Power and Sexuality: Associations of Experienced and Desired Power with Sexual Aspects of Couples' Lives

Power, one's perceived ability to influence others, is likely fundamental to the sexual aspects of couples' lives. However, relatively little is known about how different forms of power in romantic relationships relate to sexuality. This is partly because prior research has not clearly distinguished between actor versus partner power, and between experienced (actor) versus desired power. Building on recent theoretical developments that emphasize these distinctions, we examined how power relates to four different aspects of sexuality across four studies (N_total = 1,109 participants), including individuals in romantic relationships and both woman-man as well as LGBTQ couples. We found that greater actor power was associated with higher sexual satisfaction, sexual motivation, and sexual assertiveness, but was unrelated to sexual control beliefs. Greater partner power was associated only with higher sexual satisfaction. Desired power showed no consistent associations with any aspect of sexuality. These findings largely replicated across both trait-level and daily assessments. Furthermore, the findings differed minimally between women and men and only partly between sexual majority versus minority participants. The current findings advance theory and research on power by highlighting its dyadic nature and by underscoring the importance of distinguishing between experienced and desired power to better understand how power and sexuality intersect.