanted to feel safe, to calm down, to feel loved. Like all mammals, it wanted to be warm. It wanted, when stressed like a prairie vole, to huddle.
Many psychologists, my own therapist included, are wary of people seeking other relationships too soon after heartbreak. But I was surprised to experience how strongly the body wants what it wants. For years, decades, I had instead let my head determine my actions. I was like James Joyce’s character Mr. Duffy, who “lived at a little distance from his body.” Marriage had vitiated my sensuality. Now my body was asserting itself, churlish and girlish.
Maybe my physical craving was my need for self-substantiation, to prove I existed, and that I was made of matter even if I seemed to be bodily dissolving. Or maybe it was just hormones. Men’s bodies start manufacturing more testosterone around the time of divorce, according to a 1998 study of 4,500 American veterans. Evolutionarily, this makes sense. On their own, they might need to fight, or at least take bold, assertive action to find a new mate. Hookup apps are crowded with freshly sprung husbands. They are horny, and they are lonely. Divorced women also show elevated levels of testosterone, and it influences our sex drive and our competitiveness.
For months through the long winter, we dashed across the bridge to each other’s houses and adhered our incongruent bodies together. A kleptotherm, I stole his heat. He warmed smooth round rocks on his wood-burning stove and placed them on my bare skin. He fed me stews. I noticed that after a night under Sandro’s furry, weighted arms, I would wake well rested and calm. A diabetic, my morning glucose levels would miraculously drop.
As mammals, the pleasure of physical connection impels us together. As we evolved, our social attachment system appears to have piggybacked on the brain’s opioid system, part of the pain network. The areas of the brain that light up during partner separation—and during reunion—are notably rich in opioid receptors.
How does the brain know we are physically close to someone? Our skin is our largest sensory organ. Sometimes it is described as our social organ. We mammals have specialized nerve fibers under the skin called cutaneous C afferents. These nerves love to be caressed at slow speeds, according to science (in case we didn’t already know). When we are touched in this way, our breathing slows, our blood pressure drops, and our muscles relax. Psychologists have measured the way having friends or loved ones holding your hand can help mitigate pain in patients undergoing medical procedures. But recently they have begun to look at touch and the easing of social pain.
In a game sometimes used in psychology studies called Cyberball, players pass the ball to everyone but you, creating feelings of rejection and ostracism. Touch researchers at University College London made 84 volunteers play the game. Then the researchers blindfolded the players, and stroked half of them slowly (on the forearm) with a so brush (“blush brush No. 7,” to be exact). The other half got a fast-brush treatment (same brush), administered at 18 centimeters per second instead of 3. After that, the volunteers filled out a questionnaire measuring their threat level. Both groups still felt hurt, but the slow-touch group reported feeling significantly less distress and threat. Of course, all good parents understand the benefits of comfort strokes, along with kissing boo-boos and even a good tickle session, but scientists have a fancy name for it: embodied social support. Adults need it too.
Some of our skin nerves also monitor temperature, and these send signals to our brain stems to tell us to start shivering, or to burn brown fat, or to find Mom or, in my case, the local bass player. It is a deeply hardwired urge.
When we’re warm, our bodies release more natural opioids, which may be one of the reasons frequent sauna use in Finland (and aerobic exercise) is associated with lower rates of depression, stress, and stress-related diseases like heart attacks.
Studies show that when people hold a hot beverage, they subconsciously behave with more “warmth” and generosity toward others. When they sit in a warm lab room versus a cold room, they report feeling closer to the experimenter. On the other hand, when subjects are asked to recall an experience in which they were rejected, they estimate the room temperature to be colder than people recalling inclusive events. The rejectees also report a greater desire for warm food and drinks. When the participants are colder, they report feeling lonelier. Notably, researchers have suggested that “experiencing the warmth of an object could reduce the negative experience of social exclusion.”
On the nights I wasn’t with Sandro, I would linger in hot baths. I o en went to bed with a floppy red hot-water bottle, which made me feel ridiculous and geriatric, but not enough to override the pleasure of doing it. In the months after my breakup, I was rarely without a thermos of tea. It was practically, embarrassingly, my security blanket, what child psychologists call a “transitional object.” I may not have had a partner, but I had a thermos. If, jet-lagged and pre-occupied, I accidentally left it behind (which I did twice), I was here. And cold. And, apparently, more lonely. One doesn’t typically read this in breakup manuals, but now the science is in: seek heat.
NOT ONLY DOES pleasant physical contact release opioids into our brains, it also releases oxytocin, which in turn activates reward neuro-chemicals like dopamine and serotonin (and when dogs and their owners reunite, both animals release oxytocin, especially dogs when the reunion involves petting). The more readily these flow, the less we release stress hormones like cortisol, and cortisol plays a direct role in regulating blood sugar. Sandro was my heat source, orgasmatron, and insulin port all in one.
Perhaps this is all just a fancy rationalization for why I wanted to be dating. I was aware, of course, of the received wisdom about the pitfalls of rebounding too fast. I listened to one podcast advising divorced people to wait years before dating again. One oft-repeated formula states that for every year of marriage you should wait six months before embarking on a new relationship. at would put me on the 12-year plan. Sorry, no. I might not be eating solid food by then. Many popular articles on the subject—as well as many psychologists—issue bromides about learning to love yourself first. They warn that jumping into new relationships is misguided at best, as well as a problematic distraction from confronting your feelings.
Pema Chodron, the Buddhist nun who fled her first husband and was left by her second, is wise on the subject of suffering. I love so much of what she says, such as the necessity to turn “hot” loneliness into “cool” loneliness, a state of less desperation, more equanimity. But I’m less sure about her prescription for getting there. “Heartache is not something we choose to invite in,” she writes. “It’s restless and pregnant and hot with the desire to escape and something or someone to keep us company.” Best, she says, to exercise self-control and thus come to know ourselves better.
Until I’m ready for enlightenment, though, I’d rather have the company. It may hold Buddhist cred, but the Step-Away-from-the-Cute-Boy wisdom has little basis in science. In 2014, researchers at Queens College, City University of New York, decided to study rebounders. In two different studies, they asked many questions of over 300 volunteers ranging in age from 18 to 49, all of whom had recently (on average 7 months earlier) experienced a breakup from a relationship that had lasted, on average, 11 months. The subject group was racially diverse but overwhelmingly heterosexual. The researchers, Claudia Brumbaugh and Chris Fraley, found that those who had quickly entered into a rebound relationship tended to report feeling more insecure in general than the ones who were still single. Despite this, they reported more confidence in their desirability, suggesting that the act of rebounding was lifting their damaged self-esteem.
The quicker rebounders were also less likely to report lingering romantic feelings for their ex, and they reported higher overall well- being. “ This suggests that having a new partner may effectively serve the purpose of allowing people to more quickly get over their ex, even when the breakup occurred recently,” the authors wrote. “In sum, people who could be described as rebounding tended to have better personal psychological outcomes and valued their new partner more.”
As to the distraction-from-feelings argument, Brumbaugh and Fraley pointed out that this is called coping, and it’s not always a bad thing. “People often experience despair and loneliness following the end of a relationship,” they wrote. “Dating a new person may provide a way to divert attention from these negative emotions.” I was aware of the significant risk of depression following a breakup. Once you’re deep into a serious bout of depression, it can be very difficult to climb out. With each successive bout, you’re more likely to experience another. I didn’t want to run away from sadness, but I didn’t want to wallow in it to the point of dysfunction. It wasn’t just the threat of depression sabotaging my work and my parenting. To succumb to that would have been allowing the breakup to take an even bigger piece of me. I had more fight in me than that. And my C afferents liked it too.