There are so many potential reasons why sexual desire in a relationship may wane over time—but recent research suggests there's one factor that people don't often consider. Here's what to know about the link between sexual desire and partner perception.
There are so many potential reasons why sexual desire in a relationship may wane over time. You might fall into a sexual routine that fails to inspire much excitement, or you become parents and have little time or energy for anything outside of keeping the house running. Or maybe you just stop prioritizing sex altogether because other areas of life are taking precedence.
Moreover, past studies have shown that people who have sexual desire for their romantic partner are also more likely to engage in behaviors that will help maintain and strengthen the relationship overall. , a professor of psychology at Reichman University in Israel, conducted a series of experiments with a total of nearly 800 people in relationships .
In other experiments, the researchers actually tracked couples throughout their daily lives to see if these trends held true in real life. Over the course of six weeks and then six months , researchers asked both members of each couple to complete a daily or weekly diary recording their feelings about their partner and the relationship. They tracked their perceptions of their partner's value as a partner , their desire to have sex with them , and how positively they treated each other .
"Reduced sexual desire, in contrast, may deny the relationship these benefits," Birnbaum and her colleagues note."Experiencing low sexual desire for one's partner may stem from perceiving this partner to be less valuable as a mate and, second, may be translated into less investment in the relationship, which eventually might hurt the relationship and foretell its demise."