The causes of and conclusions to the spring time libidinal flux

In the past few years, I’ve often found myself discovering the truth in clichés. Some new understanding transforms them in my mind from familiar, meaningless phrases into pithy, insightful comments on the state of things. “Don’t spit into the wind” was an early example of this; there have been many more.

This month, the old line, “Ah, Spring, when a young man’s fancy turns to love” (a bastardization of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “In the Spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love”) has taken on a new resonance for me. Immediately upon returning from Spring Break, I noticed a surprisingly sharp increase in my desire for sex, a girlfriend, or (ideally) both. I found myself attracted to girls I had never found particularly appealing before, and willing to give the benefit of the doubt to girls I would usually have found actively unpleasant. Having asked around and confirmed similar experiences from a number of other people—including at least one girl who has noticed an increase in her desire for men, although not necessarily for me in particular—I think I can now conclusively declare this a widespread trend.

Of course, as the threadbareness of the above quote (the one about love, not spitting) indicates, it’s not a particularly original insight that the coming of the spring brings sexual reawakening. But I am quite sure that I have never experienced this reawakening before; its intensity has been continually surprising me for the last month. What causes the spring upswing, and why have I missed it for the last seven years since I started caring about girls? I shall attempt to answer these questions using a mixture of personal history and what I hope you will agree is science.

Many of the probable causes of spring upswing are common-sensical*: more revealing clothing, particularly on women; developing tans and remnants of them from tropical Spring Breaks; more time spent outdoors, leading to weight loss; and a general aura of health from life being bearable to live again after the soul-crushing winter term. There is also the simple matter that there are several hundred more people here this term than in the last one, meaning (seven) more attractive girls on campus.

Then there is the more intangible aura of spring, a sense of budding, awakening, and promise in the spring months, which I (and Alfred) believe translates to a desire to reach out and create new relationships.

Also, there’s the fact that spring is a good time for pregnancies. Women impregnated in the spring tend to have better access to adequate nutrients throughout the bulk of their pregnancies, in the summer and fall. Spring is also a good time to get pregnant because it means that you won’t be giving birth in the spring or summer, which has historically been bad for a number of reasons: infectious disease rates, particularly those of water-borne diseases, tended to peak in the summer months, causing significantly higher infant mortality rates and worse health later in life. Of course, these effects are declining with time, as nutrition and clean water become accessible year-round. (In fact, American spring babies now get less ear infections than other babies, because their mothers spend their pregnancies indoors, breathing indoor air pollutants to which the babies develop antibodies.) Even today, though, those born in autumn in Denmark, Austria and Australia—those born from October to December in Austria and Denmark, and April to June in Australia—have life expectancies around half a year longer than their spring-baby counterparts; schizophrenics are most likely to have been born between January and April; and spring and summer babies are more likely to be anorexics. It seems likely that I want to act in a way that could get women pregnant right now because, from a biological standpoint, I should get women pregnant right now.

All of that said, though, the spring has never before turned my fancy to thoughts of love any more than has, say, the Internet. (Or winter, for that matter.) Why is this? I have several explanations, and at least one of them makes me angry.

Part of the answer is that, as I grow older, I am able to tune into more and more adult experiences. I, and the other students whose experiences are like mine, may simply not have been grown up enough to experience seasonal ebbs and flows before. It seems that adults are much more attuned to the changing seasons; you never see a child with Seasonal Affective Disorder, or even one who pauses to admire the changing leaves unless instructed to.

Another part of the answer is that, at the beginning of spring, I often had hold-over girlfriends from the winter, who tended to disorient and stifle my sex drive, at least as far as it pertained to other women.

But the explanation that I find most interesting, and unnerving, is that my sex drive never peaked in the spring because I never really knew about spring before. This is the first year since I can remember that the weather has had a significant impact on my life. Here at Dartmouth, I walk miles a day just trying to eat and get to class—I’m inevitably affected by the temperature and light conditions, and can’t help but notice the changing trees, fluctuating snowpack, presence/lack of snow sculpture, etc. My high school, however, was an all-indoor netherworld, in which people wore the same clothes, in the same light, in the same air, at the same temperature, every day. There were, functionally, no seasons besides “summer” and “school.” Toward the middle of spring we’d start eating lunch outside, but it was too little, too late. Perhaps I never felt a strong springtime sense of rebirth because the seasons weren’t a large or important enough part of my life to identify with them. Perhaps I never wanted sex particularly badly in the spring, because, on some level, I never really connected with the idea of “spring” in the first place.

It seems, then, that this article carries two messages. The first—which I am typing out at 3:30 AM as I stare at a glowing, electric box—is that living too removed from nature can have unforeseen consequences, which may be obscure but nevertheless affect our lives in profound and meaningful ways. The second is that I really need a girlfriend. You might find the first message more important. I am inclined to focus on the second.

*Note: Several of these insights are courtesy of Carolyn Kylstra, another staff writer for TDI. Carolyn did a lot of thinking about this article and came up with some contributing factors I wouldn’t have thought of otherwise. She’s looking great, too.