Re: moments after sex.
**Give the condition a name (post-coital tristesse in this case). Tell your friend to read the following article and please tell him to seek help from a psychiatrist/marriage counselor. Next time, tell him to go discuss the martial bed problems with a person who is qualified to help him out rather than sharing it with friends.
Hope that helps.
It is “post-coital tristesse,” a Latin-French phrase that makes the whole thing sound sophisticated and much more romantic than “sadness after sex.”
Many men, and some women, have been plagued by post-coital tristesse for ages. According to Aristotle, “the exhaustion consequent on the loss of even a very little of the semen is conspicuous because the body is deprived of the ultimate gain drawn from the nutriment … [so] as a general rule the result of intercourse is exhaustion and weakness rather than relief.”
The Roman poet Petronius, in the first century A.D., wrote “Doing, a filthy pleasure is, and short;/And done, we straight away repent us of the sport.”
Hence the Latin proverb, “Omne animal post coitum triste.” All animals are sad after sex.
My favorite treatment of the idea comes from the Irish poet W.B. Yeats in “The Chambermaid’s Second Song": “From pleasure of the bed,/Dull as a worm,/His rod and its butting head/Limp as a worm,/His spirit that has fled/Blind as a worm.”
Your spirit, the drive that took you to bed in the first place, has fled with your orgasm and so you get depressed and flee, too.
There may actually be a scientific reason why this happens, though I like the poetry better. It involves the hormone prolactin. That’s the same hormone women need to make milk, but men have it, too, and it shoots sky-high immediately after orgasm.
All well and good, but in another study they concluded that prolactin works like a thermostat to shut off our desire, our appetites, and therefore the exciting, revved-up drives that make us try to satisfy them. So you get dull as a worm and your spirit flees. The more satisfying the activity, the duller the man gets.**
