WHEN you鈥檙e in love, everything seems different 鈥� and that includes smells. Compared with their less besotted counterparts, women who are madly in love struggle to recognise the body odours of male friends.
So say Johan Lundstr枚m and Marilyn Jones-Gotman of McGill University in Montreal, Canada. They asked 20 young women with boyfriends to fill in a questionnaire called the to rate how deeply in love they were. They also persuaded the women鈥檚 partners and male and female friends to sleep for seven nights in a cotton T-shirt.
The women were asked to sniff the shirts to distinguish those worn by their lovers and friends from those of strangers. The more deeply in love a woman was, the less well she did at distinguishing a male friend鈥檚 odour from those of strangers. When it came to recognising the odours of male lovers or female friends, however, the women鈥檚 love score was unrelated to how well they did (Hormones and Behavior, ).
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This suggests a lover doesn鈥檛 pay more attention to her partner 鈥� just less to potential suitors. 鈥淚鈥檓 not really a love guru,鈥� protests Lundstr枚m, now at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His next project will investigate what happens in lovers鈥� brains as they perceive the odours of partners, friends and strangers.