Fiancés who might be curious how much sex they will have after marriage may want to have their significant other take a personality test before tying the knot, according to a new study published in the May 17 online edition of the Journal of Research in Personality.
As part of their research, Florida State University psychologists Drs. Andrea Meltzer and James McNulty examined data from three independent daily-diary studies of newlywed couples to find out if there was a link between their personalities and their levels of sexual functioning.
Specifically, they focused on the so-called “Big Five” personality traits – openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism – and learned that couples with a wife that scored high in agreeableness tended to have more frequent intercourse, while there was apparently no such link between probability of sex and the personality traits of males.
“No prior research has examined the association between partners’ Big Five traits and daily reports of sexual activity,” Metlzer, a professor of social psychology at FSU, told PsyPost on Friday, “so we were hesitant to make specific predictions. It was somewhat surprising, however, that husbands’ Big Five did not predict couples’ sexual frequency.”
Low levels of neuroticism linked to higher sexual satisfaction
Meltzer and McNulty reviewed data involving 278 recently-married heterosexual couples, each of whom underwent an psychological examination to assess their personalities. The newlyweds also kept a 14-day journal about their marital life, including periods of sexual activity.
The couples, each of whom had been married for less than six months, had intercourse between three and four times, on average, over the two-week period, PsyPost said. In addition to finding that women with higher agreeableness levels tended to have sex more often, they also discovered a similar but weaker link between openness levels in women and frequent intercourse.
People who score high in measures of agreeableness tend to be more trusting and compassionate, while those who are high in openness are usually more open to trying new things, the researchers explained. The findings, they wrote, suggest that it is the personalities of the wives and not of the husbands that predicts the probability of sex amongst newlyweds.
The research also found that both husbands and wives who scored low in neuroticism reported having higher levels of satisfaction with sex when it occurred, the FSU team said. Surprisingly, husbands who scored low on tests of openness also reported higher levels of sexual satisfaction, while the data found that the personality of the partner appeared not to have any impact on the experience whatsoever.
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