Young adults who report understanding and sharing their romantic partner’s feelings tend to experience greater sexual satisfaction and stronger sexual desire, according to new research published in The Journal of Sex Research. The study of 190 couples also indicates that having an empathetic partner is linked to higher sexual satisfaction for the other person in the relationship, although not necessarily higher sexual desire.
Sexual well-being in a romantic relationship involves both how fulfilled people feel with their sex lives, known as sexual satisfaction, and their motivation to be sexually intimate with their partner, which psychologists call dyadic sexual desire. The word “dyadic” refers to a pair of people, distinguishing the desire for sex with a specific partner from solitary sexual desire experienced alone. Both satisfaction and desire are closely connected to how partners handle emotions, vulnerability, and intimacy inside and outside the bedroom.
One interpersonal skill that helps couples navigate those emotional exchanges is dyadic empathy, defined as the tendency to understand and share the feelings of a romantic partner. Like general empathy toward strangers or friends, dyadic empathy has two main parts: a cognitive side called perspective-taking, which involves stepping into a partner’s shoes to see their point of view, and an emotional side called empathic concern, which involves feeling warmth, sympathy, or compassion when a partner is struggling. However, someone who is generally empathetic in everyday life may still find it difficult to practice perspective-taking or compassion with a romantic partner during tense or emotionally charged moments.
Relationship researchers distinguish dyadic empathy from perceived partner responsiveness, which is the feeling that a partner is acting in a caring and validating way during a specific interaction. Dyadic empathy represents a broader personal tendency to tune into a partner’s inner emotional world, which may lay the groundwork for supportive behaviors and help regulate negative emotions that might otherwise interfere with intimacy.
Prior work examining this link directly in couples has been limited, though a 2017 study of 255 heterosexual couples becoming parents for the first time found that people who were more empathetic toward their partners, and those whose partners were more empathetic, generally reported higher sexual desire and satisfaction. That pattern came with some exceptions, however, such as neither component of empathy being linked to women’s sexual desire.
Young adulthood is a formative stage when people are still learning how to communicate about intimacy and blend their sexual experiences with deeper emotional bonds. At the same time, psychological frameworks such as interdependence theory propose that relationship outcomes depend not just on each person’s traits in isolation, but on how both partners’ traits combine and interact.
Two studies published in 2025 and 2026 by four of the same authors, studying young adult couples in a similar research project, found that partners’ perspective-taking abilities interacted with each other when navigating relationship conflicts, raising the question of whether a similar interplay occurs in the sexual realm. To examine how each partner’s empathy and the combination of both partners’ empathy relate to sexual well-being across a diverse range of relationships, a research team led by Emmanuelle Maindron and Marianne Emond in the Department of Psychology at the Université de Montréal surveyed young adult couples of varied sexual orientations and gender identities.
“Although empathy is widely recognized as important in romantic relationships, we still know relatively little about how it relates specifically to couples’ sexual satisfaction and desire,” Maindron told PsyPost. “Since sexuality is a shared experience, we wanted to look beyond individual characteristics and understand how each partner’s empathy might relate to both their own and their partner’s sexual well-being. We were also interested in whether partners’ empathic abilities might work together, rather than simply examining separate associations with sexual outcomes. By focusing on young adult couples we hoped to better understand these dynamics at a stage when romantic relationships and interpersonal skills are still developing.”
The researchers recruited 190 French-speaking young adult couples, totaling 380 individuals, in Canada through social media advertisements between July 2021 and August 2022. Participants ranged in age from 18 to 29, with an average age of about 23.5 years, and had been together for at least two months, averaging just under three years in their relationships. About 68 percent of participants identified as heterosexual, while the remainder identified as gay, lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, heteroflexible, queer, or other sexual orientations, and the study was open to monogamous, open, and polyamorous couples.
The survey was part of a broader project on couple communication that included both a one-hour individual online questionnaire and a two-and-a-half-hour video session. Before couples were enrolled, the research team contacted both partners to confirm their independent interest, and during the video session, team members interviewed each partner separately with parallel questions about family members’ names, birthdays, and recent outings to verify that they were a genuine couple. The present analysis focused on the online questionnaires, where participants also had to pass at least two out of three embedded attention-check questions for their responses to be included.
To measure dyadic empathy, participants completed a 13-item questionnaire tailored to romantic relationships, rating statements about perspective-taking (such as trying to look at a partner’s side of a disagreement before making a decision) and empathic concern (such as having tender, concerned feelings when a partner is less fortunate). Because the empathic concern items did not group together reliably on their own in this sample, the scientists used the combined 13-item empathy score for their primary analyses and ran a separate check using only the six perspective-taking items. Participants also rated their sexual satisfaction across five word pairs (such as “bad” to “good” and “unpleasant” to “pleasant”) and completed a six-item questionnaire measuring the strength and frequency of their desire for sexual activity with their partner.
The authors used a statistical method designed for pairs that simultaneously estimates how a person’s traits relate to their own outcomes (known as an actor effect) and how those traits relate to their partner’s outcomes (known as a partner effect). These models accounted for relationship length and gender identity, and the researchers noted that their tests of whether both partners’ empathy scores interacted with each other, or whether the results differed by gender, were exploratory.
The analysis indicated that individuals who reported higher levels of dyadic empathy tended to report greater sexual satisfaction and stronger sexual desire for their partner. The relationship between a person’s empathy and their own sexual satisfaction was small to moderate, while the link with their own sexual desire was smaller and did not hold up in a check using only the perspective-taking items. Across partners, when one person reported higher dyadic empathy, their partner also tended to report modestly higher sexual satisfaction, whereas the link between a person’s dyadic empathy and their partner’s sexual desire was not statistically significant. Together with relationship length and gender, the model accounted for about 14 percent of the differences in sexual satisfaction and 16 percent in sexual desire.
“The associations we found were generally small to moderate, suggesting that empathy is one meaningful piece of a much larger picture,” Maindron explained. “Sexual satisfaction and desire are complex experiences shaped by many personal, relational, and contextual factors, hence we could not expect empathy alone to explain them. Still, the fact that empathy was linked to both individuals’ own sexual satisfaction and their partners’ satisfaction highlights its potential significance in everyday relationship dynamics.”
When the Université de Montréal team repeated their analysis using only the cognitive perspective-taking items, the findings for sexual satisfaction remained consistent: individuals who reported being better at adopting their partner’s viewpoint reported greater sexual satisfaction, and their partners did as well. However, perspective-taking on its own was not statistically significant in predicting either a person’s own sexual desire or their partner’s sexual desire.
“Our findings suggest that empathy matters not only for emotional connection but also for sexual well-being in romantic relationships,” Maindron said. She added that “the main takeaway is that feeling understood, considering each other’s perspectives, and being attentive to one another’s needs may be important parts of a fulfilling sexual relationship.”
Across the sample, couples who had been together longer tended to report lower sexual satisfaction and lower sexual desire. Men reported higher partner-directed sexual desire on average than women, whereas the difference in sexual satisfaction between men and women was not statistically significant. In exploratory tests among the 175 couples consisting of men and women, the links between empathy and sexual outcomes did not differ in a statistically significant way by gender.
In their exploratory test of how both partners’ empathy levels worked together, the interaction between the two partners’ dyadic empathy scores was not statistically significant for either sexual satisfaction or sexual desire. The study found no evidence that two highly empathetic partners boosted sexual satisfaction beyond each person’s individual contribution, or that one partner’s high empathy made up for the other’s low empathy.
The authors propose two possible explanations for this pattern: partners’ empathic abilities may simply contribute to their sex lives in parallel as independent strengths. Alternatively, a joint interplay between partners’ empathy may only surface during specific moments, such as resolving a disagreement or offering emotional support, which general questionnaires about overall habits may not capture.
In the authors’ reading of the main findings, tuning into a partner’s emotions may help individuals approach sexual encounters with greater sensitivity to their partner’s preferences and emotional states, fostering a climate of validation and mutual comfort that may benefit both people’s sexual satisfaction. Regarding sexual desire, the researchers suggest that practicing empathy may help an individual feel closer and emotionally safer with their partner, which may encourage their own interest in sex.
“One finding that stood out was that one’s empathy was associated with both partners’ sexual satisfaction, but only with one’s own sexual desire,” Maindron noted. “One possible explanation is that having an empathic partner may contribute to sexual satisfaction by making us feel more understood, supported, and comfortable expressing our needs and preferences, ultimately fostering more positive sexual experiences. However, feeling understood and having an attentive partner does not necessarily translate into greater sexual desire.”
“Desire is also shaped by personal and situational factors, such as stress, emotional well-being, or how physically and emotionally engaged someone feels in the moment,” she added. “This may help explain why sexual satisfaction appears more closely related to how partners interact with each other, whereas sexual desire may be less directly associated with a partner’s empathy. Although we did not directly examine these mechanisms, our findings highlight how empathy may play different roles in sexual satisfaction and desire.”
These results align with an earlier longitudinal study of couples, which examined the motivation to be responsive to a partner’s sexual needs rather than general dyadic empathy. That earlier work similarly found that being motivated to meet a partner’s sexual needs was associated with higher sexual desire and greater satisfaction, while sacrificing one’s own needs to do so was linked to declines for both partners over time.
As with all research, there are some caveats to consider when interpreting these results. Because the survey captured couples at a single point in time, it cannot establish whether dyadic empathy leads to better sexual outcomes or whether having a fulfilling, desirable sex life makes young adults feel warmer and more empathetic toward their partners. In addition, participants rated their own empathy rather than reporting how empathetic they perceived their partner to be, and people’s view of their own understanding does not always match what their partner actually experiences.
The study also did not measure general empathy toward people outside the relationship, leaving open whether the observed links reflect partner-specific empathy or a broader empathetic personality, and the low reliability of the empathic concern questions prevented the team from testing how emotional sympathy alone relates to sexual desire. Finally, only 15 participants identified with a gender identity outside of man or woman, which was too small a group to draw conclusions about gender-diverse individuals. The authors note that future studies using daily diaries or long-term tracking, along with partner-rated measures of empathy, could help determine how day-to-day moments of understanding shape couples’ sex lives over time.
The study, “The Interplay of Partners’ Dyadic Empathic Abilities and Their Associations with Sexual Satisfaction and Desire in Young Adult Couples,” was authored by Emmanuelle Maindron, Marianne Emond, Brenda Ramos, Katherine Péloquin, and Marie-Ève Daspe.