Skip to main content

Danilo Díaz Granados read: The Dissatisfaction of Being Sexually Rejected By A Partner Lasts Longer Than The Pleasure Of Having An Advance Accepted

GettyImages-478896468.jpgBy Matthew Warren

Sex is an important part of most romantic relationships – and when couples are not on the same page about their sex life, it can become a source of frustration. Research has found that couples have sex about 1 or 2 times a week, but about half of sexual advances between partners go unfulfilled. 

A preprint uploaded recently to PsyArXiv sheds some light on how responses to sexual advances influence individuals’ feelings of sexual and relationship satisfaction. The study suggests that while having an advance accepted leaves partners feeling more content, this effect may be short-lived compared to the dissatisfaction of being rejected.

To get a peek into the bedrooms of 115 heterosexual couples (participants were aged between 19 and 64), Kiersten Dobson from the University of Western Ontario and colleagues asked them all to keep sex diaries. Every day for 3 weeks, both partners independently logged whether they or their partner had made a sexual advance, and if so, whether that led to sexual activity. They also recorded their daily levels of satisfaction with their sexual relationship, as well as their relationship generally, answering questions such as “How good is your relationship compared to most?”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the researchers found that accepting a sexual advance, or having an advance accepted by the partner, resulted in an increase in both sexual and relationship satisfaction that day compared to other days. 

On the other hand, being rejected decreased sexual satisfaction. But intriguingly, if the participant themselves was the rejecter – that is, if they shunned an advance from their partner – their sexual satisfaction still increased. (Neither being rejected nor being the rejecter had any effect on general relationship satisfaction.)

Changes in sexual satisfaction could still be detected days after advances were made. The team found that the boost in satisfaction from having an advance accepted persisted for 24 hours, with the slump of being rejected lasting twice as long. And the gratification that came from being either an acceptor or a rejecter lasted a remarkable 72 hours. 

It might seem especially surprising that rejecting a partner’s advances gives a boost in sexual satisfaction, particularly one that appears to last for three days. But rather than reflecting some pleasure derived from rejecting someone, the researchers suggest that being approached for sex leaves a person feeling desired, so enhances sexual satisfaction even when no actual sex ends up happening.

The fact that the negative effects of being sexually rejected by a partner last longer than the positive effects of being accepted mean that making an advance can be a risky move, the authors say.  “The act of making a sexual advance may be a high-risk situation for romantic partners, which may in turn lead those who feel less sure of their partner’s response to an advance to take the risk of making an advance less often,” they write. This could ultimately lead to fewer opportunities to bolster intimacy through sex.

The study doesn’t reveal anything about whether there is a way to buffer against the negative effects of rejection, though, or how different individuals respond. For example, the same team previously found that men underestimate, and women overestimate, how often their partners make sexual advances – though gender didn’t seem to play a role in the new study. However, it would be interesting to know whether other individual differences might alter people’s responses to acceptance or rejection.

—Responses to sexual advances and satisfaction in romantic relationships: Is yes good and no bad? [this study is a preprint meaning it has not yet been subjected to peer review and the final published version may differ from the version on which this report was based]

Matthew Warren (@MattbWarren) is Staff Writer at BPS Research Digest



View Source

Popular posts from this blog

Danilo Díaz Granados read: Beyond the invisible gorilla – inattention can also render us numb and anosmic (without smell)

By Emma Young It’s well-known that we can miss apparently obvious objects in our visual field if other events are hogging our limited attention. The same has been shown for sounds: in a nod to Daniel Simons’ and Christopher Chabris’ famous gorilla/basketball study that demonstrated “inattentional blindness”, distracted participants in the first “inattentional deafness” study failed to hear a man walking through an auditory scene for 19 seconds saying repeatedly “I am a gorilla”. Now, two new studies separately show that a very similar effect occurs in relation to touch ( inattentional numbness ) and to smell   ( inattentional anosmia ).   Sandra Murphy and Polly Dalton (a co-author on the inattentional deafness paper) at Royal Holloway, University of London report in the journal Cognition on inattentional numbness. They wanted to go beyond the way we rapidly tune out ongoing tactile stimulation, like the sensation of our clothes, and explore what happens when we’re tou...
Read more

Danilo Díaz Granados read: “Skunk” Cannabis Disrupts Brain Networks – But Effects Are Blocked In Other Strains

By Matthew Warren Over the past decade, neuroimaging studies have provided new insights into how psychoactive drugs alter the brain’s activity. Psilocybin – the active ingredient in magic mushrooms – has been found to reduce activity in brain regions involved in depression , for example, while MDMA seems to augment brain activity for positive memories . Now a new study sheds some light into what’s going in the brain when people smoke cannabis – and it turns out that the effects can be quite different depending on the specific strain of the drug. The research, published recently in the Journal of Psychopharmacology , suggests that cannabis disrupts particular brain networks  – but some strains can buffer against this disruption. Cannabis contains two major active ingredients: tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and cannabidiol (CBD). THC is responsible for many of the drug’s psychoactive effects, such as the feeling of being stoned and the anxiety that people sometimes feel, as well as ...
Read more

Danilo Díaz Granados read: Many social psychologists are impeded by their ideological aversion to evolutionary psychology

By Christian Jarrett A new survey of beliefs held by social psychologists (335 members of the Society of Experimental Social Psychologists) has confirmed previous reports that the field is overwhelmingly populated by researchers of a left-wing, liberal bent. What’s more, David Buss and William von Hippel – the evolutionary psychologists who conducted and analysed the survey – say their findings, published open-access in Archives of Scientific Psychology , suggest that many of these social psychologists are opposed, for ideological reasons, to insights rooted in evolutionary psychology and that this is impeding them from developing a “proper science of social psychology”. Buss and von Hippel add that compounding matters is an irony – the social psychologists’ desire to signal their ideological stance and commitment to others who share their political views, which is a manifestation of the evolved human adaptation to form coalitions. “Part of this virtue signalling entails rejecting a...
Read more