The Detriments of Unmet Sexual Ideals and Buffering Effect of Sexual Communal Strength
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite the importance of sex for the maintenance of satisfying romantic relationships, our understanding of a person’s sexual ideals—the traits and attributes a person desires in a sexual partner or experience—and what might buffer against lower satisfaction associated with unmet sexual ideals, is limited. Across four studies including cross-sectional, dyadic, longitudinal, and experimental methods (N = 1,532), we draw on the Ideal Standards Model and theories of communal motivation to examine whether unmet sexual ideals are associated with lower sexual satisfaction and relationship quality and test whether higher sexual communal strength—the motivation to meet a partner's sexual needs—buffered these effects. Across studies, when individuals perceived their partner to fall short in meeting their sexual ideals, they reported poorer sexual and relationship quality. People with partners low in sexual communal strength reported poorer sexual satisfaction and relationship quality when their sexual ideals were unmet, but these associations were attenuated among people with partners who were high in sexual communal strength. Perceived partner responsiveness—both in general (Study 2) and to a partner’s sexual needs specifically (Study 3)—was one reason why people with partners high in sexual communal strength were buffered against the lower sexual and relational quality associated with unmet ideals. Please note this manuscript has received provisional acceptance in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".