This episode is also on Bilibili too.
Hi everyone, it’s Zhichao Wei. It’s been ages since I last posted, and I’ve really missed you.
The channel is back, and we’re reunited after a brief separation, so let’s talk about a topic that couldn’t be more timely: why can a brief separation make lovers feel newly in love? Whether they’re a dating couple or a long-married couple, if they’re glued to each other every day, the passion gradually fades. But after spending a little time apart and then reuniting, the dry wood and raging fire catch remarkably easily. Couples reunited after a brief separation can be intensely affectionate and hot as fire.
So what psychological mechanisms are at work behind this effect?
First of all, this is certainly a physiological and psychological phenomenon related to sex and reproduction. Humans aren’t the only ones who experience it; animals do too. Recently, I actually watched my own two dogs put on a little show of it. My smaller bichon, Pineapple, went into heat a while back, and my big dog, Mango, became restless, wanting to be a dad every day—though he didn’t succeed, because the difference in their sizes was just too much. They had finally calmed down over the past few days and were behaving like perfectly civil housemates. Then yesterday morning, my wife took Pineapple out first, while I followed a little later with Mango. The moment Mango saw Pineapple, he lost all self-control again and very much wanted to be a dad. It took us forever to separate them, and Mango remained frantic the whole way home.
It made me wonder: hadn’t the fire already gone out at home? How did it flare up again the moment we stepped outside? Then it hit me: could this be the brief-separation effect? Was the problem simply that Pineapple had been out of Mango’s sight for a while? So that evening, we ran a little experiment. This time, we waited until both dogs had finished eating, then took the elevator out together, without separating them at any point. Sure enough, Mango was no longer all dry wood and raging fire.
So why did being out of sight for a while make him so restless? The reason is pretty blunt: he was afraid of being cuckolded. In species like humans and dogs, which aren’t strictly monogamous, males have an enduring form of green-hat anxiety—the fear that their mate might be unfaithful, leaving them to do all the hard work of raising someone else’s offspring while their own genes come to an end. So males evolved all kinds of mechanisms and strategies to reduce the odds of being cuckolded. The brief-separation effect is one of them.
Robin Baker, the author of Sperm Wars and a famous sexologist, conducted a very racy study in 1993. He recruited 35 couples and tracked the men’s ejaculation volume over a period of time. I won’t go into the exact recording procedure—otherwise the episode might never make it to air—but suffice it to say, it was rigorous and scientific. The results showed that a man’s ejaculation volume during sex was closely related to one measure: what proportion of the time between this sexual encounter and the previous one the couple had spent apart. Between two sexual encounters, the more time the couple spent apart rather than together, the more semen the man ejaculated. If a couple had spent 100% of the preceding period together, an average ejaculation contained about 389 million sperm. But if they had spent only 5% of that time together, an average ejaculation contained about 712 million sperm—almost twice as many.
Why would that happen? Most likely because a man worries that while his partner is away, she may have sex with another man. If another man’s sperm remains inside his wife, then the husband has an incentive to send more sperm inside her during their next sexual encounter. That raises his odds of winning the sperm competition and slightly lowers the odds of ending up with a very green head.
If we work backward from this physiological change to the underlying mental state, it becomes easy to understand why men may feel that dry-wood-and-raging-fire intensity when they reunite with their partner after being apart.
That’s one way to understand the brief-separation effect through sex and reproduction: it may well be an anti-cuckoldry mechanism. Of course, this explanation is extremely “male-chauvinist,” as if everything were about men’s little schemes and women were completely passive. But judging from everyday observation, this psychological effect probably isn’t unique to men.
So what factors might affect both partners at the same time?
One factor is this: distance changes the content of communication. A study in the Journal of Communication found that long-distance couples’ interactions were more meaningful than those of couples who saw each other every day. Couples who see each other daily have plenty of chances to talk, so they may care less about the quality of the conversation and spend more time discussing trivial little things. Because long-distance couples have limited opportunities to talk, they’re more likely to focus on love, mutual trust, imagining the future together, and planning their life ahead… Talking about these things can easily bring two people psychologically closer. That creates a situation where they grow closer and closer mentally, while physically they can’t quite get what they want. So when the young couple finally reunites, how could it not be dry wood and raging fire?
That doesn’t mean long-distance relationships are better than relationships where people can be together often. The reason long-distance relationships can produce more meaningful communication is precisely that both partners recognize the risks of not seeing each other regularly, so they’re willing to invest more as compensation. Living with that risk for the long term is obviously not a good thing. A brief separation can make lovers feel newly in love; if it turns into a “long parting,” emotional attachment may ultimately be no match for the distance between them.
In short, more meaningful and valuable communication during separation can strengthen a couple’s bond. That’s another psychological mechanism behind the brief-separation effect.
But up to this point, we’ve really explained why a brief separation beats the “ordinary familiar”—why reuniting after time apart is more exciting than facing each other all day. Why, though, can a brief separation even beat a “new love”?
Because for most people, the most comfortable state is a little unfamiliarity mixed into familiarity, and an occasional surprise amid calm and routine. Newness and surprise are both good things, but the familiar, everyday background matters just as much. Familiar things help us relax; fresh surprises make us a little tense and excited. That balance is perfect. When listening to music, only old songs can get a bit tiresome, while nothing but new songs can leave you at a loss. Some music apps are smart enough to slip a few unfamiliar songs into your saved playlist now and then. That rhythm feels just right.
Our feelings toward a romantic partner may work much the same way. Staring at each other every day can be too familiar, which isn’t good. Starting a relationship from scratch with a stranger may bring too many shocks and require too much adjustment, which also isn’t good. So perhaps what attracts us most is what the song calls “the most familiar stranger.”
Nancy Kalish, a psychology professor at California State University, studied more than a thousand couples who broke up and then rekindled their old romance. Of them, 61% said the rekindled relationship progressed faster than any previous relationship, while 71% said it was the most passionate relationship they had ever experienced.
See? Rekindled love can actually be more passionate than an entirely new relationship. The psychology behind the brief-separation effect is probably similar: a new love may be nothing but surprises, and we don’t want that many surprises—we just want a little. The feeling of being both familiar and slightly unfamiliar when you reunite after a brief separation is just right. Besides, there’s inevitably also some of the small happiness of “getting back what you thought you’d lost.”
Those are some of the psychological principles involved in the brief-separation effect. I think the lesson for couples is that if you want the fire of love to keep burning brightly, you should think about how to create, every now and then, just a tiny sense of unfamiliarity in your partner’s eyes.
I hope our reunion after this brief separation on the channel can also be dry wood and raging fire—sweet and loving.
As for Pineapple and Mango, a few days ago we actually let Pineapple quietly tie the knot with Milk, the handsome little dog next door. So—
Mango, you’re going to be a dad!
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