Full disclosure: I haven’t yet read What Do Women Want, this week’s book. However, I have read articles, excerpts, reviews, and listened to interviews with the author, Daniel Bergner. It’s on my nightstand awaiting its turn. But all that exposure to it has got me thinking. Naturally, my thinking demanded an audience.

The book looks at the basis of female sexual desire and efforts by scientists and drug companies to find some chemical way of turning women on. The theory has always been that women aren’t as sexually interested as men. Once we have settled down with our husbands and kids, we lose interest in sex. Men, however, are designed to spread their seed. They are basically an erection in search of relief. Male desire, theory goes, doesn’t diminish, at least not like it does in women. So in order to equalize desire, the world needs to fix women. “Let’s find a pill!” say the pharmaceutical companies, smelling a Viagra-sized windfall.

Apparently, that’s all BS. Women don’t lose their desire in general. We lose particular desire; we get bored with our partners. Scientists figured this out by seeing our hormones hit teenage stride again when we meet someone new who turns the key to our old engines. Those hormones stay at younger women levels, too, if our primary relationship is one in which we don’t see our partner regularly. Men are fine with the same partner; their desire falls, but not nearly as much.

So much makes sense to me now. I’m a serial monogamist because nature made me that way. I lose interest until the next love of my life comes into view and there’s nothing wrong with me because of that. This isn’t to say I couldn’t work to make a long term relationship successful. It doesn’t mean it’s all written and it’s stupid to try to have a single, life-long partner — I don’t think you can come to that conclusion with any reading of Bergner’s book. I’m just saying it makes sense to me.

In a couple of my serious relationships I wondered if something was wrong with me. I lost interest after a period of time. Nice to know it’s not about my psyche; I was just born this way.

So do we even need a desire-sparking drug? Or should we just figure out new ways of having relationships that work better with our natural inclinations?And if that happens, does it mean that raising children becomes less the purview of monogamous committed heterosexual couples and more of a communal enterprise? Would that be terrible?

There are communities that seem to make this work — the polyamorous community (which is big and organized in the Seattle area; I’m sure someone from there will chime in with comments) would argue that you don’t have to have drama when you break up with someone, that you can create an environment of extended families that keeps kids on an even keel and works for their parents, too.

I believe we have a choice, and if we love a person and want to stay with him or her forever — even after all the hormonal wackiness of new love has settled — then we can find ways to keep the fire burning. Maybe some pill will be part of that answer. But it’s nice to know that women in general aren’t broken, and that fixing us is something that was made up by mistaken scientists and the pharmaceutical companies that love to make money by equating difference with illness.

What do you think? Are we naturally monogamous and this is just a way of explaining promiscuity?