No Longer in a ‘Dry Spell’: The Developing Understanding of How Sex Influences Romantic Relationships

Sex is a defining feature of romantic relationships; yet, only recently has research into the implications of sexual processes for such relationships proliferated. We review this work to illustrate how considering the way in which sexual processes influence relationships can help bridge theoretical and empirical work outside and within relationship science. We begin by providing a novel organizational framework for considering how sexual processes influence relationships, illustrating how they can be a (a) direct predictor of relationship outcomes, (b) mechanism that explains important associations, and (c) moderator that alters relationship dynamics. We then situate these findings within a dual-process framework for understanding of how sex influences relationships and conclude by highlighting several open questions and methodological challenges that remain for future research. Our goal is to demonstrate how considering sexual functioning in light of a variety of theoretical perspectives adds to, and sometimes alters, what we know about relationship dynamics.