How Your Personality Can Seriously Help Or Hurt Your Sex Life
Does your personality type affect your sex life?
Aloha Hawaii / Shutterstock Get this: 43 percent of women suffer from sexual dysfunction (low libido, infrequent orgasms, painful intercourse) and, according to a study published in the journal Sexual Medicine, it may be a result of their personality.
It's easy to see the correlation, as no one wants to sleep with someone who's just an awful person, and I can't imagine how you're gonna attract anyone if all you do is complain and gossip about other people.
Previous research has shown poor health and diseases, like diabetes, can contribute to sexual dysfunction or disorder.
Yet there's little known about the influence a person's personality and reactions to stressful situations can have. Evil people just aren't getting laid.
So researchers surveyed 50 women who, at the time, were receiving treatment for sexual dysfunction.
They were given personality tests to see the kinds of characteristics they identified with most — extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness to experience — and then asked to rate their coping mechanisms, e.g., acceptance versus venting.
Depending on how we cope, the study says, we can either increase or decrease the stress of a situation. This is why self-care is so important, it can even help you get laid.
Based on the women's answers, researchers found those without extroversion tendencies — tendencies typically thought of as being positive, outgoing, and energetic — experienced worse sexual function.
The same was true for women who tended to cope negatively, such as turning to substance use and self-blame. In other words, the satisfactory levels of your sex life may be determined by how positive you are overall. Here's a reason to take a break from dating for a while if you think it's making you jaded, it'll only get worse depending on how negative you are.
More of an introvert yourself? Not to worry. "I took away that women who were open to new experiences had better sex lives," says Prevention advisor Mary Jane Minkin, MD, a clinical professor at the Yale University School of Medicine, about the study findings. "And I believe that.
So I'd just encourage women to be as healthy as they can in all aspects of life, including being open to new experiences, and they'll have better sex lives." So maybe you should give that quiet, nerdy guy a chance. He might not seem like your type at first, but he might surprise you, and your sex life will thank you for it.
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