What Your Reasons for Having Sex Might Reveal About Your Emotional Life
Monday, October 13, 2025.
Let’s start with the obvious: sex is not really always about sex.
It’s also about managing the unbearable lightness of being you.
It’s about getting a brief vacation from your own consciousness — without having to check luggage or talk about your childhood.
According to a study in the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy (one of my favs), your reasons for having sex say a lot about your emotional competence — or lack thereof.
The Hungarian researchers didn’t call it that, of course.
They called it “emotional regulation.”
But what they meant was: some people have sex to connect, others to cope, and a brave few to avoid thinking about their mothers.
Sex: The Nervous System’s Favorite Hobby?
Men in the study were more likely to have sex for self-focused reasons when they struggled to manage emotion.
Pleasure, novelty, performance — the old standbys.
Women, by contrast, tended to use sex as a form of emotional repair, especially when they were stressed or unsure what they were feeling (Meskó et al., 2025).
In short: men regulate through action, women through affection, and everyone’s faking a kind of inner peace.
This isn’t manipulation — it’s biology.
The body’s first language is touch. When the frontal lobe gives up, the skin takes over.
I see this weekly in emotional regulation in couples: when two people can’t talk, they revert to tactile diplomacy. It’s clumsy, but it’s also often effective.
Is Sexual Desire a Form of Emotional Bookkeeping?
A 2023 study in Scientific Reports found that folks inclined towards cognitive reappraisal — reinterpreting emotional events — show more partner-focused sexual desire.
People who suppress emotions, meanwhile, report less interest in intimacy. They’re not cold; they’re just somewhat emotionally constipated.
And a cluster analysis of emotion regulation and sexuality found that poor impulse control predicts compulsive sexual behavior (Billieux et al., 2023).
Which makes sense — when you can’t calm yourself, you’ll just use someone else’s body as a sedative.
This is why I tell my clients (half-joking, fully serious): “If you’re having sex just to feel okay, you’re in therapy territory.”
It’s the same logic behind micro-obsessions: repetitive behaviors that look sexy, but sometimes function like panic management.
Dyadic Coping: Two Nervous Systems Walk Into a Bar
The study also explored dyadic coping, which sounds like a Swedish furniture line but means how couples handle stress together.
When men described shared, supportive coping, they were less likely to pursue self-centered sex.
When both partners could manage life like grown-ups, sex became communication instead of medication (Meskó et al., 2025).
In other words: if you can’t co-regulate stress, your body will do it for you — chasing one frantic orgasm at a time.
Some couples don’t actually talk to each other; they perform emotional charades until one of them proposes sex as punctuation.
Sometimes that’s love. Sometimes it’s triage.
Aging Gracefully, or Just Rebranding?
The researchers found that motives for sex remain eerily stable across age.
The 25-year-old who says “I wanted to feel alive” becomes the 55-year-old who says “I wanted to feel close.” Different words, but same historic emotional scaffolding.
It’s classic socioemotional selectivity theory: as we age, we stop chasing novelty and start chasing meaning. But we still chase.
It’s the same dynamic I sometimes see in dual individualism marriages: the older couples who do well aren’t more evolved — they’re just more fluent in strategic emotional distance. They’ve learned to be together without the need to touch every problem-saturated topic all the time.
America: Where Sex Replaces Feelings
The Hungarian researchers want to replicate their work cross-culturally. Good luck with that.
In the U.S., where emotional repression is practically a civic virtue, sex is often the only socially acceptable form of vulnerability.
We’d rather confess a kink than admit we’re scared.
By contrast, Northern European couples — who actually talk about emotion — report higher sexual satisfaction (Horne & Zimmer-Gembeck, 2021). Emotional literacy doesn’t kill desire; it just makes it less desperate.
This is the unspoken thesis of emotional regulation in couples: when you can name your feeling, you don’t need to outsource it to your partner’s body.
Your Libido Is a Mood Ring
If you use sex to connect, you regulate through closeness.
If you use it to distract, you regulate through sensation.
If you avoid it under stress, you regulate through distance.
If you crave it after conflict, you’re trying to repair your world through skin.
It’s all emotional strategy — not pathology. The only question is whether your partner speaks the same dialect.
That’s the real project of science-based couples therapy: decoding each other’s emotional accents. Not to “fix” desire, but to understand what it’s saying underneath the noise.
The Punch Line: Desire Is Data
When I read Meskó’s study, I thought of all the couples who arrive in my office complaining about mismatched libidos. Now I’m wondering if what they’re really saying is, “We regulate differently.”
Desire isn’t something you lose; it’s something that migrates to where the emotional safety is.
When people learn to manage stress together, sex stops being a battleground and becomes a homecoming.
If you’ve ever used sex to say “I’m fine,” therapy can help you find a better language. If you’d like, I can help with that.
People think sex is about love. It’s not always. Perhaps it’s sometimes about how much emotional static you can stand before you reach for your spouse’s skin.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Billieux, J., Brassard, S., Khazaal, Y., & Bőthe, B. (2023). The role of emotion regulation strategies for sexual function and mental health: A cluster analytical approach. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 1164802. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/374679509_The_Role_of_Emotion_Regulation_Strategies_for_Sexual_Function_and_Mental_Health_A_Cluster_Analytical_Approach
Carstensen, L. L., Isaacowitz, D. M., & Charles, S. T. (1999). Taking time seriously: A theory of socioemotional selectivity. American Psychologist, 54(3), 165–181. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.54.3.165
Horne, R. M., & Zimmer-Gembeck, M. J. (2021). The role of emotional competence in romantic relationships: A review and integration. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 25(2), 183–208.
Meskó, N., Putz, Á., & Kocsor, F. (2025). Sex- and age-specific patterns of sexual motivation in relation to emotion regulation and dyadic coping. Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy. https://doi.org/10.1080/0092623X.2025.2562090
Velten, J., Luo, Y., & Margraf, J. (2023). Sexual shame, emotion regulation, and sexual desire in men and women.Scientific Reports, 13(1), 3854. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-31181-y