The Advice Goddess: June 2016

Q: My girlfriend of two years seems to be gradually moving me out of her life. Seeing her two or three times a week has dwindled into maybe once -- and no overnights. She’ll meet me at the movies and then ditch me afterward, saying she’s got a bunch of things to do. She denies anything’s wrong, claiming she’s just “very busy.” I think there’s more to it.

A: It seems you’re right; she’s really looking forward to your dates the way a cow looks forward to a personal tour of the slaughterhouse.

People talk about what a high falling in love is, and they aren’t wrong, because their body’s basically in the throes of a biochemical drug binge.

University of Pisa psychiatrist Donatella Marazziti looked at blood samples of people who’d been madly in love for less than six months and found that they had serotonin levels comparable to people diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Luckily, obsessively having sex is more fun than obsessively washing your hands.

Falling in love also alters testosterone levels — though differently in men and women. Men’s drops — making them more cuddlywuddly — and women’s goes up, increasing their interest in sex.

Unfortunately, this increased interest is temporary. Marazziti found that T levels went back to normal between the one- and two-year mark — which is when the feeling “We’re perfect for each other!” can start to be replaced by “We’re perfect for other people.”

This may be how she’s been feeling. To get an answer — beyond knee-jerk denials that anything’s wrong — email her. Ask her whether you two have a problem, and tell her to take a couple of days to think about it.

Upon reflection, she should either decide to try to fix things or break up with you — and not in a way that mimics continental drift.

I know my boyfriend’s into me, and he’s generally very loving, but I get far more compliments about how I look from guys I’m not dating. How do I get my boyfriend to let me know that he likes the view?

There’s a reason that the Miss World pageant lacks a mathematics category, in which contestants come out smiling and waving and then do one of the world’s great unsolved math problems in their head: “And now, ladies and gentlemen, we’ll watch as Miss Uruguay proves that the 196-algorithm does not terminate when applied to the number 196.”

Obviously, beauty isn’t everything. In fact, according to research by economist Jeremy Greenwood, a smarty-pants, highly educated guy is more likely than ever (compared with, say, 1960) to require his bride-to-be to be similarly smarty-pants and highly educated. What hasn’t changed is male sexual desire. Because it’s intensely visual, it’s reassuring for a woman to hear that the way she looks is driving a guy wild — as opposed to driving him to pluck his eyes out with barbecue tongs.

Men like to know they’re making a woman happy — or at least how they might have some hope of that. So, put it in those terms: “Baby, you know what I’d love…?” rather than “Buddy, you know how you’re failing me…?” (Gently remind him until he gets in the habit.)

A positive approach like this tends to be the most effective, tempting as it may be to hint that noncompliance will lead to severe sanctions: “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, if you ever want a blow job again, you’d better say something nice about my outfit.”