Sexual Passion Across Time: Patterns and Predictors Through Five Years of Marriage

The purpose of this study was to explore how harmonious, obsessive, and inhibited sexual passion may change over five years of marriage, and to also evaluate whether sexual relatedness, sexual competence, and sexual autonomy-core constructs of self-determination theory (SDT)-at the beginning of marriage may be important predictors of sexual passion across time. With a nationally representative sample of 2106 mixed-sex recently married couples, we analyzed the intercepts and slopes of the three types of sexual passion over five years. The results indicated that the three types of sexual passion all had relatively stable means across time with small but significant positive slopes. Also, of the three SDT predictors of sexual passion, higher levels of sexual autonomy early in marriage were related to lower initial levels of inhibited sexual passion and higher levels of harmonious sexual passion over time. Curiously, sexual relatedness, though associated with lower levels of sexual inhibition across time, was associated with decreasing levels of sexual harmony.