What Couples Get Wrong About Male Sexual Desire

With Darien Thira, Ph.D.

Note: The research discussed here focuses primarily on long-term heterosexual couples and examines how conflict may affect men and women differently. While some of these dynamics may be relevant across relationship types, it is not yet known whether the findings generalize to same-sex, bisexual, pansexual, or other relationships.

Over the years, I've noticed a particular conversation repeating itself in my office. A woman shares that she has been pulling back from sex with her partner. Not because she doesn't love him. Not because she isn't sexual. But because, somewhere along the way, she started believing that what he wants from sex isn't really her.

"He just wants to have sex," Lila said about her husband, James. "I could be anyone."

When we turned to James, he looked confused and sounded hurt. "That's not true!” he insisted.

The research agrees with him.

The story we've been telling about men

For a very long time, we've believed that men seek sex for their own physical pleasure. They want novelty, excitement, and release. The story is of how men separate sex from emotion in a way that we’re told women don't. It is women, not men, we believe, who seek closeness, tenderness, reassurance, or emotional connection from sex.

This story is so familiar to us that most people rarely stop to question it—including the people having sex with men.

Current research is rewriting the story. Sure, men value excitement, pleasure, and sexual release But studies have found that emotional intimacy plays a significant role in men's sexual satisfaction within partnered relationships (Štulhofer et al, 2014). Researchers increasingly view sexual desire not simply as a drive for physical gratification, but as a system that helps create and maintain emotional bonds between partners (Birnbaum & Reis, 2019). In long-term relationships, sexuality is often intertwined with intimacy, responsiveness, and relationship satisfaction (Muise et al., 2014).

Our Study

To understand why many couples report declining sexual frequency today, we asked hundreds of straight men and women to describe why they prefer sex with a partner versus sex on their own (masturbation). Their responses may surprise you.

Emotional connection was the most common reason people gave for partnered sex – actually, it was a little higher for men than for women. They both described wanting closeness, affection, emotional safety, tenderness, and the feeling of being chosen and desired by their lover. Many men, in particular, describe wanting to feel accepted by their partner—desired, not merely accommodated. It’s not that men did not identify pleasure as important for sex, but it was secondary to connection. And the same was true for women.

But the most striking finding was not simply what men and women said they wanted. It was what they believed the other gender wanted. Both men and women misread what motivated their partner to have sex. Women dramatically underestimated just how emotionally meaningful partnered sex was for their male partner. The gap between what many men actually described wanting (“emotional connection”) and what women assumed they wanted (“pleasure”) was surprisingly large.

Men made the same mistake, thinking their task was to provide pleasure rather than offer connection. (Read a summary of top sexual misunderstandings.)

The takeaway is this: Most couples do not want different things from sex. Of course, pleasure always matters, but for partnered sex pleasure is second to emotional connection for both men and women. This story we tell about men comes at a cost, for everyone.

What this misunderstanding costs us

When a woman assumes that her partner just wants sex for his own gratification, she may pull back from initiating because she believes he is not desiring her for her. When sex does happen, she may just go through the motions rather than working with her partner to create a meaningful connection because she assumes that he is only seeing her as a sexual object.

And many men can sense their partner’s disconnection. Because sex can be one of our most pleasurable sources of relationship connection, "going through the motions" does not offer the experience of feeling wanted, chosen, reassured, emotionally close, and connected. The experience of feeling merely tolerated sexually can be profoundly painful.

Sex Essential Reads

The 6 Principles of Sexual Health

Do You Treat Sex as Sacred?

Many men have also been taught, quite explicitly, that needing emotional closeness through sex is somehow less than "masculine.” It is dependent. Weak. Embarrassing. So men are unlikely to say those things out loud. They learn to describe sex in physical terms, even though that may not be their whole story. Over time, both men and women can take on roles that neither actually wants.

When he finally said it out loud

In the following session, James finally said the thing he had struggled to articulate for years: that what he wanted from sex was closeness — and the connection with Lila specifically was what mattered most to him.

Something shifted for Lila when she heard him share his desire for her that plainly. She realized she was more than just an object for his pleasure. And that James longed to be desired and accepted by her as much as she did from him. For both of them, sex was at least as much about connection as it was pleasure.

In the months after, Lila started reaching for him differently—getting in touch with her own desire for connection rather than waiting for him to initiate. She told him she had missed him. She let him feel that she wanted him specifically, and was not simply ‘willing’. They changed the type of sex they were having too—including more eye-gazing and meaningful caresses. And he made sure to more clearly express how important she was to him, in words and focused attention on what worked for her unique body. And they both reported that the sex got “hotter”! Lila was also able to focus in on her own sexual pleasure, as she felt more connected with James.

"It feels like we are synced now, and it is like he knows exactly where to touch me,” Lila exclaimed.

And James, for the first time in a long while, announced that he felt emotionally met.

They had inherited very different stories about what sex meant to the other person. So they began to write a new story about sex together, one with a happy ending.

Next steps for your real-life happy ending

Many couples spend years quietly misreading each other, because they are reading the gender story rather than their partner’s. While gender plays a role in our sexuality, our pathway to arousal and reasons to have sex are more personal.

If you're curious to learn more about your own sexual motivations, click the link for the latest survey created by Nurturing Humanity Research Institute.

Facebook image: PeopleImages/Shutterstock