Take this all with a grain of salt, but a book being published next month by Current/Penguin, The Chemistry Between Us: Love, Sex and the Science of Attraction, argues that all the sexy, impatient, bored, jealous, secure feelings you think you have regarding loveabout your boyfriend or husband, the hot guy in the office, your ex are really neurological responses to the chemical cocktails that flow through your veins. Youre not making decisions or choices, not really. Youre following the requirements of biology, and then telling yourself a culturally acceptable fiction like "love at first sight," or "just my type," or "so glad I dumped that douchebag cheater."

The authors, Larry Young and Brian Alexander, are a neuroscientist and a journalist, respectively. They're particularly interested in the rest of the animal kingdom species that haven't developed stories by which we explain away our biological impulses. By describing experiments in which researchers masturbate female rats, stimulate the cevixes of ewes, and study the cheating behavior of otherwise monogamous voles and zebra finches, they trace the biological foundations of human bonding.

So as an end-of-summer public service, I thought I'd pass along three of Young and Alexander's tips on love and marriage.

1. Dont marry the guy you meet while youre ovulating.

The fertile period womans cycle has demonstrable effects on her appearance and behavior. The timbre of her voice changes. She takes more care with her appearance. She becomes more flirtatious. Men notice: Studies have shown that strippers who are ovulating make more money than those who are not. A University of New Mexico psychologist found that ovulating strippers made $354 per five hour shift, as opposed to $264 for non-ovulating strippers. Menstruating strippers earned even less.

But women also make riskier decisions at the fertile time of the month. Theyre likelier to hook up with a stranger, likelier to respond to the attentions of a bad boy type, likelier to rent a house, sight unseen. Heather Rupp is a neuroscientist whose experiments on ovulating women are chronicled in Chemistry. The guy you are most likely to pick mid-cycle he is not necessarily the guy who is going to raise your children, she says. The perfect guy is the guy you like across the entire cycle, and they are rare!

2. Size matters.

Oxytocin is a hormone that triggers bonding, especially in women and especially between women and their babies. It is released through the stimulation of the cervix (which explains, partly, the bonding that occurs between mother and infant after labor). Scientists at the University of Cambridge found in the eighties that if they stimulated the cervixes of ewes (with a dildo!) who had not recently given birth, the ewes behaved maternally toward lambs that did not belong to them. They exhibited the full complement of maternal behavior after five minutes of vaginal-cervical stimulation, the scientists wrote.

Thus Young believes that the human penis has a similar, evolutionary purpose: To massage his sex partners cervix and thus release in her maternal feelings for him: "Men are using their penises to entice women to babysit them.

3. Some men have a bad boyfriend gene.

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The Chemistry of Love