Relationships make young women miserable? Satisfaction with sexual life, relationship status and quality of life among young women and men
Na: Sopot Youth Conference 2019
Wygłosiła: Aleksandra Leniec
Streszczenie: Pervasive stereotypes suggest that men are in general more focused on sex than women and that sex plays more important role in their quality of life than for women. This view is congruent with the assumption that young males enter relationships in order to have sexual benefits while young females care more for emotional benefits.
However, some theories of sexuality as well as empirical data suggest that satisfaction with sexual life is at least as important contributor to psychological quality of life (QoL) for women as it is for men. To test this hypothesis a study was conducted among 1403 undergraduate university students (851, 60.7% women). A WHOQOL Brief quality of life questionnaire was used. ANOVA tests were conducted. Psychological domain of QoL was dependent variable, partner status, gender, and satisfaction with sexual life were independent variables. In order to control for socioeconomic factors, an environmental QoL was also controlled in the analyses. The results showed that women with partners tend to show lower QoL than women without partners, and women with partners showed lower QoL than men with partners. Furthermore, among individuals without partners satisfaction with sexual life was positively related to psychological QoL exactly in the same way for women and men. In contrast, among individuals with partners satisfied with their sexual life, women had significantly lower quality of life than men. At the same time men in relationships satisfied and dissatisfied with their sexual life had similar quality of life, while women satisfied in comparison to women dissatisfied with their sexual life tended to have higher psychological QoL. These results strongly suggest that relationship status and satisfaction with sexual life have different associations with psychological QoL among young women and men.