Does Adventurousness Actually Predict Sexual Satisfaction?

In our recent survey on sexual adventurousness, we asked participants whether they had engaged in (or, if not, were willing to engage in) a variety of sexually adventurous activities. Here is a preview of a few of them to get your blood pumping:

• Sharing verbal fantasies
• Watching pornography together
• Incorporating sex toys into sex
• Engaging in exhibitionist or voyeuristic sexual behavior together
• Having sex with a chance of being seen/heard
• Engaging in sexual roleplay with each other
• Exploring a fetish together

You can check out the details of the survey here. We found that all of our sexually adventurous behaviors were quite satisfying for the participants, and these activities were also associated with higher relationship and sexual satisfaction levels in the participants’ current relationships.

Since one of my main areas of research expertise is in the area of sexual satisfaction, I wanted to dig a little deeper into the overall satisfaction levels of our participants and how that was related to the participation in adventurous sexual activities.

To do this, I created what we call in the stats world a multivariate model (a hierarchical multiple regression to be specific), to predict sexual satisfaction. I was interested in whether being sexually adventurous predicted satisfaction over and above variables like relationship length and whether or not a couple had kids.

For sexual satisfaction, being sexually adventurous actually explained 15% of unique variance in sexual satisfaction. In non-stats terms, this means that if there were a pie-chart of the things that contribute to sexual satisfaction, sexual adventurousness would take up 15% of that pie-chart. Age, length of current relationship, and whether a couple had children were all significant predictors of sexual satisfaction, but sexual adventurousness was by far the strongest predictor.

So for those of you who are being sexually adventurous, know that you are contributing to your sexual satisfaction within the relationship. Additionally, for those of you looking to boost your sexual satisfaction, why not try something a little more adventurous between the sheets? If you are fresh out of ideas, you can look to our survey results and check out some of the behaviors we surveyed, or you can check out the Good in Bed ebook 52 Weeks of Amazing Sex for more ideas.

This post was originally on Good in Bed