Earlier today, my girlfriend took me to see her bff, who was in town visiting. It turns out her bff is also three months pregnant. So we chatted and talked for quite a while, congratulating her and talking about what she is doing next. Naturally my girlfriend was squeeing in excitement.
Now what the readers of this board don’t know is that my girlfriend has recently been hesitant to have sex with me because she is afraid she will get pregnant - not because of me, but because of the pheromones of her best friends, two of whom have recently been pregnant in the past three months. My girlfriend believes that the pheromones of a pregnant woman can induce a woman who is not pregnant to become pregnant shortly after being in contact with the pregnant woman. In my girlfriend’s words, “a woman becomes pregnant when her body wants to become pregnant. It doesn’t matter if the man uses protection or not.”
I’ve heard this myth in some variation before, from the “pregnant from being around friends” narrative, to a version that involves an African fertility statue. I’ve tried to find some factual myth-busting on this matter, but all I can find are cutesy “OMG I was around a pregnant friend of mine and liek I ended up pregnant!” mumbo jumbo. So I come before this board and ask, can a woman become pregnant after being in contact with pregnant friends of hers?
No way is that true. I think it would behoove you both to attend some sort of Sex Ed class or something. Because that level of ignorance about how reproduction works is not a good match to a sexual relationship between two people. I’m not trying to be mean or something but, knowledge about these sort of things are essential.
It’s absolutely true. Well not because of the pheromone thing or any other such nonsense. It’s because your girlfriend is jealous of her BFF and all the attention she’s getting, so she wants her own baby, and she just might forget some things as a result. So always wear a condom when you have sex with a girl whose BFF is pregnant.
Silly as the OP is, it would be interesting to know if there are chemical triggers that can make it more likely that a woman will become pregnant. Are these triggers entirely determined by a woman’s own biological clock, or can environmental factors like, well, being around pregnant friends, have an effect? So in other words, assuming a supply of sperm…
is this part true, and if it is, what drives a woman’s body to want to become pregnant?
The state of sexual education is so very abysmal I don’t even have a way to describe how much it disheartens and scares me.
And I agree that the only factor that comes into play when a woman’s friends become pregnant and the woman wants to be pregnant too, is the one of forgetting to bother with birth control and even sabotaging it. Make sure she never got her hands on that condom before you put it on, dude.
OP, if this is a serious post, your writing is at a very high level, which leads me to doubt about your GF’s ignorance. If both of you are on the level, well, good luck and be careful.
Sir, I think that the operative part of the OP for you is that your girlfriend does not want to have sex with you and is making up ridiculous excuses not to. You have issues which need to be dealt with. You might need to trade her in for a new model.
Yes, and her squeeing in excitement, whatever that is, sounds kinky. Unless you’re into that.*
*Since you’re new here–stick around!–being obnoxious about typos is often mandatory.
No.
Pregnancy requires sperm going into the girl.
If a condom is properly employed, sperm doesn’t go into the girl.
Like another poster, I would submit that she may have ulterior motives for wishing to avoid intercourse.
Perhaps she has acquired an STD and doesn’t wish you to discover it ; she might be treating said disease and waiting for it to heal before having intercourse with you again.
Perhaps intercourse has become painful due to some other biological conditions she suffers from. I know at least one woman who claims that PCOS has led to her genitalia becoming too sensitive for pleasurable intercourse.
I suggest looking into the placebo effect, particularly is has a known cure rate over and above baseline. While there are some theories, like believing you are getting treatment is changing mood, outlook, releasing endorphins and other compounds that some have theorized are responsible for the cure.
There are many cases and stories that a infertile couple tries to have a child, gives up, adopts and then gets pregnant, could some psychological factors come into play with ability to get pregnant ? (this is my tie into the placebo effect)
Being around a friend who is pregnant can be a very emotional experience, and also the inner desire some women have to have a child one day. Could that inner desire surfacing cause a woman’s body to be more receptive to getting pregnant, to me you can’t rule it out.
I’m pretty sure the OP is not asking if a woman can get pregnant merely from proximity to other pregnant women, but rather if exposure to phermones or some other chemical given off by a pregnant woman can induce ovulation or fertility in a non-pregnant woman, still needing a sperm of course.
Thats not such an odd question, I’ve long heard about women living in close quarters having synchronized periods.
Yup. And I remember reading about women who suffered from infertility “borrowing” a friend’s baby to carry around for a few days (with permission!) and then conceiving the normal way soon after.
(no cite, sorry, was too vague for google to find the article I was thinking of!)
I think most of the posters here - with the exception of bldysabba - are misunderstanding the OP.
From this point, it is clear to me that there IS a man involved, and the claim is that contraceptives are irrelevant.
My understanding is that as a point of fact there are no contraceptives which work 100% of the time. All of them have a small failure rate, even when used properly. It sounds to me like the friends claim is not that pheromones will cause pregnancy even without sperm, but that the pheromones will cause the contraception to fail – or at least, increase the likelihood that the contraception will fail.
Given that all contraceptives will occasionally fail even when used correctly, how can one prove which factors caused it to fail? Or which factors did NOT cause it to fail?
A condom fails when it leaks. The probability of a leak occurring does not increase with exposure to pregnant chicks- unless they are the sort who want to share the miracle of birth with their friends and poke at the OP’s wallet with needles.
The idea that being around pregnant women could increase the probability of conception assuming a leak does occur has some merit until you actually think about it: there are still only two eggs available for babby-forming.
The only conceivable “benefit” would be an increase in the probability of a fertilized egg implanting, but I very much doubt there is any scientific evidence for this phenomenon.