Of lust and love: Beliefs about the role of sexual desire in romantic relationships

Little is known about the beliefs that men and women have about the role of sexual desire in romantic relationships, despite the interpersonal and individual significance of those beliefs. Three experiments conducted with students from a university in the midwestern United States examined both the perceived consequences of sexual desire for romantic relationships and beliefs about the association between sexual desire and romantic love. Men and women believed that dating partners who desire each other sexually are more likely to experience romantic love and other “positive” interpersonal events and less likely to experience “negative” events than partners who do not desire each other sexually, regardless of their level of sexual activity (Experiment 1). Similarly, partners who are romantically in love were viewed as more likely to desire each other than were partners who love or who like one another, and desire was perceived as equally likely to occur in loving and liking relationships; that is, sexual desire did not differentiate these two affective syndromes (Experiment 2). In couples with a mismatched sexual desire pattern, the high-desire partner was perceived as more likely than the sexually uninterested partner to be in love, satisfied, committed, happy, and jealous, whereas the low-desire partner was viewed as more likely to terminate the relationship and to be unfaithful (Experiment 3). These results suggest that sexual desire is viewed as an important feature of romantic love, and that its presence or absence in a dating relationship is believed to have implications for the emotional tenor and interpersonal dynamics of that relationship.