by Correlations of desire with age and with relationship satisfaction turn out to be small, a reminder that individuals vary far more than averages suggest
Predictors of Sexual Desire: What the Numbers Do and Do Not Tell Us
Popular accounts of sexual desire tend toward confident generalisations. Desire falls with age. Happy couples want each other more. A paper published in a scientific journal offers a useful corrective by reporting how strong those relationships actually are.
The Findings
The study examined associations between sexual desire and a range of demographic and relationship variables in a large sample. According to the published article, the correlations of desire with two continuous variables, age and relationship satisfaction, were minus 0.16 and 0.08 respectively. Both were statistically reliable. The authors note that the association between sexual desire and relationship satisfaction is quite low in magnitude. They also report that gender interacted with relationship satisfaction, with the link between satisfaction and desire being more positive for women.
How to Read a Correlation
A correlation ranges from minus one to plus one. Zero means no linear relationship. A value of 0.16 in either direction is small. The paper gives the corresponding proportion of variance explained as about three percent for age and well under one percent for relationship satisfaction.
To put that in everyday terms: if you knew only a person’s age, you would be able to predict their level of desire scarcely better than by guessing the average. The same is true, even more so, if you knew only how satisfied they were with their relationship.
With a very large sample, tiny effects can be statistically significant. That means they are unlikely to be due to chance. It does not mean they are large or practically important.
What the Age Finding Means
On average, desire is slightly lower in older groups. But the spread within every age group is wide. Many people in their sixties report more desire than many in their twenties. Age is a weak guide to any individual.
That should be reassuring to those who fear an inevitable decline, and it should caution against assuming that an older person has lost interest.
What the Satisfaction Finding Means
The weak link between desire and relationship satisfaction may be more surprising. It runs against the intuition that people in happy relationships must want more sex.
Several explanations are possible. Desire is influenced by many things unrelated to the relationship: health, hormones, stress, sleep, medication, mood. Some people have high desire by temperament and others low, whatever their circumstances. And in long relationships, contentment and security can coexist with reduced sexual urgency.
The gender interaction suggests that, for women on average, feeling satisfied with the relationship is somewhat more closely tied to desire than it is for men. That is in line with other research indicating that context and emotional connection are, on average, more strongly linked to women’s desire. Averages conceal wide individual variation among both women and men.
The Review of Earlier Work
The paper’s introduction summarises previous studies, with their sample sizes. Lower individual desire tracks lower relationship satisfaction, particularly among women, in one study of 133 couples. Discrepancies between desired and actual frequency of sex reduce satisfaction and stability, in a study of more than eight thousand couples. Matching partners’ desire does not uniquely predict satisfaction, in the study of 366 couples described in a separate published abstract. And in a small longitudinal study, sexual and relationship satisfaction changed together, without one clearly causing the other.
Taken together these suggest a nuanced picture. Desire and relationship quality are related, but loosely. The gap between what a person wants and what they get may matter more than their absolute level of desire.
Implications for Couples
Several practical lessons follow.
Low desire does not prove the relationship is in trouble. A partner’s reduced interest is not necessarily a sign of unhappiness or lost affection. It may have nothing to do with the relationship.
A good relationship does not guarantee desire. Couples who get along well can still struggle with sex, and need not feel that something must be secretly wrong.
Do not assume by age. Individual differences outweigh age effects.
Attend to the gap. If either partner’s actual sex life differs markedly from what they would like, that discrepancy is worth discussing.
Implications for How We Talk About Sex
Media reports often present research as if it applied uniformly: “study finds older people want less sex.” A correlation of minus 0.16 supports no such statement about any particular person. Reporting the size of an effect, as this paper does, is part of communicating science honestly.
Limits
The study is correlational and cross-sectional. It cannot show that ageing causes lower desire or that satisfaction increases it. Older and younger participants differ in many ways besides age, including the era in which they grew up. Desire was self-reported and measured in a particular way, and other measures might yield somewhat different results. The sample, however large, may not represent every population. Full details are in the paper.
The Central Message
People differ enormously in sexual desire, and the usual explanations account for only a little of that difference. That is a reason for humility in making assumptions about others, and for curiosity in understanding oneself and one’s partner.
A Lighter Ending
Statistics, and the conclusions people draw from them, are a reliable target for humour. The London Prat takes aim in its UK satirical news on survey statistics and UK satirical news about what the data says. Bohiney Magazine offers the American equivalent.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
