Why Being Too Friendly With Your Partner’s Friends Can Ruin Your Sex Life
How partner betweenness leads to sexual dysfunction
Ideally, you want your partner to get along well with your friends — or at the very least, be able to coexist peacefully with them. But what happens when your partner is more friendly with your friends than even you are?
According to a study in the American Journal of Sociology, if you’re an older man with a woman, it can wreck your sex life.
Why? Because when an older man’s partner has stronger relationships with his friends than he does, which is known as partner betweenness, he will feel like his partner is coming in between him and his confidantes. This can lead to negative feelings that manifest themselves in several ways, including relationship dissatisfaction, lowered attraction to his partner, and erectile dysfunction (ED).
“Older men’s greater focus on close, kin-oriented relationships increases their likelihood of adopting new definitions of masculinity….” — Benjamin Cornwell
To discover how partner betweenness causes sexual dissatisfaction, researchers Benjamin Cornwell and Edward Laumann looked at data from the National…
