High Sexual Desire Is Important For A Happy Relationship, Says Science
I have never heard of someone entering a relationship wanting it to not work. Unless they are fucked up human beings with a terrible moral compass, people walk into relationships with their hopes and desires tied to it. This is why we are so intrigued to know what makes a romance last. Is it about love? Sexual desire? We are all ears when a successful couple shares their way of handling conflicts. When someone tells us how they knew their partner is the one, we listen intently while taking mental notes.
And still, even with so much love in our hearts and good intentions in our minds, our relationships end. Things don’t work out and we end up getting bitter, as if we were perfect. When someone asked me if I am “ready” for marriage. Honestly, I had no clue what to tell them. Can you ever be truly ready? You may think you are ready but it’s not like we went through a training program, gave exams and got graded on our partnering skills.
Things are so different in theory and in practice. We tend to think love is enough but is it, really? Only if human relationships were that simple.
Thanks to several studies on relationships and sex, we get insights into the science of human connections and how we navigate through things to make it work.
The latest study challenges the age-old notion that relationship satisfaction is influenced by both partners being on the same libido level. I mean, yes, it’s partially true. But there’s more to it. “Conventional wisdom and evidence from past research suggest that partners who are more similar (i.e., match) in their levels of sexual desire are also more satisfied. However, the past research on this topic has not disentangled the extent to which satisfaction is actually due to partners specifically matching on desire, or due to partners’ overall level of desire,” said study author James Kim, a postdoctoral fellow at Western University and member of the Relationship Decisions Lab.
The study assessed couples’ sexual desire, relationship and sexual satisfaction. “For example, if Mary has much lower desire than her partner and is unhappy in her relationship, is her unhappiness because of her desire being highly different from her partner’s, or because she simply has lower desire? We wanted to explicitly test whether matching on sexual desire actually has a unique effect in predicting couples’ satisfaction,” Kim explained.
The researchers found that there was no evidence to prove that couples whose sexual desire matched were more satisfied than those with mismatched levels of libido. “Contrary to prevailing beliefs, we did not find that couples who were more closely matched on desire were significantly happier with their relationship or sex life than couples who were mismatched: there was no unique effect of matching,” Kim told PsyPost.
However, what really made a difference was the amount of sexual desire in the relationship. “Instead, we found that what really matters for couples’ relationship and sexual satisfaction is partners having higher levels of sexual desire. This suggests that rather than trying to align partners’ levels of sexual desire to be more similar, couples can build a more satisfying sexual relationship by focusing on strategies to manage these differences (e.g. communicating effectively when sexual desire is low) or finding ways to boost or reignite sexual desire in the relationship,” Kim advised.
However, Kim says there may be scope for more. “In this study, we looked at each partner’s self-reported levels of trait sexual desire, so couples were determined to be matched or mismatched based on these variables. However, we didn’t assess people’s perceptions of matching. People may perceive there to be discrepancies in desire when in fact there are none, and vice versa,” Kim explained.
Kim added, “Thus, one remaining question that would be important to address is whether partners are aware of differences in their levels of desire, especially since previous work finds that perceptions of desire discrepancy are a stronger predictor of lower satisfaction than actual discrepancies between partners.”
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This is why I feel it’s really important to have sexual desire for each other. It really doesn’t matter how good he is on paper, if he doesn’t give me the hornies, I would probably not go for it. I mean, sex isn’t just about intercourse, it’s about love, intimacy, closeness, affection and desirability. And I want all of that! Thank you, science and the universe for affirming my belief. Want a successful relationship? Go make one with someone who loves you deeply and makes you wet AF!
