Every wondered why one person does it for you and another doesn't?  Why you chose your Valentines?  The Chemistry Between Us attempts to do what no other book has done: present a grand unified theory of how love, sex, and human social bonding is created in our brains, how that creation drives our behavior, and to place these mechanisms into social, historical and even political contexts.

Provocative, opinionated, and written with humor and insight for the lay reader, The Chemistry Between Us offers answers to some of the most tumultuous, joyous, heart-breaking, questions every one of us faces at some time in our lives, and asks us to consider the broader social impact of molecular events in our heads.

What makes two people, strangers before meeting for the first time, conclude that they not only would like to, but must, spend the rest of their lives together? What could happen inside the brain of a sober, responsible, married man, a federal judge, to enable him to carry a loaded pistol while buying drugs for his stripper paramour? How could male violence relate to the brain chemistry of love? Why would a young woman, happily committed to her boyfriend, flirt with a jerk?

What can the story of a young adoptee tell us about our current culture of parenting? What drives a mother to behave like a mother, and what does that have to do with human romantic love? How are grown men like babies? (Besides the whole whiny-with-the-flu thing.) What can we learn from rats that refuse to have sex unless they're wearing leather? What's the relationship between sexual fetish and love, and drug addiction and love?

What is gender? Do brains have a gender? How can some people be attracted to others of the same sex? What causes a person with all the body parts of a man to insist he's a woman? Or a bodily female person to insist she's a man?

Readers on the left and the right, people of all faiths, sexual orientations, and relationship status, are bound to find elements of The Chemistry Between Us that they'll object to fiercely, only to read on and find something to applaud. At the very least, readers will be fascinated, and likely to find themselves asking some serious, and some not-so-serious, questions about the world we're making and how that world might be affecting the very nature of human relationships.