Sexual Compatibility or Psychological Compatibility?

Many people believe that sexual compatibility is all-important in a relationship.  Most research indicates that, contrary to some people’s expectations, sexual compatibility is not the ultimate key to marital happiness. There are many happy couples who, by any definition, have a less than satisfactory sex life.  The wife rarely experiences orgasm, or the husband is impotent, or both fail to achieve satisfactory orgasms.  On the other hand, there are couples whose periods of harmony only occur in bed.  More important than sexual compatibility is psychological compatibility.  Couples who are psychologically well matched are likely to show a surprising degree of tolerance for the unsatisfactory areas of their sexual relationship.  The psychologically ill-matched couples show no such tolerance, but instead are prone to exaggerate their sexual difficulties.  The position is not helped by the obsession with being normal or, preferably, slightly normal in one’s sexual drives and accomplishments.  The average may be two acts of intercourse a week, some people are only satisfied with two daily, while others are content to let weeks pass without intercourse. 

However, research does suggest a relationship between the quality of marriage and the wife’s sexual response.  One study showed that in a sample of 8000 women, only 4.4 percent of the very happily married wives did not experience orgasm, compared with 19 percent of the unhappily married group.  It would be misleading to suggest that happiness in marriage is always related to the number of orgasms experienced by the woman, or that frequency of orgasm is always related to sexual satisfaction (one can be experienced without the other).  Evidence suggests that a wife is more likely to have positive feelings about her sex life if she and her husband are closely involved with each other’s activities.  Since the wife’s interest in sex often tends to depend more heavily on a sense of interpersonal closeness, it is difficult for her to find gratification in sex in the context of highly segregated marital roles. 

The question remains open to controversy is whether premarital sexual experience affects marital relations.  The Kinsey Report claimed that those experiencing orgasm before marriage were more likely to experience it after marriage.  However, more recent studies refute this finding.  To the extent that knowing this person well involves knowing him or her physically and sexually, premarital intercourse between engaged people must broaden their understanding of each other and hence enhance their chances of a successful marital relationship.  One husband summed up the irony of the situation: “After we married, we both wished desperately that we had not slept with anybody else.  Yet the worst thing possible would be to marry somebody just because you wanted sexual intercourse.  Until you’ve got over the sex hang-up you can’t start to get to know a person.”