“I Miss My Ex's Voice So Much”

“The guy I'm seeing has a super sexy low voice, and it kinda drives me wild, being like an animal in bed.” —A woman

“I get so excited hearing my lover’s sexy voice. I would even love it if she read the phone book out loud.” —A man

Seeing and hearing are important in turning us on. Which is more significant in enduring love, and which better creates wild sexual encounters?

Sight and hearing in romance

“Quiet sex is a turn-off to me. Hearing my partner get into it really creates this hot feedback loop that makes me enjoy myself more and gets me even more aroused.” —A woman

Communication is essential in thriving romantic relationships. Our senses—sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste—are significant here. We can fall in love by stimulating any one of them, but we respond best to sight and hearing. Touch, smell and taste typically provide the romantic fine-tuning. In sexual encounters, they are often more significant than sight and hearing and an aversion to them may be a deal-breaker in a new relationship.

Sight gives us more information than hearing and so is considered most important when choosing a romantic partner. As the popular saying goes, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” Despite the huge wealth of information we obtain assessing a potential romantic partner, a visual assessment often focuses on superficial traits, such as external appearance, and ignoring, or distorting, deeper personal traits, such as kindness and wisdom. We see a potential partner through a “beauty halo,” in which a beautiful person is assumed to have other good characteristics—this generates the popular idioms “things are not always what they seem,” or “we should never judge a book by its cover.”

Contrary to this, the eyes are referred to as the mirrors of our minds and are indeed crucial in emotional communication (Ben-Ze’ev, 2000, 513-514). In their article, “Love is in the Gaze,” Mylene Bolmont and colleagues (2014) emphasize the role of human faces in conveying critical information during social interaction. Thus, looking for longer and more frequently are perceived as indications of romantic interest, and mutual eye contact is one of the most reliable markers of love between couples.

Hearing is also significant in romantic love. Michal Kraus (2017) found that voice-only communication elicits higher rates of empathic accuracy, relative to vision-only and multi-sense communication. Though our visual assessments typically provide more information about the proposed romantic partner, hearing often gives us clues of basic traits that underlie enduring relationships. Accordingly, it is often easier to detect profound traits through a phone call rather than a face-to-face meeting. Conversations are dynamic and interactive and hence are more likely to be precise. Kraus (2017) further indicates that judging emotions through a single channel of communication, such as the voice, is already a complex cognitive process that becomes even more cognitively taxing when sense modalities are added. Hence, more modalities used for emotion recognition might paradoxically impede empathic accuracy.

The linguistic content

“When he talks dirty to me during sex, it excites me to the extreme.”—A woman

Michael Kraus (2017) explains his findings by indicating that conversations involve both linguistic and paralinguistic vocal cues that enable conversation to reach a deeper emotional knowledge. In romantic conversation, there is indeed a unique combination of emotional aspects, expressed in various forms of voice, and intellectual aspects, expressed in the wording of the conversation. Human language is essential for communication, enabling us to share our most heartfelt attitudes. When relationships begin with voice-only conversation, we are able to focus on the deepest aspects of our partner and ourselves, invisible to the naked eye.

Sexual encounters rely heavily on stimulating our hearing. Thus, 90% of peoples’ fantasies contain dirty talk (Lehmiller, 2020) and there is increasing popularity of audio porn involving telling erotic stories, rather than voicing moans. A story provides a greater space for one’s imagination, which in turn facilitates active mental interactions, self-identification and greater intimacy. Whereas in visual pornography, one is generally passive and exposed to all the gruesome details, audio pornography requires its users to be more active, since they control the visual narrative. Amir Amedi and colleagues (2005) argue that while in real life, vision and hearing work in synergy, in imagination they compete with each other—and for some people audio content works better than video.

We constantly tell stories, and some of them, like those in bibliotherapy, are even part of therapy. Because of this, people who use audio pornography consider their activities as more legitimate and intimate, and less like cheating or perversion than when watching visual pornography.

Seductive voices

In addition to language used, romantic and sexual encounters also include voices, which are often of greater impact than sight (and words). Thus, although eye contact seems important in romantic interactions, it runs counter to popular sexual habits of closing/covering the eyes and having sex in the dark (see here). In addition to voice, noises, such as moaning, groaning and screaming, are also quite popular in sex (see here).

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Here are some examples, taken from Reddit, in which people indicate the value of voice in their romantic and sexual experiences.

Women

“A man’s voice is pretty important to me. I like dating men who have deep, soothing voices.”

“Men’s voices are not that important. Positive traits will outweigh an annoying voice; it's not a deal breaker.”

“Voices clue the listener into the speaker's intelligence, and as someone attracted to intelligence, I drool when I listen to a smarty-pants.”

“I dated a Frenchman once when I didn't understand French; I was hot when he whispered French into my ear during sex.”

“Voice turns me on like many men get turned on by visuals.”

“Voice is very important, but usually not because of talking. Groans, heavy breathing with moans and short-of-breath spoken words add to excitement.”

Men

“She has a sexy Russian accent that drives me crazy.”

“Oh, I love her voice so much. It can sound cute or sexy. I could listen to her talk all day.”

“My S.O. likes my voice, especially when I'm reading out loud. I don't particularly like her voice, unless she's moaning.”

“I once dated a woman with an Irish accent. Holy hell, that was hot.”

Concluding remarks

“A nice voice is awesome, but it is not a major attraction factor. Only very rarely would it rule someone out as a potential partner.” —A woman

Voice-only communication gives us a partial perspective and so involves various risks, including facilitating pretense and deception. Nevertheless, an initial period of voice-only communication may reveal essential romantic information, which is often discovered only later on. Despite initial cognitive advantages of voice-only communication, the move from falling in love to establishing an enduring loving relationship requires the unique input of other senses as well. Whereas in many romantic experiences, noise is toxic and silence is golden, in sexual experiences noise is often bliss and silence is toxic (Ben-Ze’ev, 2019).