not paying attention to how fast I’m going. My husband refuses to
be the passenger in the car when I’m driving. He’s like, ‘I need to
drive. You can’t drive.’”
Gina says that now her husband is her anchor. “He keeps me
grounded, so I have a somewhat ‘normal’ life. He says things like,
‘Remember you’re my wife, you’re the mother of our two kids. You
can’t go off and always do these crazy things. You could get yourself
killed. Then the kids aren’t going to have a mom.’”
“I have to remind myself that it’s not just me anymore.
When I was single, it was just me. But now I have to think about
them too.”
Even with their relatively low emotional intelligence, pro-
pensity toward ludic love, and higher divorce rates, plenty of HSSs
make long-term relationships work. It may take a little additional
effort and some special arrangements between partners, but it
certainly does happen.
That said, it is clear that being a high sensation-seeker can
impact intimate and romantic relationships. But those aren’t the
only relationships we humans engage in. Being a high sensation-
seeker also influences friendships and families.Would You Feed Your Kids Pufferfish?
We know that high sensation-seekers report having stimulating
family environments and that high sensation-seeking tends to run
in families. It’s likely there is a genetic component to this, espe-
cially from a biochemical standpoint. It seems very probable that
the children of sensation-seekers inherit their parents’ reactivity to
dopamine and relative lack of reactivity to cortisol – setting them
up to seek out the same extreme behaviors their folks do. Gina,
from the story above, clearly thought her children had inherited
her high sensation-seeking tendencies. “I see it in my own two
children, especially my youngest. Even as a toddler, he had no
fear. At swim lessons, he would jump right into the 12-foot deep
end. I had to tell him, ‘You can’t just do that! You’re still learning
how to swim.’ But there’s no fear there. He’s nine now, and I don’t
know of anything he’s afraid of.”
Clearly nature plays a role, but nurture probably does too.
The thrills sensation-seekers create in their family life could have
something to do with their children’s predilections. Remember
Jimmy, the fearless foodie fromChapter 3who tried the Japanese111 / The Relationships of High Sensation-SeekersDownloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSF Library, on 11 Nov 2019 at 14:21:35, subject to the Cambridge