It’s sort of like dropping an atomic bomb on your house to blow out a candle. Dropping a bomb on a house will blow out a candle. It’s just that its effects are sufficiently . . . nonspecific . . . to make this a fairly unpopular way to deal with one’s candle-extinguishing needs.

This idea that women’s brains should go full tilt at high fertility is supported by research in neuroscience, which shows that estrogen acts like fertilizer on multiple regions of women’s brains.

Women get frustrated with themselves because they don’t understand why their brains and bodies rebel at the thought of having sex that they don’t want (but wish that they wanted). And men get their feelings hurt because they don’t understand why their partners would be more willing to do the dishes or put away laundry than to have sex with them.

HPA-axis dysfunction can wreak havoc on your brain, your moods, and your immune system, and may even sap you of your joie de vivre.

having a blunted stress response could also harm emotional well-being in more indirect ways through its negative impact on our ability to absorb emotionally meaningful events from our environments.

Somewhere, somehow, we’ve all agreed that it’s okay for ourselves and for other women to live with mental health problems, as long as no one is getting pregnant unexpectedly. This is—quite literally—complete insanity.

Most women who choose their partners while on the pill don’t have problems down the road. It’s just worth noting that some of them do.

Mate guarding can prompt great acts of romance targeted at keeping women happy and satisfied.

They found that women with more attractive husbands reported increased marital satisfaction after going off the pill than they reported while on