Why do most women feel depressed post coitus?

Most women look forward to the rosy afterglow of contentment they feel when they’ve made love. But Laura Summers has not always found it so easy to lie back and enjoy those moments of contended bliss.

For the six years she has been with her partner Ben, Laura, 28, from Sittingbourne, Kent, has felt tearful after those special moments of intimacy.

Laura, who works in catering and has a two-year-old son, says: “Ben and I still have sex once or twice a week — and I’d estimate that half the time I suffer from what can only be described as post-sex blues. In the moments afterwards, there are times when we’ll be having a cuddle and I’ll dissolve into tears. Sometimes the feelings pass within a few hours. But if we’ve had sex at bedtime, the feeling can extend to morning and I wake up still feeling sad.”

Laura is convinced that her own sense of inadequacy and poor body image is to blame. “Sex can be a really emotional experience for me,” she says. “Sometimes, I feel completely overwhelmed by the moment, not only by my own feelings for Ben, but also by disbelief that he can love me as much as he does. Those feelings can be so powerful and all-consuming that they manifest as a period of gloom and tearfulness afterwards.”

It may seem odd that, in an era where sex is portrayed as the best possible fun you can have, that Laura feels so bitterly sad afterwards. But according to a new study, she is not alone. Although little talked about, research published in the journal Sexual Medicine has found that 46 per cent of women have suffered the post-sex blues — marked by tearfulness and feelings of depression and anxiety.

Furthermore, it seems to be on the rise. A study six years earlier found that just a third of women had experienced the phenomenon, also known as Post Coital Tristesse. So are such feelings simply the knock-on effect of a particularly powerful hormonal aftershock that follows the female orgasm? Or could it be an indication of a deep-seated insecurity that they will never measure up for their partners in a culture in which women are bombarded by images of female perfection?

First the good news: it is true that for some women, tears after orgasm can be an expression of intense pleasure and proof that the earth moved. These climaxes even have a name: crygasms, defined as peaks so powerful “they leave you with tears streaming down your face, usually when you are in a state of emotional or physical connectedness with your partner”. But studies have also found how easily the hormones released during orgasm can trigger a loss of emotional control in women. Because, as any woman who has ever experienced the irritation of seeing her man go to sleep immediately after sex knows, the genders can react very differently to lovemaking.

During arousal, a man’s body is flooded with higher levels of testosterone, as well as the "pleasure and lust" hormone dopamine. However, while these also rise in a woman’s bloodstream, she is also flooded with more of the bonding hormones, oxytocin and prolactin, than her mate. While prolactin helps women feel sexually satisfied, the flip-side is that it can also spark other feelings - it is one of the main chemical messages that triggers weeping in women, but not in men.

Beyond that, studies have also found that prolactin boosts feelings of vulnerability, already likely to be heightened in women after the closeness of intercourse. Furthermore, brain scans of women during climax have also found that the waves of electrical activity they trigger can shut down some areas, including regions of the frontal cortex, which help control emotion, allowing them to spill to the surface, as in Laura’s case.

Laura says, “Like every woman, there are days when I look in the mirror and feel good about myself and days when all I see are stretch marks and fat. I think those moments of low self-confidence play a big part in me feeling emotional after sex. Sometimes, Ben overwhelms me with compliments while we’re making love and I feel like a film star, only to experience a huge crash when it’s over. Then, I’ll start questioning whether I’m truly good enough for him and feel very sad. When I start to cry, Ben will wrap his arms around me and ask me what’s wrong. I try to reassure him that he’s not made me feel sad, but that I’m simply overwhelmed with a sense of being so fortunate to have him.”

Denise Knowles of Relate says, “What we’ve got to recognise is that there’s a perfectly normal, natural biological process going on here. The swing in hormone levels can mean a woman can go from feeling very close to her partner, with all that lovely oxytocin and other bonding hormones, to suddenly not having that. You can’t get physically closer to a human being than when you’re making love to them. And women may miss that move away from emotional closeness. Naturally, there’s going to be a dip and that can cause women to become tearful, to feel that they are on their own.”

Researchers have also found there may be a genetic component to whether a woman reacts emotionally after sex.

(Courtesy of Daily Mail.)