So I'm wondering about the most common problems you see when it comes to sex in relationships.

Well, one thing that's incredibly common, especially in long-term romantic relationships, is differences in sexual desire between partners.

So it's not uncommon for partners to want to have sex at different frequencies.

And in some ways, it's probably unrealistic to expect that two people over the course of many years would want to have sex at the same time and with the same frequency.

throughout the relationship.

But interestingly, in our research, we wanted to understand how these differences in desire might influence people's like sexual and relationship satisfaction.

And what we found was that actually couples who were, you know, matched on their levels of sexual desire, they weren't more satisfied with their sex life or their relationship than couples who were mismatched.

What about sex and single people?

What do you do from there? What advice do you give a man or a woman in that partnership to, I guess, revert that and change that?

Yeah, it's a great question.

And I think part of this is that household labor is often invisible, right? It's not only like doing the physical task, but also noticing what needs to be done, planning it, remembering it, making sure it happens.

And when one partner really carries more of that load, especially if it goes unrecognized, it can create this sense that their time and effort are being taken for granted.

We've also found in some other work that even when there was unequal distribution of household labor, when the person doing that felt more appreciated, it sort of buffered them from that lower satisfaction.

So there is something about noticing this and making that invisible labor more visible.

We also found that this link between unequal labor and lower sexual desire was strongest among women who were parents.

What are the effects of this, of having more planned sex, if you will?