Women With Partners Who Share Household Chores Have Greater Sexual Desire: Study

Many women are still burdened by housework to this day. On top of the chores they need to complete on a daily basis, they also carry the so-called "mental load" or the "invisible tasks" linked to household management.

Their partners may want to do something to change this because a new study has found that there's a correlation between a woman's sex drive and their partner's involvement in household chores.

The study, published in the Journal of Sex Research, observed that having a partner who shares the household chores can keep a woman satisfied in a relationship and even boost their libido.

Desires are categorized in two ways: dyadic and solo. Dyadic desire refers to the sexual desire one feels for another person, while solo desire is about individual feelings, according to ScienceAlert.

Researchers from the Swinburne University of Technology did a survey involving 299 Australian women between the ages of 18 and 39, asking them about desire and relationships. The online questionnaire they used covered an array of topics, including how they found their housework, who organized social activities and made financial arrangements and who had more time in their hands.

The participants were divided into three categories: the "equal work" group, in which women felt chores were equally divided; the "women's work" group, where women felt they did more work and the "partner's work" group, whose members believed their partners did more things at home.

The researchers then analyzed the participants' sexual desires in these groups, taking their relationship dynamics into consideration. Eventually, their findings gave a clearer picture: Women in the "equal work" group reported greater relationship satisfaction and greater dyadic desire compared to those in other groups.

Driving home the disproportionate burden of housework on women, the study added that the "partner's work" group was too small to lead to any concrete conclusions. The "women's work" group, on the other hand, ranked themselves lower on the scale of dyadic desire and reported having less satisfaction with their relationships.

Interestingly, same-sex relationships were no different, reporting similar results as their heteronormative counterparts.

As for solo desire in women, the study found no correlation between solo desire and relationship inequity. This underscores the point that fairness in relationships is fundamental to all women's satisfaction and sexual desire, according to the study.

There is an already established link between relationship satisfaction and female sexual desire, but the new study's findings provide an explanation as to how this dynamic works: Women's perception of fairness within a relationship determines their contentment, which in turn has an impact on their sexual desire for their partners.

Moving forward, the scientists propose conducting a trial to confirm if lowering women's mental load boosts their libido.