The two different types of low sexual desire

Various circumstances can lead to low sexual desire in romantic relationships.

background

Interpersonal intimacy is strongly linked to sexual desire, especially in women. This connection led researchers to examine whether women with low sexual desire may have gotten there through different circumstances in their relationships.

Sutherland and colleagues (2020) investigated whether the experience of low sexual desire might differ among different women. The authors define low sexual desire as “a lack of motivation to pursue and/or become receptive to sexual activity.” They argue that women with different types of low sexual desire may not have common experiences. Therefore, women seeking medical or psychological treatment for low desire should not always be treated the same.

methodology

The authors recruited more than 500 female participants from the United States (via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk) who were currently in a long-term relationship. The women completed questionnaires in two 30-minute sessions assessing their sexual and relationship satisfaction, as well as their life stress and communication.

Results

The researchers found evidence of three distinct subgroups within their sample. The first group was referred to as the “average desire group.” This group reported higher sexual desire and better sexual communication compared to the low desire groups. The authors claim that better sexual communication skills may lead to higher sexual satisfaction within this group.

The second group was called the “global distressed group.” This group had low sexual desire as well as low relationship satisfaction, sexual satisfaction, and poor sexual communication skills. The women in this group were dissatisfied with their relationships in both the sexual and non-sexual areas. The authors speculated that these women may have been dissatisfied with their relationships in general, which could then cause their low sexual desire.

The third group was called the “sexually dissatisfied group.” This group had low sexual desire, low sexual satisfaction, and difficulties with sexual communication, but had average relationship satisfaction. This group was therefore dissatisfied with their sexual experiences, but not with the non-sexual aspects of their relationships.

Although the overall dissatisfied group was dissatisfied with other aspects of their relationships, this group and the sexually dissatisfied group did not differ in their average level of sexual desire. Likewise, the relationships of women in the two different low desire groups were of equal length. In addition, both low desire groups reported more daily stress than their counterparts in the average desire group. This suggests that while daily stress may contribute to low sexual desire, it does not help differentiate between the two low sexual desire groups.

Conclusions

The researchers suggest that women may shift between low and average desire groups over time. For example, couples may experience average desire at the beginning of their relationship and factors such as poor sexual communication or stress in everyday life may cause them to shift to one of the lower desire groups over time. However, because this was a cross-sectional project, the authors were unable to test this possibility. The authors conclude that women with low sexual desire are qualitatively different from one another and should not necessarily be treated the same when treating low sexual desire.