News.com.au sex columnist Nadia Bokody. Photo / Instagram/Nadia Bokody
OPINION:
I'm wondering if I should get up and leave.
I've been at a friend's house for hours, and we've barely made eye contact the entire night.
Her gaze keeps darting to her phone as I'm speaking. She's turned it on and off several times already to check it's still working.
"Do you think he'll reply soon?" she abruptly interjects, as I'm mid-sentence telling her about a work project.
What's unsettling about this scene isn't how wildly out of character it is for her (she's the least rude person I know); it's how much I recognise myself in it.
I've been the person unable to focus on who I'm with because I'm too busy checking my phone in anticipation of a text from someone I like. A text that – more often than not – will never come.
I've lost nights of sleep, held entire focus groups with friends, and embarrassingly shed more than a few tears over someone who has barely managed to show the bare minimum level of effort. And I've pretended to be totally cool with it.
Though it's commonly referred to as "breadcrumbing" or "blowing hot and cold", the scientific term for this experience is "intermittent reinforcement". And it's no accident it provokes such an intense response.
In a series of experiments carried out in the 1950s, psychologists CB Ferster and BF Skinner exposed rats to two different lever systems. In one, the rats were taught pressing a lever sometimes produced a treat, but also periodically produced nothing. In the other, they were given a lever that dependably expelled treats each time it was tapped.
To their surprise, they found the rats not only became more interested in the unpredictable lever than the one they could rely on; they were obsessed with it.
In relationships, some psychologists refer to this phenomenon as "trauma bonding", because it's essentially an anxiety-reward cycle.
If you've ever found yourself questioning how you ended up in a casual sexual relationship when you actually wanted something more – maybe even desperate to assert your needs but feeling seemingly helpless to pull the trigger – chances are high you've been on the receiving end of intermittent reinforcement.
It's effective at modulating the way we act because it essentially triggers an addiction-type response in the brain; providing a dopamine hit at the end of many hours, days, or even weeks or anxious unknowing – not dissimilar to the relief someone with a drug dependency experiences upon achieving their next narcotic fix, or a gambler might feel after getting a win on the slot machine.
And that's why it's such a popular tactic among "bad boys" (read: emotionally unavailable men) and dodgy male pick-up artists who employ strategies like sporadic ignoring and "negging" (insults masked as compliments aimed to shake a person's confidence) to attain sex.
(I should also mention women do this too, because we're not immune to being terrible people.)
When we're constantly off-kilter, our ability to employ logic weakens. Combine that with a powerful dopamine hit, and you're primed for Ubering to a dude's house when he booty calls at midnight after days of radio silence.
It doesn't help that the love stories we see played out in popular media regularly idealise this behaviour, either. A male protagonist who treats his female love interest poorly before declaring his love for her, and toxic on-again-off-again-relationships are frequently packaged as romance.
But while the unceasing rollercoaster of emotional inconsistency might make for great suspense on screen – and can even feel exciting in reality (after all, who hasn't had hot sex after a long-awaited late-night text??) – at the end of its dizzying highs are crashing lows.
I watched the same usually level-headed friend morph into an anxiety-ridden heap after that night at her house glued to the phone. Eventually, her no-strings-attached relationship reached its inevitable demise; leaving her questioning how she'd departed so far from herself in the process.
Thankfully, that friend is now with a guy who delivers every time she pulls the metaphorical lever, and often, even when she doesn't.
Ironically, when they first started seeing one another, she confessed he wasn't her "type".
I immediately levelled with her; "Your 'type' is people who don't actually deserve you, so yes, you're right. He's not your type. And that's exactly why you should date him."
Three years on, they're married, and we no longer hold focus groups about whether the people we're with actually like us.
Admittedly, a text message and some hot sex after three days of being left on "read" can deliver a euphoric hit, but – and perhaps I'm showing my age here – these days, someone who shows up consistently is far more sexy to me.
• Follow Nadia Bokody on Instagram and YouTube for more sex, relationship and mental health content.
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