Decided to re-post this since I had a little crying fit myself last night!:

A new adult dating study out of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, and published recently in Science magazine, says that women’s tears shut down male sexual desires.

Female tears contain pheromones, which are chemical signals excreted in order to communicate with others. Their very existence has been much debated, but this study is more proof that they do indeed exist.

In this study, women watched sob-inducing movies all by their lonesomes and then caught their tears in vials. (This sounds like some weird set up for a bad sex novel). Later, men sniffed either the real tears of jars of saline that had been dripped down the women’s cheeks. Men who sniffed tears found the pictures of the women’s faces to be less sexually attractive than the men who sniffed saline, but both had similar feelings of empathy.

In a different experiment, men sniffed tears or saline and then reported on how sexually aroused they were. Again, the tear-sniffers were less aroused.

And finally, researchers stuck tears or saline up to the noses of a group of other men and then scanned their brains with MRIs; similarly, the tear-sniffers showed much lower levels of activity in the parts of their brain controlling sexual arousal.

Attempted explanation by science people: this is an evolutionary adaptation to lower aggression, increase social bonding and so on. Whatever the case, sex and crying don’t go together.