How Solo Sex Affects Your Partnered Sexual Satisfaction

It’s a well-established finding that people in committed relationships are generally more satisfied with their sex lives than those who are not. The received wisdom is that having ready access to a sex partner is what makes people so happy in their relationships.

This point of view assumes that committed couples generally have as much sex as they want. However, we also know that a discrepancy in sexual desire is one of the most common reasons that couples seek counseling. Typically, the partner with the higher sex drive is quite unsatisfied with their sex life, and oftentimes the lower sex drive partner is, too. Clearly, just being in a relationship doesn’t guarantee that you’ll get your sexual needs met.

Likewise, people who aren’t in a relationship but do engage in frequent partnered sex also tend to report high levels of sexual satisfaction. This suggests that it’s the frequency of intercourse, or at least getting as much as you want, that leads to sexual satisfaction.

Another well-established finding is that people who masturbate frequently are less satisfied with their sex life than those who don’t. This is true both for those who are partnered and for those who are unpartnered. It could be that frequent masturbation dampens the desire for partnered sex, but it could also mean that they’re compensating for unmet sexual needs.

Yet even this finding falls apart on closer inspection. It is true that men who masturbate frequently do tend to report lower sexual satisfaction. At the same time, women who engage in lots of solo sex tend to report higher sexual satisfaction than women who don’t.

The Connection Between Solo Sex and Sexual Satisfaction

Clearly, we still lack a good understanding of how masturbation affects sexual satisfaction in a relationship. To gain greater insight into this issue, University of Oslo (Norway) psychologists Nantje Fischer and Bente Traeen surveyed over 4,000 Norwegian adults, ranging in age from 18-89 years, regarding their frequency of solo and partnered sex as well as their degree of sexual satisfaction.

The researchers found that the respondents fell into four clearly defined categories:

• Frequent masturbation, high sexual satisfaction
• Frequent masturbation, low sexual satisfaction
• Infrequent masturbation, high sexual satisfaction
• Infrequent masturbation, low sexual satisfaction

Each of these categories was associated with a different pattern of sexual behavior, and there were gender differences in each of the categories as well.

Men and Women Have Solo Sex for Different Reasons

Not surprisingly, women who reported frequent partnered sex also reported high sexual satisfaction. But what was surprising was that they also tended to masturbate frequently. In general, these women had strong sexual appetites and were very open to new sexual experiences. For these women, masturbation was one way to enhance their overall sexual satisfaction. In other words, solo and partnered sex were complementary aspects of their sex lives.

Likewise, men who engaged in frequent partnered sex reported higher sexual satisfaction than those who didn’t. However, most of these men also reported little or no masturbation. In other words, men generally only reported high levels of solo sex when they weren’t getting as much partnered sex as they wanted. Furthermore, men who reported a lot of masturbation, especially while viewing porn, reported lower sexual satisfaction. This suggests that, in contrast with women, men use masturbation as compensation for the lack of partnered sex.

For both men and women, those who were in cohabiting relationships reported less masturbation than those who were unpartnered. There are several possible reasons for this. First, to the extent that having a live-in sex partner enabled them to meet their sexual needs, they felt less need to masturbate.

Even among those who were cohabiting but sexually dissatisfied, there was less masturbation than among those who were unattached. This could simply be due to a lack of privacy for solo sex. But it could also be due to attitudes about the inappropriateness of solo sex within a committed relationship. In fact, it’s not uncommon for partnered persons to report feelings of guilt about their autoerotic behaviors, nor is it unusual for the other person to feel betrayed when they catch their partner masturbating.

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The Influence of Traditional Attitudes

Fischer and Traeen also found, consistent with other studies and with common assumptions, that men are more likely to masturbate than women, and they do so more frequently. The researchers speculate that this difference may be due to traditional sexual scripts, in which men are supposed to have higher sex drives than women and have fewer reservations about engaging in solo sex when partnered sex is unavailable.

In contrast, according to the traditional script, women aren’t supposed to want sex as much as men do. Rather, they’re supposed to engage in intercourse to please their partner.

Even her achieving orgasm is supposed to be for him, to stroke his ego. If a woman engages in solo sex, then, it’s a sign that she has improper urges, something a “good girl” shouldn’t feel and certainly shouldn’t give into. Granted, people’s attitudes about sex have changed radically over the last 60 years, but the old stereotype of the man as the active partner and the woman as the passive one still persists.

Fischer and Traeen’s article, however, does end on a positive note. That is, most of the men and women in this study were generally satisfied with their sex lives. In fact, the category of high sexual satisfaction and low masturbation was the largest by far for both men and women. Likewise, the categories with low sexual satisfaction and either high or low masturbation were the smallest for both genders. That, in itself, is encouraging news.