Sex ‘short-circuits’ bond

Article By: Bryony Whitehead

Abstaining from sex with a partner for longer could sow the seed for a more stable and successful long-term relationship, a new study claims.

Researcher Dean Busby from Brigham Young University’s School of Family Life told LiveScience.com that premature sexual relations could interfere with “good decision-making and keeps couples in a relationship that might not be the best for them in the long-run”.

It also found that couples who had sex within a month of their relationship had the highest chance of breaking it off than those couples who waited until marriage.

The Brigham Young University study recruited 2035 heterosexual individuals at an average age of 36 and mostly in their first marriages, and focused specifically on the timing of the sexual relations.

Those couples that had delayed sex for longer scored 22 percent higher in their stability as an item, their satisfaction as 20 percent higher, their sexual quality as 15 percent higher and their communication between each other as 12 percent higher.

Still, Busby noted that 40 percent of couples have sex on their first or second date. He added that waiting to get to know someone before having sex with them would give an individual time to establish how trustworthy a potential partner is and whether or not they are worth pursuing as a partner long-term “before the powerful sexual bonding short-circuits their decision-making abilities.”

In other studies, it has been found that early sexual development of a relationship is necessary in order to establish sexual compatibility.

Studies that fall more in line with the recent one by Dean Busby et al suggests that abstinence from sexual intimacy allows social interaction and communication to develop better in the relationship, thereby ensuring more solid grounding for the long term.

Yet further studies suggest that the love-sex relationship is a complex one depending on a couple’s beliefs, the level of their commitment and emotional feelings towards one another.