When Tonight Is Not the Night: Sexual Rejection Behaviors and Satisfaction in Romantic Relationships
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In most long-term romantic relationships, partners experience sexual conflicts of interest in which one partner declines the other partner’s sexual advances. We investigated the distinct ways people reject a partner’s advances (i.e., with reassuring, hostile, assertive, and deflecting behaviors) in Studies 1 and 2. Using cross-sectional (Study 3) and daily experience methods (Study 4), we investigated how perceptions of a partner’s rejection behaviors are linked with the rejected partner’s relationship and sexual satisfaction. We found robust evidence that perceived partner reassuring behaviors were associated with greater satisfaction, whereas perceived partner hostile behaviors were associated with lower levels of satisfaction. Perceived partner responsiveness was a key mechanism underlying the effects. Findings for assertive and deflecting behaviors were limited, but the effect of deflecting behaviors was qualified by levels of hostile behaviors for sexual satisfaction. Findings provide the first empirical investigation of the specific ways partners can decline one another’s advances to preserve satisfaction.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".