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Men in love: Living with sexual boredom

February 2003
Sexual and Relationship Therapy 18(1):63-94

DOI:10.1080/1468199031000061272

Authors:

Aneta Tunariu

Imperial College London

Paula Reavey

University of Stirling

In this article, we provide a discursive reading of twelve men's understandings of sexual boredom in long-term romantic relationships. The empirical study of sexual boredom in psychological arenas has retained a firm commitment to psychological measures of individual performance and has accentuated men's ‘natural’ tendency towards boredom due, for example, to a specialized adaptive psychological mechanism. From a social constructionist perspective we argue that the phenomenon of sexual boredom needs to be seen as a discursive construction mediated through the ideas or imperatives that are currently popular within the self-help genres and other forms of sexual merchandise, which regulate the wider cultural norms and practices of (compulsory) sex, (gendered) sexual desires, (hot) monogamy and (ideal) romantic love. Drawing on approaches from discursive psychology (an approach that attends to how language is used) we examine the tensions and conflicts which characterize these participants’ attempts to negotiate their positions in relation to sexual boredom, and the strategies they adopt in order to distance themselves from (owning) it. Here we discuss how such negotiations are set against ideals of ‘modern’ man's sexual proficiency (readiness and skilfulness), liberal views of sexual relations (embracing a democratic form of intimacy) and romantic (true) love, that the participants propose are required to maintain monogamous long-term relationships. All the participants construct the notion of boring sex (dull, mechanical, over-rehearsed sex) as an inevitable feature of all sexually exclusive relationships, and sexual boredom (boredom with boring sex) as a trade-off for long-term companionship and ‘true love’.

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Men in love: living with sexual

boredom

ANETA D. TUNARIU* & PAULA REAVEY

Division of Psychology, South Bank University, London, United Kingdom

ABSTRACT In this article, we provide a discursive reading of twelve men’s understandings of sexual

boredom in long-term romantic relationships. The empirical study of sexual boredom in psychological

arenas has retained a ﬁrm commitment to psychological measures of individual performance and has

accentuated men’s ‘natural’ tendency towards boredom due, for example, to a specialized adaptive

psychological mechanism. From a social constructionist perspective we argue that the phenomenon of

sexual boredom needs to be seen as a discursive construction mediated through the ideas or imperatives

that are currently popular within the self-help genres and other forms of sexual merchandise, which

regulate the wider cultural norms and practices of (compulsory) sex, (gendered) sexual desires, (hot)

monogamy and (ideal) romantic love. Drawing on approaches from discursive psychology (an

approach that attends to how language is used) we examine the tensions and conﬂicts which

characterize these participants’ attempts to negotiate their positions in relation to sexual boredom, and

the strategies they adopt in order to distance themselves from (owning) it. Here we discuss how such

negotiations are set against ideals of ‘modern’ man’s sexual proﬁciency (readiness and skilfulness),

liberal views of sexual relations (embracing a democratic form of intimacy) and romantic (true) love,

that the participants propose are required to maintain monogamous long-term relationships. All the

participants construct the notion of boring sex (dull, mechanical, over-rehearsed sex) as an inevitable

feature of all sexually exclusive relationships, and sexual boredom (boredom with boring sex) as a

trade-off for long-term companionship and ‘true love’.

Why look at sexual boredom?

In our Western society the topic of sex occupies a visible place within political,

academic, therapeutic and every day settings. Sex is by now an established consumer

product open to the politics of fashion, technology and the rhetoric of democratic

personal choice (e.g. Reavey & Warner, 2002). Modern intimacy is very much linked

to ‘the exploration and satisfaction of sexual desire’ (Weeks, 1995: 38) as well as

being tied to liberal notions of equality and mutual exchange. In this new age of

sexual discourse, there is no room for under-whelming sex. Loss of sexual interest

and sexual boredom have been reported to be important reasons for sexual inﬁdelity

(Shackelford & Buss, 1997), and for the breakdown of a relationship in both short

and long-term couples (Hill et al., 1976; Counts & Reid, 1986; Gigy & Kelly, 1992).

Although seldom the presenting complaint, being bored with sex with a current long-

Correspondence to: Aneta D. Tunariu, Division of Psychology, South Bank University, 103 Borough

Road, London SE1 0AA, UK. E-mail: joinerad@yahoo.co.uk; reaveyp@sbu.ac.uk

Sexual and Relationship Therapy, Vol 18, No. 1, 2003

ISSN 1468–1994 print/ISSN 1468-1479 online/03/010063-32

British Association for Sexual and Relationship Therapy

DOI: 10.1080/1468199031000061272

term partner can prompt referrals to sex and couple therapy or surface as an intricate

part of the clients’ loss of, or low, sexual desire (e.g. Nichols, 1987; Cole, 1988; Wincze

& Carey, 1991; Person, 1999; Tunariu et al., 2002). Yet, despite its increased visibility

in the popular media, the empirical study of sexual boredom in (long and/or short-term)

sexual relationships appears to be limited to the measurement of individual performance

(i.e. that of Watt & Ewing’s (1996) Sexual Boredom Scale). Moreover, the theorization

of sexual boredom has received scant attention outside a handful of sociological

(Hawkes, 1996), socio-biological (Symons, 1992) and therapeutic (Stoller, 1979;

Wilson, 1988; Kaplan, 1995) accounts; various elaborations on the nature and role of

sexual boredom in intimate relationships can however be found in self-help books and

magazine articles (e.g. Murray, 1977; Cole & Dryden, 1993; Schnarch, 1997; Bader,

1998).

Locating sexual boredom in psychological literature

‘[B]oredom is experienced as a disturbance in the sense of time, as an inability to

synchronize attention with the activities of the surroundings or, in their absence,

with one’s own fantasy life. The experience generally involves a sense of

impatience with the self and the environment; a sense of frustration,

dissatisfaction, and want; a vague need for something, for an interest or outlet.

As such, it is an unpleasant or painful feeling, even though it may not impress the

observer as much as the suffering that depression or anxiety usually suggests.’

(Hartocollis, 1972: 96)

In psychology, boredom is usually examined as an affective – cognitive – motoric ‘state

of low arousal and dissatisfaction which is attributed to an inadequately stimulating

situation’ (Mikulas and Vodanovich, 1993: 3). Induced by a prolonged mismatch

between what is desired (for need satisfaction) or required (for effective resource

allocation) and what is actually available (e.g. Fenichel, 1951; Csikszentmihalyi, 1975;

Hamilton et al., 1984; Hill & Perkins, 1985; Dyer-Smith & Wesson, 1997) boredom is

thought likely to occur whenever the individual feels compelled to remain in a

situation that is no longer absorbing or adequately entraining (e.g. Barmack, 1937;

Berlyne, 1967; O’Hanlon, 1981; Leary et al., 1986). The existing literature points to a

number of factors thought to be strongly connected to an individual’s increased

susceptibility to experiencing boredom. These include: sensation seeking personality

(Zuckerman, 1979); high scores on the Boredom Proneness Scale (Farmer &

Sundberg, 1986); high need for novel stimulation; a more rapid rate of habituation

(Zuckerman, 1979); less creative interaction styles (Martindale et al., 1996); low

attentional capacity and low scores on the Boredom Coping Scale (Hamilton et al.,

1984) and a tendency to use more stable and less complex attributions for their

boredom (Polly et al., 1993). Although there has been a shift from viewing boredom as

a direct response to tedious or repetitive situations (see Smith, 1981) to seeing it as

something relative to subjectively differential perceptions of monotony (Perkins & Hill,

1985), style and complexity of attribution (Mikulas & Vodanovich, 1993) or degrees

64 Aneta D. Tunariu & Paula Reavey

of vested interest and resources allocation (Dyer-Smith & Wesson, 1997), the majority

of mainstream psychological theories retain the assumption that boredom is essentially

a privately owned characteristic that becomes observable across speciﬁc situations in

the form of decodable personal reactions. However, to see the emotion of boredom as

something residing in the mind or the body of an individual is to downplay or take for

granted the social considerations that work to produce the representations that people

(such as respondents of psychological studies) use to make sense or express this aspect

of their lives (see Barbalet, 1999 for more on the phenomenology of boredom and its

relationship with social meanings).

As with boredom in general (e.g. Vodanovich & Kass, 1990; Sundberg et al., 1991;

Watt & Blanchard, 1994) sexual boredom is considered to be more of a male attribute

(Watt & Ewing, 1996). In the limited psychological literature on the topic, there is a

strong reliance on viewing a decline from an initial interest in a sexual partner to a state

of boredom with sex with that partner in terms of personality traits. Recent studies

conducted by psychologists from the personality and individual differences stand point

found men’s scores to be signiﬁcantly higher than women’s on the Sexual Boredom

Scale (Watt & Ewing, 1996) and on the subscale of the Boredom Proneness Scale

‘which assessed an individual’s need for challenge, excitement and variety’ (Watt &

Vodanovich, 1999: 306). Thought of in terms of evolutionary endowment men’s sexual

boredom, described as boredom with sex induced by repetitive sexual encounters with

the same partner, has also been found to affect men more than women (Wilson, 1988;

Symons, 1992) and is often related with a line of experimental work known as the

‘Coolidge effect’. This refers to a tendency of males who have reached sexual satiation

with one female to experience a restoration of mating behaviour in the presence of a

novel female (see Dewsbury, 1981 for a review) and is explained as ‘another

manifestation of their [men’s] reproductively optimal promiscuity strategy’. In this

context sexual boredom is understood as a ‘[p]rogressive ‘‘contempt due to familiarity’’

(at least as regards sexual excitement)’ which some propose ‘is an almost inevitable

outcome of sexually exclusive marriage’ (Wilson, 1988: 65). Compared to women, men

are also reported to possess a greater need for external stimulation and variety of sexual

partners, to be more interested in sex (e.g. Symons, 1979; Apt & Hurlbert, 1992;

Sprecher & McKinney, 1993; Greer & Buss, 1994; Laumann et al., 1994), to place more

value on its physical aspects in the process of building loving relationships (Frazier &

Esterly, 1990), to be more likely to engage in (Hurlbert, 1992), but less likely to forgive,

extra-marital sexual affairs as opposed to romantic affairs (Shackelford & Buss, 2002),

and are more likely to endorse sexual motives related to pleasure rather than emotional/

affective expressions (Hill & Preston, 1996). Empirical information on gender

differences with respect to sex and sexual interest is substantial (see e.g. Baldwin &

Baldwin, 1997; Regan & Berscheid, 1999; for reviews). Much of this work has relied on

statistical analyses (e.g. looking for signiﬁcant differences between arithmetic means) of

respondents’ answers to a set of pre-selected statements, open-ended questions and/or

vignettes. But to infer from these studies that there are diametrically opposed naturally

inherent, differences between the sexual desires (forms, preferences, needs) of men and

women is to assume gender as a natural category, obscure its complexities in real life

and downplay the way it lends itself to the social forces which perpetuate a gendered

65Men in love

imbalance of power in our dominant patriarchal social order (e.g. Bem, 1993; Bohan,

1997; Wetherell, 1997). Understanding the nature of feminine and masculine

sexualities as obviously formed and stable realities, tightly bound with biology also

sets the premises for rationalizing the phenomenon of sexual boredom as something that

impinges on men’s lives more than women’s. Popular discourse seems to support this

view. Men (university students) scored higher than women on the 18 statements of Watt

& Ewing’s (1996: 58) Sexual Boredom Scale (SBS) [1] (see Appendix A). Watt and

Ewing’s argument regarding the scale’s statistical validity is warranted within the

epistemological boundaries set for psychometric work but, since respondents’ replies are

taken in a contextually neutral way, it cannot unravel whether these are as predictable

and entrenched in one’s ideological system or as detached from perceptions about the

quality of a current sexual relationship, as their study suggests. Collecting data in the

form of scores on the SBS, or via other psychometric instruments for that matter, does

provide us with a snap shot of respondents’ current standpoints on the locally dominant

formulations concerning sex in long-term relationships. But people do not conﬁne

themselves to a limited or invariable manner of sense making of their sexual experiences

or other aspects of their lives (Wetherell & Potter, 1992: 79). Rather, as our

investigation aims to illustrate, people engage in contextually bound variations (hence

our participants’ comment to the SBS items: ‘It all depends’), contradictions and re-

positioning when trying to understand and explain their experiences and actions in

regard to sexual boredom.

The social constructedness of sexuality (setting the scene)

Sex is an important part of who we are, our gender identity, social competency and our

personal and inter-personal well being. Although it is ‘comfortable to believe in the

centrality of private experience and ourselves as conscious decision makers [and]

masters of our own actions’ (Gergen, 1999: 117) the collection of ideas, forms of

identity, emotional expressions or sexual practices that historically have come to be

catalogued under the term ‘sexuality’ (Foucault, 1976) are far from being private or

natural matters (e.g. Butler, 1993; Tiefer, 1995; Weeks, 1995). Rather these are socially

constructed realities formed and sustained by current cultural agreements, norms, and

commonplace practices, whose meanings we continually reshape between ourselves in

line with prevalent political, cultural and scientiﬁc parameters of social regulation,

morality and ideology (e.g. Weeks, 1985, 2000; Plummer, 1995). The various

assumptions, causal systems and so on, which underpin habitually used discourses,

become internalized, recycled and entranced further in a community’s commonsense,

taken for granted knowledge. Through its frequent use the ‘familiar’ then acquires a

sense of self-evident reality; the ‘social’ passes as the ‘personal’. This is accomplished in

the language we use during daily social interaction, in the discourses we have at our

disposal as social beings. This line of (epistemological) argument is taken-up by social

theorists who, dissatisﬁed by the essentialist parameters of the scientiﬁc approach began

to re-examine and re-think the relationship between society and psychological (e.g.

Berger & Luckmann, 1966; Harre´, 1979, 1983; Parker & Shotter, 1990; Billig,

1991; Parker, 1992; Wetherell et al., 2001). In a more formal sense the term ‘discourse’

66 Aneta D. Tunariu & Paula Reavey

is used to denote a ‘system of statements which cohere around common meanings and

values [. . .] and which are a product of social factors, of powers and practices, rather

than individual set of ideas’ (Hollway, 1983: 231). Sexual discourses shape what we

come to desire sexually, the way we organize and give meaning to our sexual

experiences, what we understand as suitable sexual expression and our very sense of self

(e.g. Hollway, 1984b; Henriques et al., 1998; Nussbaum, 1999). They limit what we

come to consider as possible and necessary, often confer contradictory or incompatible

messages and so give rise to various ‘ideological dilemmas’ for speakers (Billig et al.,

1988). But we do not deploy these linguistic resources in a mindless fashion, rather their

uses are contextually-bound and relate to the ‘situational actions’ (such as justiﬁcation

and mitigation, amongst others) for which particular versions of events or selves have

been constructed (Edwards & Potter, 1992). Sexual discourses, therefore, including

those involving sexual boredom, consist of collectively shared ways of thinking we use to

construct the meanings that we ascribe to our own and other people’s sexuality. These

discourses are available to particular historical communities through a variety of ‘sexual

technologies’ which may include ﬁlms, novels, newspapers, magazines, formal and

informal education, self-help books or academic publications (Gavey, 1992).

Locating sexual boredom in contemporaneous discourses of sexuality

Whilst a remote feature in psychological research agendas, it is increasingly apparent

from the self-help literature advising on sex and love that the notion of sexual boredom

has become a salient issue surrounding sex, especially with regard to sustaining passion

in long-term romantic relationships. The selection below illustrates some of the ways in

which sexual boredom is treated in the self-help literature:

‘[Sex] is the most natural thing in the world, a logical result of romantic love, the

physical expression of a more symbolic union. But sex with someone that you

love can also be as routine and dull as brushing your teeth. It can be a cause of

shame and misery’ (Sarah Litvinoff, 1999: 6 The Relate Guide to Sex in Loving

Relationships).

‘It’s a lot easier to introduce sexual novelty and undisclosed aspects of eroticism

in one-night stands or an affair than in your marriage. It’s a greater challenge to

your sense of self when you’re with a spouse. That’s why sexual boredom (and

affairs) are so prevalent. We demand stability in marriage – and when we get it,

we complain that things are always the same. The resulting boredom contributes

to low desire’ (David Schnarch, 1997: 151 Passionate Marriages).

‘Can a relationship survive on love but no lust? Not if sex remains under-

whelming and boring’ (Mariella Frostrup, relationship advisor to The Observer

21st April 2002).

In all these examples it is easy to identify direct correspondence between the parameters

of sexuality dominant in our culture and the writers’ professed views, for each

67Men in love

formulation unexamined and, therefore, work to reinforce the ‘truism’ of contemporary

assumptions about romantic sexual relations that are dominant in our culture: the

‘naturalness’ of compulsory sex in loving relationships; the primordial place of

overwhelming sex in sustaining intimacy and (hot) monogamy; and the portrayal of

giving and receiving ‘good sex’ as a feature of personal competency and successfulness

as a coupledom (e.g. Holland et al., 1991, 1993; Nicolson, 1993; Hawkes, 1996;

Kleinplatz, 1996; Potts, 1998; Tiefer, 2001). A rule-of-thumb in popular discourse also

has it that a boredom-free sex life is testimony to the presence of sexual desire,

emotional closeness and romantic love. Good sex prevents inﬁdelity and sustains

intimacy by motivating adequate voluntary efforts and the sexuo-erotic vigilance

necessary to ensure the longevity of the relationship. For it to be good, sex should not be

too sluggish or insensitive to what men and women ‘really’ want; neither should it be too

predictable nor too comfortable, resulting in a too easy slippage into boring sex. But the

reverse is also implied. Concerns over inadequate sexual performance and preoccupa-

tions with not giving or not receiving ‘appropriate sex’ can bring about anxieties about

the quality of a loving relationship, a sense of thwarted sexual desire, a sense of failure

and subsequent evaluations of sexual boredom and the association it has with blame or

fault. Such anxieties can give rise to self-pathologizing or subsequent referral to couple/

sex therapy (e.g. Nicolson, 1993) as perhaps reﬂected by the upsurge of complaints

related to low sexual desire witnessed over the past decades (e.g. Kilmann et al., 1986;

Person, 1999). It is therefore plausible to argue that current cultural constructions of sex

have transformed the issue of sexual boredom into an important feature of an

individual’s happiness, personal health and social well-being.

Introducing the analysis

Discourses are a ‘source’ of and an ‘opportunity for creating multiple meanings’

(Mulkay, 1991: 9). When taken up in conversations with oneself or other people, they

offer us ‘subject positions’ or ways of being and relating within them. Each such

‘location’ (Edley, 2001) provides the speaker with certain ‘structures of rights and

duties’ or distinct possibilities and limitations as to which concepts, storylines, claims

and roles can be taken up by the speaker (Davies & Harre´, 1990, 1999). However, the

‘crucial thing about discourses concerning sexuality is that they specify different

positions for men and women’ (Hollway, 1984a: 64). This article focuses on the cultural

linguistic resources that the participants in our study draw upon to make sense of sexual

boredom in long-term relationships; and on the discursive manoeuvres they develop to

reconcile the various ideological conﬂicts arising when taking up particular locations.

Speciﬁcally, we are interested in how they position themselves in relation to the idea of

being sexually bored both as men in general and as men in love (partners in a long-term

primary relationship).

Analytic contexts

The texts we analyse come from interviews conducted between November 1999 and

July 2001 with a total of twelve men whose ages range from 23 to 41 years. These

68 Aneta D. Tunariu & Paula Reavey

interviews are part of a larger project involving over three hundred participants

(involving sex therapists, clients and the general public). The intention here is not to

present data from a representative sample but to provide a rich account of these men’s

subjective sense making. We do however assume that an analysis of their talk will give us

an insight into the more global, culturally dominant patterns of understanding sexual

boredom. For subjectivity and identity, as Wetherell & Edley (1999: 338) put it, ‘are

best understood as the personal enactment of communal methods of self-accounting,

vocabularies of motive, culturally recognizable emotional performances and available

stories for making sense’.

The participants, some of whom identiﬁed themselves as homosexual, some as

heterosexual, were located in the London area. Their professions included barber,

bar attendant, teacher, nurse, musician, hotel manager, postgraduate student and

ofﬁce worker. At the time of the interview each participant reported being in a

primary long-term relationship (at least six months) and sharing a home with their

partner. All participants were given a pseudonym. Each participant was interviewed

on one occasion by a woman interviewer (AT) lasting between one and two hours.

For the ﬁrst 15 minutes participants were asked to complete a structured

questionnaire aimed at collecting details about matters such as the most common

causes of friction arising in their relationships, their preferred ‘coping strategies’

when sex with their current partner had lost its allure and several open-ended

questions related to sexual desire. The questionnaire ended with the 18 statements

of Watt and Ewing’s Sexual Boredom Scale (see Appendix A). The interviews were

broadly guided by an interview schedule that focused on: (i) criteria participants

used to judge a sexual relationship as good, then as boring; (ii) factors, events and

ways that would make them aware of no longer being optimally sexually stimulated;

(iii) prompts to qualify their views of ideal sexual stimulation/satisfaction and (iv)

the strategies they used to overcome sexual boredom. In addition, participants were

asked to elaborate on their responses to several of the SBS’s items. The idea

behind this was to generate further conversational contexts, during which the

participants could appropriate, argue against or change their minds about the

content of some of these statements. The interviews were tape-recorded (with the

participant’s permission) and fully transcribed using a simple transcription code (see

Appendix B).

Analytical process

Our analytical approach was that of discourse analysis, which is part of a tradition in

qualitative research concerned with ‘the exploration of lived experience and participant-

deﬁned meanings’ rather than with identifying the causal relationships between

objectively deﬁned variables, found in the natural sciences (Willig, 2001: 11). However,

of central importance to discourse analysts is the language people use to describe their

experiences, since experience itself cannot be treated as a straightforward ‘fact’ or as the

only ‘true’ picture of reality (Reavey, 2003). Furthermore, language is not viewed as

simply reﬂecting reality (describing what is ‘there’) but is seen as actively engaged in the

process of meaning-making. Through its use language has both a ‘constructive function’

69Men in love

as it provides a framework for organizing our experience, and a ‘performative function’

as it can be used to sustain certain social goals (Burr, 1995; Gergen, 1999). ‘Language’,

therefore, creates the world in which we live. This does not mean that social

constructionists deny the existence of a material world ‘out there’ or think that the world

only exists when we ‘speak’ about it. Our point is that the way people talk about

emotions, desires, sexual practices and so on, is constitutive of ‘how we understand

ourselves as emotional beings’ (Edley, 2001: 438). Language then is a central focus in

understanding people’s private and public positions, their identity and their relationship

to themselves and others.

An important aspect of discourse analysis is how ‘objects’ (sexual boredom) get

talked about and constructed in a given context (here, men’s talk of long-term sexual

relationships). In the case of this study, the analysis began by de-constructing the texts

by ordering them into themes that were identiﬁed via key words (relationships,

commitment, desire, needs) and were related to the research questions outlined by this

project (see above) [2]. This entailed paying attention to the various implicit and explicit

references to sexual boredom in a number of different contexts (past and present

relationships etc.). We were mindful of the implicit references to sexual boredom in

particular, as it was unusual for the participants to automatically ‘know’ what sexual

boredom was or to acknowledge it in the context of their present relationship (through,

for example, fear of denigrating their current partner). After breaking the text into

themes, our aim was to look at all the different ways in which sexual boredom was

‘created’ or ‘constructed’ by the participants and propose a reading of the various effects

(Potter & Wetherell, 1987) these might have for the participants’ subsequent accounts

(e.g. look at whether people’s attitudes towards sexual boredom were consistent or

whether their versions of it contained contradictions or dilemmas that were worked

through or left outstanding during the course of the interview). This stage of analysis

also locates participants’ constructions in wider discourses of sexuality. For example,

within the context of an interview about sexual boredom, a man may draw on a popular

ideas informed by evolutionary theory when he talks about his need to engage in extra-

marital sex, a biological discourse when he explains the urgency of his sexual needs and

a romantic discourse when describing his partner’s (female usually) desires. As the

analysis will illustrate, on many occasions these versions of reality are used as ways of

accounting for a ‘natural’ discrepancy between their own and their (usually female)

partners’ sexual desires, as well as a mode of justifying men’s sexual inﬁdelity.

Identifying wider discourses can help us to see the socially produced nature of accounts,

while, simultaneously, highlighting contradictions and tensions within the same text

(interview).

Living with (the threat of ) sexual boredom

Our analysis of these participants’ talk will illustrate two overlapping conversational

contexts, these we call ‘individual/private’ and ‘coupled/in love’ and from which

different shades of sexual boredom emerge. The primary linguistic resource on

which these participants draw to produce their interpretations of sexual boredom is

a tenet of the ‘sex as a lifestyle discourse’ (Hawkes, 1996) and contains ‘the

70 Aneta D. Tunariu & Paula Reavey

cultural expectation that each individual has a right and a duty to achieve and give

maximum satisfaction in their sexual relationships’ (Nicolson, 1993: 56). The

primary issue involved in a private or a public communication of sexual boredom is

the issue of ‘spotting the boring entertainer’, that is to allocate fault to the

individual or individuals assumed to be responsible for preventing sexual boredom

and for providing ‘fun’ in the relationship. This, we show, requires participants to

pay close attention to, and often to re-deﬁne, their views on what the phenomenon

of sexual boredom might be, which in turn affects how it gets communicated and

dealt with.

Sexual boredom in the ‘individual/private’ conversational context

Talked about from the vantage point of a ‘solitary’ subjective individual, the

phenomenon of sexual boredom is construed as something that can happen to people

in the event of prolonged dissatisfaction with their sexual lives (such as with the sex

had with a particular partner). The prevalent view, however, is that this is more likely

to happen to men (‘regular guys get bored’) due to the nature of their sexuality;

namely due to their animated sex drives (typically higher than women’s) and a healthy

‘virile’ attraction towards novel sexuo-erotic challenges. For an emotionally

‘unattached’ man, according to the participants, the ideal sexual encounters are those

that endorse ‘good sex’ (e.g. absorbing, passionate, overwhelming sex) and adequately

stimulate and improve his sexual proﬁciency (i.e. men’s readiness and skilfulness at

‘doing sex’).

Sexual boredom in the ‘coupled/in love’ conversational context

Talked about from the vantage point of a ‘coupled/in love’ partner, the phenomenon

of sexual boredom is construed as something that happens naturally to all long-term

sexually exclusive relationships due to progressive familiarity, domestic trivia and a

human (although greater for men) temptation towards novel, exciting sexuo-erotic

challenges. For the emotionally ‘attached’ man who is trying to have a successful

long lasting relationship, the ideal sexual encounters with a romantic (loved and

loving) partner are those that actively endorse joint vigilance and sexuo-erotic

industriousness i.e. resolute devotion to exploring ways of ‘fuelling’ sexual passion,

and that capitalize on (i.e. overtly receive and conﬁrm) his liberal-sexual proﬁciency

and so prevent their relationship from succumbing to sexual boredom. In this sense,

for the sexually monogamist partner, the ongoing project of dealing with the threat of

sexual boredom becomes a reasonable trade off for ‘true love’ and long-term

companionship.

Communicating sexual boredom

One striking feature of all the participants’ accounts, typically (although not always)

occurring early on in the interview, is the denial of sexual boredom by discrediting it as a

serious enough event:

71Men in love

Extract 1

AT: What do you think is the nature of sexual boredom?

Greg: I never get bored. [. . .] I’m not that kind of person. [. . .] No matter how

dissatisﬁed I was with sex I don’t think I’d be sexually bored, you know. I mean

because I can be stimulated (.) I am stimulated so much more:: by the non-sexual

err say qualities, compliments it. If:: something seriously affects our sexual

relationship or:: one of us, [then] we discuss it, you know. (Greg: a 24-years-old

Australian, hostel manager, in current ‘straight’ relationship for one-and-a-half

years; Q6)

Greg’s apprehension at being seen to own (up to) sexual boredom is perhaps not

surprising given its ‘culturally dis-valued’ status as an emotion (Darden & Marks,

1999) [3]. In both popular and academic discourse the attribution of boredom is,

often implicitly, taken to entail an individual’s fault, inaptitude or unwillingness to

attain or deploy the skills necessary to produce signiﬁcance and meaningfulness

from the particularities of a situation (Askins, 1980). Leary et al.’s (1986) study

involving over 1200 participants, for example, showed that boring individuals are

judged less favourably than interesting individuals; boring individuals, for example,

were perceived to be more egocentric and more banal, to show more ingratiation

and lower affectivity and in a small percentage of cases were even thought to be

less intelligent. Boredom, especially when coupled with a lack of sexual prowess, is

clearly not ‘a condition for love’ (Armstrong, 2002) yet our communal knowledge

about it contains conﬂicting messages. On the one hand boredom is rendered a

trivial or, at least, a superﬁcial emotion that individuals would do well to sort out

privately (see Darden & Marks, 1999). On the other hand, it is one of the

‘emotional imperatives’ which motivate or at least direct people’s actions towards

meaningful encounters (Barbalet, 1999: 633) and has a central place in modifying

the ‘vital background of enthusiasm’ (Suttie, 1963/1935: 95). Sexual boredom, then,

is also liable to be viewed in similarly ambivalent ways. On the one hand, the

speaker is likely to expect her/his declaration of being sexually bored to be greeted

as a cop-out that deserves condemnation and subsequent evaluations of

incompetence, sexual ignorance or downright laziness. The ‘dull people have dull

sex’ discourse that we found to be customary in sex therapists’ corroborates our

study of this expectation. It sees sexual boredom as an avoidable consequence

induced by either partner’s complacency, reduced sexuo-erotic sophistication and

modest or absent contribution towards joint satisfaction in sexual encounters

together (Tunariu et al., 2002). On the other hand, to privately or publicly identify

its presence in discussions about one’s current relationship is also to cast doubt on

one’s partner’s sexual performance and sex appeal or, worse still, to read it as

implying the speaker’s de-motivation (hence, defective romantic love) in continuing

with sexuo-erotic arrangements currently identiﬁed as unsatisfactory. These

participants’ practice of discrediting its status and down-playing its relevance in

current relationships may thus serve as a way of preventing oneself (sexual actor)

from being judged negatively. This practice may also be used to protect their

partner’s feelings, or as a mode of avoiding confrontation that would necessitate

72 Aneta D. Tunariu & Paula Reavey

uncomfortable challenges to the relationship’s status qua (see Brissett & Snow,

1993, for a full review on the intricacies of communicating boredom in social

interactions and on its ‘vocabulary of motives’).

During the course of the interviews, however, the ‘status’ of sexual boredom

modiﬁes, takes different routes and receives ‘upgrading’. The participants begin to

discuss its role as a sexual motivator with the understanding that they are referring to

their past and not current sexual relationships:

Extract 2

AT: Are there any occasions in the past when you did not feel optimally

stimulated?

Greg: Yes, it had happened in the past. Oh, yeah. In a previous relationship err

after a while she did not interest me any more. Sometimes I could not even be

turned on, I could not even be bothered trying to become excited. [AT: How

come?] I suppose I’d become bored by what she offered me (.) it wasn’t what I

needed for my expectations.

AT: What would you say has made you aware that you were no longer interested?

Greg: I think err from thoughts, feelings:: (.) yeah, from my perceptions of what

she made me feel:: my perceptions of what I wanted to get out:: and what I was

getting

AT: What would you say was it that you did want to get out?

Greg: What I wanted to get out of it? Err:: what I needed to feel sexually:: (.) so

that I would wanna stay (.) but it did not balance with what I was getting so::. I

know I’m a man, but (.) I don’t like playing games so I just get out of a

relationship that sexually doesn’t work, you know? Surely I’ve got a man’s brain

but I am not like: ‘I’m a man and men need to have a lot of sex’, regardless, you

know? Or ‘that’s what men do’ etcetera, etcetera. I’ve got my own brain as well.

(Greg, Q10)

Note the contradiction between Greg’s articulations about his impermeability to all

boredom formulated in Extract 1 with those made here. His retrospective claim to

sexual boredom describes a consequence of his interaction with inadequately

stimulating sexual relationships; with the effect: he could no longer ‘be bothered

trying’ to produce sexual excitement; he and his personal (sexual) attributes no longer

ﬁtted into that relationship (see Hartocollis, 1972). A declaration of sexual boredom,

thus, turned from requiring strategies aimed at removing any self or public doubt

about a speaker’s sexual competence, to a mode of self-accredited superiority (Wangh,

1975). By taking past relationships as the context for discussion, the speaker can

explicitly identify and point to the ‘boring entertainer’ of a particular coupledom, an

enterprise which remains implicit in accounts of sexual boredom produced within a

‘coupled/in love partner’ milieu for discussion. Not only do these participants ﬁnd a

discursive space for talking about sexual boredom as the result of having insufﬁciently

motivating sex(ual partners) but they are also then able to describe the ending of a

sexual relationship as justiﬁable, indeed, as ultimately un-avoidable in the event of

prolonged sexual boredom.

73Men in love

Regular guys get bored (building sexually proficient positions)

In this section of the analysis we shall look at the prevalent patterns emerging in

accounts produced from within the ‘individual/private’ vantage point.

In the extract below, for example, Barry associates the onset of sexual boredom with

unfulﬁlled, speciﬁcally male, physiological needs. He uses the notion of boredom within

a man’s sexual life to rationalize increases in his ‘natural’ tendency to ﬂirt with other

women, to account for the possibility of this progressing into inﬁdelity and, implicitly, to

warn women of the consequences of downplaying this facet of men’s sexuality:

Extract 3

AT: To the question: ‘when sex with current partner has lost its allure’ your

choices of answers were ‘fantasizing’ and ‘ﬂirting’ could you say more on these?

Barry: When I don’t have sex for a while err I do fantasise about other girls err it’s

natural. The body takes over and (.). What I mean is (.) that err I’m not sexually

bored and then I fantasize. What I mean:: is that the body naturally builds up

sperm and:: so that it’s is way to get rid of . But when Iamsexually bored err

ﬂirting with other girls (.) goes a bit further. If I am:: sexually bored and if the girl

was to err to (.) react to the ﬂirtation then, yes, I would go further with the

temptation (Barry: a 26-year-old, Caucasian, student, in current ‘straight’

relationship for three years; Q9).

Unlike Greg who insists on not being included in the category of men who remain

‘slaves’ to their biological needs or socio-biological sexual styles (e.g. in Extract 2 he says

‘I am a man [but] I’ve got my own brain as well’), Barry straightforwardly reproduces

the conventional views conferred by the ‘male sexual drive’ discourse. This discourse,

Wendy Hollway (1984a: 63) explains, ‘sees men as sexually insatiable and male

sexuality as a naturally uncontrollable drive’ whose presence and adequate satisfaction

cannot be ignored (by their women partners). By relinquishing control of his sexual

drives and needs to the ‘laws of nature’ in this way, Barry argues for a fatalistic take on

male sexual boredom. This he uses to gain ideological ground for requesting a

continuous supply of (perhaps more and better) sex from his partner and to provide a

justiﬁcation for sexual ‘inﬁdelity’.

Extract 4

AT: Do you think [that] your relationship will last for a long time?

Ian: [. . .] I believe gay relationships can last if there is harmony. Gay men err::

men in general have higher sex drives and the only way gay relationships can last, I

think, is if you have a satisfying sexual life. Err:: (.) I mean straight men see

prostitutes or have one-night-stands because they are bored with their sexual

partners [. . .] gay men don’t have to go to brothels or see prostitutes because::

two men in a relationship generally give and want, and enjoy:: sex. Male gay

relationships can satisfy each other’s sexual drives. I am not saying that they

cannot get sexually bored, on the contrary, I have a higher sexual drive than my

partner and so:: sometimes this is a problem. I still have to work on this [general

74 Aneta D. Tunariu & Paula Reavey

laughter] (Ian: a 27-year-old New Zealander, barman, in current ‘gay’ relation-

ship for six months; Q20).

In this extract Ian reinforces his choices of sexual lifestyle by comparing them to those

he perceives to be characteristic of heterosexual relations, a practice also commonly

taken up by heterosexual men. Gay participants, as Ian’s talk exempliﬁes, often pitied

heterosexual men who, they see, are ‘forced’ into visiting prostitutes to make up for a

customary mismatch between men’s and women’s sexualities. Both gay and straight

respondents singled out the male – male couple as the most likely sexuo-erotic

arrangement to succeed in dealing with sexual boredom due to an ‘inherent gay drive’

to sexual openness (i.e. more experimentation, more fun, more likely to ﬁnd sex per se

enjoyable) and a better chance to satisfy/match each other’s sexual drives. Both gay and

straight respondents were aware of this way of talking and attended to it in different

ways. Straight men, for example, frequently expressed their envy towards gay sexual

‘freedom/openness’ and often also used it to rationalize their view of gay men as

promiscuous. Some even rendered the ‘typical’ gay man as incapable of sustaining long

term love/affection driven relationships. In this paper we shall not offer a systematic

comparison between ‘gay’ and ‘straight’ narratives, rather we focus on those aspects of

sexual boredom discourse that all participants share (such as their vulnerability to its

dilemmas and access to its dominant cultural meanings).

Sexual boredom as the result of discrepancies between the partners’ hard wired

sexual needs and desires is a common articulation. But there are, however, shades and

avenues for negotiating a less pessimistic view distinguishable in these participants’

stories. This is illustrated in the extract below and it will become even more apparent in

the next section of our analysis.

Extract 5

AT: So ﬂirting makes you feel sexual?

Alex: I’d say yes. Maybe men are more easily sexually bored than women. And we

need more (.) err to be stimulated err or to reach our level of sexual satisfaction.

So what we do is:: (.) we can’t get that from one woman so we ﬂirt or have affairs

or:: AT: And does this work?

Alex: How I look at it is this. If for instance my partner all of a sudden, tomorrow,

gave me the ideal:: err sexual relationship (.) i.e. everything that I wanted,

everything that I would like to do err that I need to feel fully:: satisﬁed say she was

to give me that tomorrow, would I not ﬂirt? Would I not fancy other women?

Fantasise? I would truly:: say ‘No’. Because I am not bored (.) sexually bored via

her but what she does, she can increase the intensity [..] And:: my partner kind of

has the ﬁnal advantage [he laughs] sexually, you know, cos’ I’d feel more manly,

more:: sexual, you know::, when I come home (Alex, 29-years-old, Black

Caribbean, ofﬁce worker, in a current ‘straight’ relationship for four-and-a-half

years; Q12)

As illustrated by Extract 5, the issue over male sexual fulﬁlment emerges, again, in

terms of some uncontrollable drive that keeps men constantly desiring new sources of

75Men in love

sexual excitement; the kind that novel females can readily provide (by means of ﬂirting

with them or by featuring in their fantasies). The underlying message is that ‘regular

guys’, that is healthy, virile men, do inevitably become sexually bored in long-term

romantic relationships. The implication here being that any fault on their part is

(logically) not possible. Their partners, in this case women, have to understand and be

prepared to accommodate this unavoidable aspect of male sexuality. This version

confers a strongly advantageous position on men, but, less overtly, it also gives a

somehow less fatalistic view of sexual boredom. This is accomplished by stating that

male sexual desire can potentially be gratiﬁed and, therefore, the intensity and

consequences of ‘natural’ sexual boredom can be decreased, if only temporarily.

Providing other, subjectively important, aspects of intimacy are meaningful and

satisfactory for both partners, the act of ﬂirting or sexually desiring other people would

no longer be problematicized as a reﬂection of partner-induced sexual boredom. It

opens a route to reconciling ‘who is the boring entertainer’ in their own and their

partner’s sexual lives. But the prioritising of male-centred practices inherent in the

styles and expressions of sexuality that the speaker presupposes for each gender

privileges phallic-centred needs, and an unequal distribution of responsibility when it

comes to the management of sexual boredom. If their monogamous relationship is to

work, Alex explains, his partner has to recognize that in the end she can only beneﬁt

from her partner’s extra-dyadic erotic pursuits. Alex’s account prescribes gendered pre-

occupations. As a heterosexual man, his is, for example, to cultivate his sexual

proﬁciency – e.g. ﬂirting makes him feel more ‘manly’ that is, more ready to tap into

and get right the sexual dexterity expected from a ‘real’ man. Hers, in the ﬁrst instance,

is to understand him in this way. In the second instance, as it becomes apparent in the

extract below, she is encouraged to join in and, importantly, to endorse those activities

(choices of lifestyle) which further their collective sexual prowess in the name of

achieving ‘good sex’ together:

Extract 6

AT: So if you had to describe an ideal sexual scenario what would that be?

Alex: The ideal would be my partner initiating sex more often, be more

unpredictable in fact both of us should be more unpredictable and also more

experimentative. [. . .] Because the thing is that when we have sex I always have an

orgasm but my partner does not always seems to. And I wonder did she? Or why

can’t she always? Or maybe she wants oral sex. So I feel that (.) I think we are a-

bit-sort-of naı¨ve sexually. [. . .] And so I feel that maybe our sex life needs to be

spiced up especially sex toys, pornography and so on (.) apart from intercourse,

you know, there are other things that could make sex more interesting. We’ve

discussed the taboo thing [sex having gone stale and boring] and we both think

that we should experiment more. (Alex, Q5)

Alex appears uncertain and frustrated by his poor insight into why his partner does not

always experience an orgasm or does not do more (such as giving him instructions) to

ensure that she does. In dealing with the ‘taboo thing’ Alex turns to choices of sexual

technologies and encourages strategies of self-improvement for both of them. This he

76 Aneta D. Tunariu & Paula Reavey

does by retaining a complicit stance on the styles of sexual interaction prescribed by

conventional masculinity. The roles which he assumes as the man in this relationship (in

Extract 5 for example and in other places during the interview) are: (i) to initiate and to

actively control the sexual act (as described by ‘the male sexual drive’ discourse) (ii) to

perform sex skilfully; (iii) to treat it as gift and in return to try to give the woman an

orgasm (as described by the ‘pseudo-reciprocal gift’ discourse, Gilfoyle et al., 1992:

288).

All the participants present themselves as men who know and nurture their sexual

needs and potentialities. Vis-a`-vis sex in their current relationship they all express a wish

for greater frequency of sex, for more exciting sex through spontaneity, variety,

experimentation, and unpredictability, and express an emphatic disapproval of planned

sex. This is not an unusual story (of terms) and the literature on sex differences often

classiﬁes it under the rubric of ‘what men desire from a sexual relationship’. In Hatﬁeld

et al.’s (1988: 49) study of almost 300 participants, for example, men (more than

women) reported a desire that ‘their partners would be more rough, experimental, more

willing to engage in fast, impulsive sex, initiate more sex, [. . .] be more wild and sexy, be

more variable in where sex is had, give more instructions, and be more willing to do

what ‘I want’’.

These differences, the authors suggest, ‘may be explained by differential socialization

and/or different evolutionary pressures’ (p.39). We, instead, prefer to regard these as a

way of instantiating some of the structures of sexual discourse commonly engaged by

peoples’ interpretations and evaluations of their relationships. The culturally dominant

set of formulations that is relevant here is the ‘sex as a lifestyle’ discourse (Hawkes,

1996). This discourse is the source of many of our participants’ statements on ideal

sexual satisfaction and unfulﬁlled sexual desires, and locates their attitudes of dislike for

predictable, un-experimentative and under-whelming sexual encounters. The more

positive and emancipatory sexual morals instigated in the 1960s which allowed sex

outside the bounds of committed (religiously married) relationships and encouraged

open sexual expression in both men and women (the ‘permissive’ discourse, Hollway,

1989); have become an intricate part of the comodiﬁcation of passion typical of the

contemporaneous sex-market milieu. By means of abundant illustrations, descriptions,

instructions and wide-ranging choices on how to achieve the ever-expanding peak of

sexual satisfaction, the normative linguistic practices of media advisors on sexual

relations, sexual scholars and sex therapists have contributed to transforming notions of

sexuo-erotic lust ‘from a taboo into a ‘‘must’’ ’ (Vandereycken 1987: 179). The ‘sex as a

lifestyle’ discourses construct sexual passion as a commodity, a leisure product which

consumers come to desire and to believe that they ought to access (Hawkes, 1996). One

outcome for modern sexual partnerships is that they are, as Gail Hawkes (1996: 121)

puts it, ‘caught in a pincer movement: on the one hand, a moral imperative to have sex,

since this is the central dynamic of a ‘‘relationship’’; on the other, if we ‘‘have it’’, then

we are honour bound to avoid sliding down into the abyss of boredom’. As a corollary,

people are persuaded to develop over-optimistic views about the forms, intensity and

duration of sexual desire (Everaed & Laan, 1995) and, as our analysis shows, over-

pessimistic views of sexual boredom. The resilience of this partnership becomes even

more transparent and dilemmatic when framed by modern ideologies of ‘democratic

77Men in love

intimacy’ (Giddens, 1992) that are at-hand and ‘have’ to be reckoned with by partners

in romantic arrangements.

True love and real couples: irregular guys get bored (liberal proficient positions)

In this ﬁnal part of the analysis we look at what happens to sexual boredom when talk of

personalized masculine sexual needs combines with talk of romantic commitment. This

takes place against a background of sexual morality, which, as Jeffrey Weeks notes,

involves ‘living with uncertainty’. Contemporary sexual discourse is marked by

ideological tensions and contradictory messages as to what ‘truths’ we can or ought

to appropriate for choices of life style and individual ‘self-making’. Choice has

increasingly become ‘the ruling morality [. . .] [y]et how, and with what criteria, we

should choose is less clear’ (Weeks, 1995: 28). On the more negative side there is ‘a

sexual libertarianism that brooks no barrier to individual satisfaction, that makes

individual pleasure the sole yardstick of sexual ethics’ (Ibid., p.29). On the more positive

side there is the possibility of sexual autonomy, self-expression and democratized

personal lives that the attainment of the ‘pure relationship’ promises (Giddens, 2002).

In other words, we intend to illustrate the ways in which these participants produce

versions of sexual boredom that are able to accommodate and conjoin strands of talk

from the ‘individual/private’ context with notions of the ‘romantic ideal’ and ‘true love’.

Extract 7

AT: Does the duration into a relationship matter [vis-a`-vis sexual boredom]?

Dan: Err:: really depends on the couple, the relationship that you have. Where

you’ve got strong love and understanding, and openness in the relationship

then, really and truly, you should really be able to deal with it. Because once

you begin a relationship you’re (.) really exploring::, you’re ﬁnding out about

sex with each other, it’s new and exciting. I don’t know:: and err (.) because it

is human nature to explore and conquer and [you might think] ‘I’ve been there,

done that is like what’s left?’ or it’s like ‘what is next’?, ‘why is x not the same

once you done y?’ or ‘why am I no longer happy with [the sex that I’m

having]’ and these might really and truly be commencing boredom in your

relationship. But I’ve got over that. I’m realistic. I know that whatever I have

here and now it’s not the exactly same again, but is good (Dan; 23-years-old,

Black Caribbean, musician, in a current ‘straight’ relationship for four years;

Q8b)

Here Dan articulates an important issue which emerges from our analysis of these

interviews: peoples’ talk of sexual boredom rests on interpretations which probematize

any perceived modiﬁcations in the focus of (their or their partners’) sexual desire,

intensity of sexual excitement or physiological arousal that might occur in the course

of sexual encounters with the same partner. In this particular fragment of Dan’s

narrative, he explores and attempts to resist this problematization. Namely by

challenging a key assumption contained in discourses of sexual boredom that the

kind of sex characteristic of the early stages of a relationship is the very expression of

78 Aneta D. Tunariu & Paula Reavey

an all-consuming romantic love that we all strive for, such that any changes in its

frequency or concentration must be a reﬂection of weakened romantic love, loss of

sexual interest and/or sexual boredom. Dan does this in two ways. First by

naturalizing, hence normalizing, one’s tendency to be excited by what a new

relationship offers whilst at the same time calling for a ‘realistic’ perspective on it.

Secondly, he advises against dwelling on questions such as: what was sex like at the

start of the relationship? why is it no longer the same as the relationship progresses?

To do this risks inﬂicting boredom on one’s self. The realization of this strategy he

gives as both a sign of personal maturity and as something which is reliant on

partners enjoying ‘strong love and understanding [compromise] and openness [in

their repertoires for procuring non-boring sex]’.

Under this second main theme we present two interdependent procedures that

participants adopt for integrating their views about men’s greater propensity for

sexual boredom with their views of being men in love:

(i) Sexual boredom is construed as a natural progressive feature of all long-term

sexuo-romantic relationships;

(ii) Sexual boredom is construed as a reasonable trade off for ‘true love’ and long-

term companionship.

Both procedures rely on:

(i) Differentiating between ‘boring sex’ (a description of an isolated sexual act) and

boredom with ‘boring sex’ (a description of an over-arching feeling); a strategy

that allows participants to make sense of ‘living with sexual boredom’ in terms of

and by retaining coherent, enduring identities;

(ii) Developing the notion of ‘masculine liberal-sexual proﬁciency’; a strategy which

involves emphasizing democratic and partner-centred attitudes to romantic

relations when it comes to procuring/sustaining sexual satisfaction;

(iii) Declaring themselves as ‘ready’ for lasting commitment which entails a kind of

love that can ‘tolerate and forgive’ occasional boring sex in their lives.

So far, these men’s accounts, produced from the individual/private discursive context,

describe sexual boredom as a loss of something; a loss of enjoyable sex (e.g. ‘hot’, over-

whelming, spontaneous, sex), a decline in passionate sexual desire and/or a loss of

interest in sex with a particular partner. On the one hand, it is associated with a sense of

indifference to the prospect of having dull sex (or perhaps to having it anyway, for a

while). On the other it is associated with a sense of (sexual and personal) frustration and

an active search for introducing compensatory changes (e.g. en-skill-ing sex) within a

current relationship or looking for stimulation outside of it. When the interviewees

present themselves as men ‘in love’ they also assume the ways of thinking and being that

romantic discourses make available to them. One inherent component, normatively

assumed to deﬁne or authenticate ‘true love’, is an apparent ‘commitment to, and

willingness to make sacriﬁces for, the loved one’ (Averill, 1985: 99). Under these

discursive demands, the participants typically emphasize sexual boredom as something

79Men in love

to which all humans are prone, as something that can ‘inﬂict’ itself on either partner,

man or woman. This is because it is presented as a product of natural changes in long-

term relationships such as duration, familiarity, domestic trivia and mundane but

essential life events.

In order to add more genuineness to the claim that sexual boredom is a feature of all

long-term relationships as they progress, the speakers build it up as the result of a basic

human need for challenge, much in the way that some psychologists (e.g. Berlyne, 1967)

understood boredom, in general; namely as a drive state ‘provoking a search for diversity

and novelty’ (Smith, 1981: 333).

Extract 8

AT: What do you mean by sexual satisfaction?

Ian: I think a lot of it is coming from needing a challenge:: because boredom does

not happen up until you have been together for a while (.). Especially in the gay

community you see someone attractive err sexually and the challenge starts again.

Err so:: you have to think and you may want that challenge:: again. If you act on it

I reckon you are bored with sex with your partner.

Aneta: What would prevent you from acting on it?

Ian: Err being sexually satisﬁed, having err being challenged in your relationship

[...]. Because you are so tied up in each other’s lives that err like in all long term

relationships sex does become dull and:: you both need a challenge (Ian, Q5).

A chief advantage of assuming the discourse of ‘sexual boredom as an inevitable feature

of all long-term relationships’ is that an individual can explicate the event of sex having

gone stale or boring in his romantic relationship in terms of natural parameters and so

put aside, at least in principle, the nagging issue of blaming either partner as the ‘boring

entertainer’. But there is one critical tension which requires the participants’ attention.

On the one hand they proposed a version of sexual boredom as something inherent in

the nature of men’s sexuality (when talking from within the ‘individual/private’

conversational context). On the other hand there is the version produced here from the

‘coupled/in love’ conversational context, which claims it as something inherent to all

longer-term relationships and to which either partner, regardless of gender, can

succumb to.

The following two extracts illustrate a common strategy which, when adopted, allows

these participants to make sense of ‘living with sexual boredom’ whilst retaining a sense

of coherence and continuity across their ‘stories’:

Extract 9

AT: How do you feel about your current sexual relationship?

Ivan: What I feel about my relationship now is that it’s (.) rather than having

lots and lots of different relationships with different men, I’m having lots of

different relationships with one person. So err (.) I still ﬁnd *** as sexually

arousing and attractive and:: desirable as I did when I ﬁrst met him. But things

have changed; err we both know each other better err (.) [. . .] So:: where as

before when we’ve ﬁrst met it would be all very touch and ﬁery, now:: is more

80 Aneta D. Tunariu & Paula Reavey

of the loving stuff but we still have passion and wild:: sex ever so often, when

we feel like doing that.

AT: Interesting:: different relationships with the same partner

Ivan: Yes, it’s different relationships within the same relationship; because I

mean:: we both admitted that we’ve fallen in-and-out of love with each other

countless time since we’ve been together. And so (.) I would probably say that

those are times when I ﬁnd sex with him (.) not hard but:: maybe I don’t want it

as much or:: sex becomes a routine, boring one might say. But then something

happens:: and the spark comes back and so I fall in love with him again. (Ivan; a

36-years-old Caucasian, ofﬁce (sexual health) worker, in current ‘gay’ relation-

ship for six-years; Q8)

It is differentiating between ‘boring sex’ (a description of an isolated act which does not

neutralize romantic love) and boredom with ‘boring sex’ (a description of an over-

arching feeling) that permits the co-existence of these two contradictory accounts. In

other words, it is the emotionally isolated sexual act that becomes dull and boring ‘in all

long-term relationships’ and to which ‘men are more sensitive’. Extracts 9 and 10 both

also exemplify many of the dominant features involved in the production of a less

fatalistic, but still pessimistic, view of sexual boredom – one that reduces the speaker’s

vulnerability to the idea that good sex (and thus good sexual relationships) equals

persistent over-whelming spontaneous passion:

Extract 10

AT: So have you encountered situations in which you feel you were bored with

sex?

Ivan: No, not very often. Well not for a while anyway. I suppose because (.) I

mean in the past if I got bored I’d just move on. [. . .] And so:: if I get bored I

wonder whether I want to be stacked with that person, it wouldn’t just be sexual,

it’d be with everything about that relationship [. . .]

AT: You seem to mean different things by the terms boring and boredom

Ivan: Yes:: and that’s because boring sex would be short term, boredom would be

err like combining falling out of love and bad sex across the board. Boring I can be

tolerated in small doses at certain times but I think it only becomes boredom when

you’re ﬁnding everything about that relationship boring; it’s cumulative and

longer term. [. . .] I mean if I decided that I wanted to be with that person and the

relationship turned more satisfying as an emotional thing rather than a physical

thing then [. . .] I am willing to accept a little bit of that because I don’t want to

lose him, because I don’t want to move on (.) from him. (Ivan Q10)

First, the speaker differentiates between the words ‘boring’ and ‘boredom’

(i) Boring sex is used as an evaluative phrase referring to dull, routine and over-

rehearsed sexual acts. Although boring, it might perhaps be instrumental (e.g.

for obtaining orgasm, or for keeping inter-personal bonds) but culturally it is

identiﬁable as passionless sex;

81Men in love

(ii) Sexual boredom is used to refer to a feeling of having become bored with ‘boring

sex’; an emotion which is habitually taken to refer to an individual’s indifference

or demotivation towards a sexual partner or sexual relationship; something

which culturally may be identiﬁed as the ‘waning of sexual desire’ or the ‘four-

year-itch’ of domestically bound romantic partners.

Secondly, by doing so the speaker establishes a relationship between sexual boredom,

manifested as isolated instances of boring sex, and romantic love that enables him to

construct a viable discursive procedure of ‘sexual boredom as a reasonable trade off for

love’. In this context:

(i) Boring sex is seen as something that can be tolerated providing that its

occurrence is temporary and occasional;

(ii) Sexual boredom on the other hand, cannot be tolerated since it is conceived as

something that builds up and is longer lasting. It combines ‘falling out of love

and bad sex’ and threatens to destabilize all aspects of the relationship.

This version of sexual boredom as a dormant, but undoubtedly easily activated,

self-propagating event entails that as long as the partners in a relationship have a

kind of ‘communication’ which has the means to convince each of them of the

authenticity of their ‘genuine’ feelings of love in spite of unsatisfactory sexual

encounters with each other then ‘boring sex’ can be successfully handled. The

implication being that only ‘irregular’ partners (hence those who are not really in

love) come, to their peril, to foster any other interpretations. What is required,

therefore, is joint vigilance, sexuo-erotic creativity, and reciprocated ‘true love’ to

maintain interest in each other. These points are captured in the extract below.

About three quarters into the interview Greg explained that he would spend ‘every

effort to make sex better and not be in a sexually dull relationship’ but, at the same

time, he explained that he ‘wouldn’t work forever’. At this point Greg was asked:

Extract 11

AT: So is ‘dull’ the same as ‘boring’?

Greg: It’s not equivalent but I suppose:: after a lot of ‘dull’ sex happens, it could

be said to be boring.

AT: Is it important for a sexual relationship?

Greg: Is sexual boredom important for a sexual relationship? Oh yes! You gonna

have to live with it in the bad times no matter what you do or what you expect or

what you would like ‘cos you got to create a balance between your and the

other’s interests. [. . .] I think it’s a natural thing for males or females, for a

couple, for anyone. I think that in a long-term relationship it’s bound to happen.

[. . .] you gonna have to see to it (.) otherwise sex would just be:: boring and dull.

[. . .] People are not discussing it with each other enough [. . .]. Any relationship

has got to be worked on (.) and err:: people can experience boredom in their sex

life but I mean (.) it does not mean it’s the end of it. Lots of people (.) I mean

some people hold the idea that (.) love is very melodramatic and has nothing to

82 Aneta D. Tunariu & Paula Reavey

do with good sex and laugh at you if you appreciate it. I disagree with that.

(Greg, Q13)

Moreover, when we contrast the argument developed in this fragment from Greg’s

‘story’ to the one that was presented in Extract 1, we have an illustration of the fact that

our participants’ accounts, as with every day talk in general, are dilemmatic and contain

contradictions within the course of the same conversational occurrence. (Billig et al.,

1988).

In the extract below, for example, on the other hand, Harry rejects the notion that

sexual boredom, (as in ‘boring sex’) can or should even materialize as an issue in the

presence of ‘genuine’ love. Whilst agreeing that it is a common feature of all

relationships, he challenges the view that this makes it a natural event:

Extract 12

AT: Going back to the scale [contained in the questionnaire] (.) you disagree with

the statement ‘It’s only natural to grow tired of having sex with the same partner?

Harry: I’ve disagreed because I think it quite common but it isn’t natural (.) if you

know:: that you are in love with the other person you not gonna let the fact that

you know you’d wish to have better sex affect it. If you’re genuinely in love with

them you’ll not actually:: get bored of having sex with them, you know. If you love

the person no matter what they do sexually it’ll be exciting to you because is that

person doing it (Harry: a 25-years-old Caucasian, ofﬁce manager, in current ‘gay’

relationship for six months; Q30).

Although Harry distinguishes ‘boring’ sexual acts from ‘boredom’ (by drawing a

distinction between wishing sex was better and ‘being bored’ with sex with one’s

partner) what seems to prevent him from arriving at a more ﬂexible formulation of

sexual boredom are the kind of prescriptions that he attaches to the notion of ‘true love’.

In spite of ‘wishing for better sex’ and ‘knowing’ that current sexual stimulation and

satisfaction are in competition with one’s ideal, subjective needs, Harry expects partners

to resist (the ‘temptation’ of) entertaining views of their sex life that would render it as

non-exciting or boring. Earlier in the interview Harry explained that he has a lower ‘sex

drive’ than his partner and, ‘on occasions’, he prefers the kind of sex which ‘might be

described as dull and un-experimentative’. He also expressed his scepticism of the

possibility that lustful passionate sex could be sustained in longer term sexual relations

given the inevitable differences between peoples’ attitudes to and drives for sex. Harry

describes love as ‘the cement that holds a relationship together, ‘‘because no one can be

happy with their sexual partners all the time so there has to be tolerance and forgiveness;

if you actually think you love them you have to provide that’’ ’ (Q13). Harry, it seems,

embraces over-pessimistic views of sexual boredom and idealistic, uncompromising,

views of ‘true love’ as a way of dealing with his uncertainty and nagging doubts about his

partner ﬁnding sex with him boring.

From within the ‘coupled/in love’ conversational context the phenomenon of sexual

boredom, thus, provokes a shift from emphasising the body as the ‘driving force’ behind

an individual coming to experience and handle ‘sexual boredom’, to the requirements of

83Men in love

‘cerebral’ appreciations of emotionality, companionship and ‘true’ love. This shift draws

on the premises of ‘the pure relationship’ and it does appear to involve a form of

intimacy that is less about ‘passionate love’ and more about ‘democratic love’. This form

of intimacy, Giddens (1992) proposed, relies on mutual self-disclosure, pleasuring and

equal appreciation of each other’s uniqueness. The emphasis on men’s sexual

proﬁciency (a ‘real’ man is good at sex) which prioritizes passion is maintained but

modiﬁed to involve a greater appreciation of the emotional aspects of sexual

relationships and more democratic attitudes towards both partners’ sexual and personal

needs, and towards sex that is not as ‘good’ as it ought to be.

Extract 13:

AT: In the questionnaire you have marked sexual differences as a common cause

of friction—can you elaborate on this?

Dan: Yeah. In my relationship I would:: spend a lot of time reassuring my

partner. I tell her that ‘I’m not gonna condemn you or judge you if you ought to

carry out a fantasy that you have’. I say ‘I want to give you freedom to express your

self. I’m supporting:: you, I’m not against you. This is what I want as well:: (.) she

can act upon her instincts [. . .] [since if] I give you something, really and truly I

would like to receive that back. And it’s like, if I don’t receive that (.) it’s like is like

come on:: [he laughs] you know what I mean? I know is not meant to be like that

[romantic love requires sacriﬁce] but I think us being humans:: it has to be

reciprocal (Dan Q4).

In the extract above Dan lays down conditions for male sexual proﬁciency. These

conditions relate to the expertize needed to prevent dull, mechanical sex and,

hence, procure and sustain ‘passion’ in his long-term relationship. At the same time

he also emphasizes his open-minded, permissive understanding of his (female)

partner’s sexuality. By doing so, he de-polarizes the two possible ways of being

masculine that are made available to a speaker from within either of the two

competing conversational contexts: the individual/private and the coupled/in love;

namely the sexually proﬁcient and the liberally proﬁcient subject positions,

respectively. This ‘merger’ opens up room for negotiation and here, in heterosexual

talk, it is proposed to accommodate women’s natural drive towards love and

emotionality in a climate of equal co-operation and mutual fulﬁlment. Within the

ideological conventions of the ‘pure relationship’ the ‘sexual boredom as a

reasonable trade off for love’ discourse, requires that the task of sustaining ‘hot’

sex is something that both partners are jointly responsible. By ‘pure relationships’

Giddens (1992: 58) means situations ‘where a social relation is entered into for its

own sake, for what can be derived by each person from a sustained association with

each another; and which is continued only in so far as it is thought by both parties

to deliver enough satisfaction for each individual to stay within it’. But, as is

noticeable in this second extract from Dan’s narrative, his sense of actualization and

self-expression as a successful sexual partner remains frustrated by his partner’s

apparent reluctance or unwillingness to capitalize on, that is receive and conﬁrm,

his liberal-sexual proﬁciency. Yet ‘it is not a simple thing’ he tells us; and there is

84 Aneta D. Tunariu & Paula Reavey

nothing that he ‘can do about it anyway’. Frustrated? Yes. Yet he continues with the

negotiations required to ‘save’ this relationship:

Extract 14

AT: In the questionnaire you say that the quality remained unchanged but the

frequency of enjoyable sex has decreased?

Dan: I’ll say it’s because our life style has changed. We work late:: which does take

a lot of our time. So obviously sex has decreased, naturally. I’m saying decreased

understandably:: and not because love has gone or that our relationship is going

bad. It has decreased but I understand her she understands me. It is nothing I can

do about it anyway. If I didn’t understand enough I would say ‘I’m out of here!’

[AT: Why?]

Dan: Because:: it’s like you know, I’m ready [. . .] and we’re in a common

relationship and you don’t hate me and you got to listen to me too. But because I

understand her she has good reasons so. We have a relationship and I’m not

blind::, I’m not a pig (.) it is not a simple thing. (Dan, Q13).

Dan ‘understands’ that his current sex life is unsatisfactory and borders on being

‘boring’, but he also ‘recognizes’ that this is not due to relationship problems or

defective love. This should be a reasonable arrangement under the premises postulated

earlier, but it seems it is not. He dis-aligns himself from the acts that are expected from

‘a pig’ (which can be taken to imply a ‘macho’ man) and is persistent on what other, less

‘understanding’ men would do. A ‘macho man’ would forcefully express his

dissatisfaction and be tempted to leave an unfulﬁlling sexual scenario where sexual

satisfaction (calibrated by masculine needs) is repeatedly problematic.

Men clearly have access to more positive formulations for constructing, deﬁning and

experiencing their sexuality (and so yielding more power in sexual relations) but ‘they

are also constrained’ by the meanings and lifestyles prescribed by the dominant

patriarchal hetero-sexuality (Holland et al., 1994: 27). In their analysis of young men’s

talk on masculinity Holland et al. (1998: 170), for example, show how ‘[t]heir strategies

for dealing with their potential vulnerability and struggles to be successfully masculine,

to emerge as young gladiators rather than wimps, involve them deﬁning their sexuality in

terms of male needs, desires and satisfaction’. They also argue that whilst ‘enticed’ by

the ideal of hegemonic masculinity (e.g. strength, coolness, virility, sexual prowess) in

their daily lives (young) men often take issue with ‘the male-in-the-head’ and create

strategies for resisting its pervading cultural pressures. Wetherell & Edley’s (1999: 352)

examination of (adult) men’s negotiation of hegemonic masculinity similarly concluded

that for a sophisticated understanding of this aspect of men’s lives ‘we need to allow for

the possibility that complicity and resistance can be mixed together’. Such contentions

ﬁt well with the discursive procedures that the participants we interviewed engaged in.

Contrary to the common belief that men’s and women’s sexuality is dichotomous and

that men are typically conﬁned to a ‘body centred’ rather than a ‘person centred’

orientation to sex (Hatﬁeld et al., 1988) the participants sense-making repertoires also

contain more conventionally feminine representations of sex and sexual relations.

Participants in our study do, for example, also celebrate the emotionality and the

85Men in love

communication/expression of affect and intimacy through sexual encounters, and

display ‘permissive’ discourses when negotiating sexual boredom in their and their

partners’ lives.

What is being realized, therefore, is a proposal for negotiating the dilemma of

experiencing ‘boring sex’ whilst being a partner in a loving relationship. But this is not

and should not be read as a neat and ﬁnal resolution. Rather, what we have outlined

here is one of the possible ways of sense-making that is permitted by the culturally

available knowledge pertinent to sexual boredom. These participants collectively share

the versions of sexual boredom and the procedures for dealing with the tensions

between them that we have identiﬁed here, but there is also variation in the ways these

articulations are appropriated (e.g. Harry, Extract 12). Moreover, the unresolved

ideological tensions that these linguistic repertoires contain continue to spur further

scrutiny and discontents with ‘sexual boredom as a reasonable trade-off for ‘true love’

(e.g. Extract 14). One of the reasons for this is that monogamy – a primary, long-term,

domestically bound sexual relationship – remains as the chief ideological framework

for the very construction of the concept of sexual boredom. In summary there are two

central points we want to make here. The ﬁrst is that discourses of sexual boredom

have become a viable linguistic resource in our culturally shared taken for granted

knowledge about long-term relationships. The second is that people do deploy them

when trying to make sense of romantic love, sex and the anxieties surrounding its

pleasures.

Conclusion

The tensions between individual men’s construal of their sexual drives, entitlements and

successfulness as a sexual partner, and their responsibilities as loving partners, is an area

that has so far remained obscured by the psychological literature that focuses on sexual

boredom as a personality trait (Watt & Ewing, 1996) or as something that is deeply

embedded in an evolutionarily specialized psychological mechanism of men’s sexuality

(Wilson, 1988; Symons, 1992). The aim of this paper was to address complexities in the

discursive strategies that the men we interviewed used to account for the presence or

absence of sexual boredom, and their attempts to reconcile the conﬂict between their

personal sexual needs and the requirements associated with long-term monogamy.

These participants’ talk of sexual boredom emerged from within two different but highly

intertwined conversational, and hence discursive, contexts, these being: the persona-

lized and ‘inherently structured’ context of male sexual needs, and the ‘coupled’ and

emotionally ‘attached’ context pertaining to liberal attitudes towards companionship

and ‘true love’. A claim of being in love prompts men to adapt their ‘natural’ sexual

proﬁciency so that it is both tolerant of and able to overcome the inevitable episodes of

boring sex by formulating repertoires of skill, vigilance and industriousness. It also

prompts them to reconﬁgure sex and passion so as to accommodate a more liberal,

caring and comfortable model of intimacy, by formulating repertoires relating to the

‘real couple’. The ‘modern man’ in long-term commitment is both sexually proﬁcient

(inherently) and liberally proﬁcient (through conscious decision). In summary our

analysis allows us to identify the following features of the sexual boredom discourse:

86 Aneta D. Tunariu & Paula Reavey

(i) Sexual boredom is something that men are likely to experience in long-term

sexually exclusive relationships: All ‘Regular guys get bored’ due to the nature of

their sexuality;

(ii) Sex becoming boring is a natural, inevitable, progressive characteristic of all

long-term relationships: ‘Irregular guys get bored’ since ‘boring sex’ turns to

‘sexual boredom’ only if one ‘lets it’. By endorsing liberal – sexual proﬁciency

strategies partners can jointly manage the issue of sexual boredom;

(iii) Dealing with the threat of sexual boredom (boredom with boring sex), then,

becomes a reasonable trade off for ‘true love’ and long-term companionship.

Recognizing the role played by discourse in organizing and deﬁning our private lives

does not force us into denying that all human actions are embodied and involve

physiological responses, or that thought and language need cognitive abilities, or that

emotionality requires appraisals and personal signiﬁcance (e.g. Parkinson, 1996;

Edwards, 1997; Cromby & Nightingale, 1999; Willig, 1999; Gillies et al., in press), but

the point we want to hammer home is that ‘the dominant contribution to the way that

aspect of our lives unfolds comes from the social world, by way of its linguistic practices’

(Harre´, 1986: 5). Research has shown novelty, mystery and uncertainty alongside

physical and psychological distance, danger, conﬂict and hostility (e.g. Stoller, 1979;

Person, 1999) to instigate and facilitate sexual passion for both men and women (e.g.

Kernberg, 1988; Schwartz, 1994). But sexual interest and desire for sex with a partner

has been noted to decrease as familiarity and/or habituation (of sexual arousal) increased

(e.g. Lazarus, 1988; Schwartz, 1994; Plaud et al., 1997; Kaplan, 1995). Poverty of novel

stimulation through monotony, routine and familiarity or habituation does not,

however, necessarily lead an individual to appraise an occurrence as an experience of

boredom (e.g. O’Hanlon, 1981; Perkins & Hill, 1985; Dyer-Smith & Wesson, 1997).

That is, these do not produce the negative affects such as restlessness and frustration, or

the labelling of these as boredom, as long as the ongoing circumstance maintains its

purpose (e.g. having sex with a partner is not regarded as pointless) and meaningfulness

for the individual (Askins, 1980; Barbalet, 1999: 635). ‘Sexual boredom’, then, cannot

be seen as an emotional reaction to a boring event ‘suffered by a passive participant’

(Harre´, 1986: 5) as suggested by some psychologists, but is better seen as a discursive

practice used in the course of evaluating particular ‘bodily perturbations’ (Ibid.) and/or

psychological anxieties, or in managing changes in our (and other peoples’) actions;

such evaluations are ‘part of an on-going construction of meaning which is established

(if only temporarily) at the time of its reﬂective identiﬁcation’ (Askins, 1980: 135).

Clearly, people either do or do not have a particular experience and researchers should

not ‘disregard experience as a source of knowledge’ (Ramazanoglu & Holland, 1999:

381). However, this cannot be treated as unmediated by the social parameters where it

unfolds (e.g. the event of an empirical inquiry) or detached from the social domain

where it was produced and differentiated.

The greater openness to sexual issues (e.g. access to sex education) set in motion

by the 1960s ‘sexual revolution’ is also linked to more liberal sexual morality and the

emergence and apparent ascendancy of the ‘pure relationship’ (Giddens, 1992). This,

Giddens argues, has opened the way for a range of choices for self-expression, many of

87Men in love

which were, until recently, openly problematized, such as women’s sexual autonomy

and same sex relationships. ‘We can envisage the development of an ethical framework

for a democratic personal order, which in sexual relationships and other personal

domains conforms to a model of conﬂuent love’ (Giddens, 2002: 448). Other social

theorists do not share Giddens’ optimism and argue for a less straightforward outcome

for the ‘modern couple’; one marked by dissatisfactions, negotiations and compro-

mises (e.g. Duncombe & Marsden, 1995; Jensen-Campbell et al., 1995; Holland et al.,

1998; Jamieson, 1998, 2002). Whilst ‘the pure relationship’ is an attractive ideology,

and one to be aspired to, it is misguided to think that gender equality has been fully

achieved and that the constant work of realizing ‘democratic intimacy’ has come to

take precedence in peoples’ repertoires of relationship management (Jamieson, 2002)

It is also problematic to overlook the anxieties contained within sexual relationships;

anxieties (about, for example, desire for sex, performance and maintenance of

passionate ‘marriages’) that are still often gender speciﬁc. Our discourse analysis of the

interview-transcripts of these twelve men allows us to begin to highlight yet another of

what Giddens (2002: 448) refers to as, ‘sources of strain’ upon the realization of

democratized personal sexual lives and relationships: being in (true) love necessities

(men) living with (the threat of) sexual boredom. Partners in a ‘real couple’ (involving

men with ‘genuine’ feelings of love) can, our participants maintain, deal with having

their sexual needs un-satisﬁed if they are committed enough to be willing to

compromise and co-operate towards a mutually satisfying sexual relationship. Yet the

issue over how much men as partners ‘in love’ can tolerate and forgive ‘boring sex’ in

long-term romantic relationships is not as straightforward and remains dilemmatic.

Notes

[1] Watt and Ewing offer their SBS as ‘an individual difference measure of the tendency to experience

boredom with the sexual aspects of one’s life’ (1996: 57).

[2] Current work on the theory of discourse includes a number of distinct strands for approaching the

analysis of discourse with differing focal points for research (see e.g. Burr, 1995; Willig, 2001) but, as

Potter & Wetherell (1995: 81) point out these differences ‘should not be painted too sharply’ since

‘answering DA [discourse analysis] questions usually necessitates a combined focus on discursive

practices [what people do or accomplish with a particular manner of talking] and resources [what

kind of linguistic resources do people drawn on in the course of their talk]’ (see also Wetherell,

1998).

[3] Although boredom is a relatively new word (it ﬁrst appeared in the English language in 1832) it

retained some of the negative connotations of its ancestry, an emotion called acedia that was

made problematic by early monastic doctrine. Documentation on its phenomenology, however,

closely matches those of ‘modern’ boredom (Harre´, 1983; Sorabji, 2000: 359). Acedia referred to

a spiritual sin primarily related to ‘slackness and indifference in spiritual exercise’ and was later

extended to explain ‘lay’ people’s emotional and motivational conduct (Peters, 1975: 499). It

became a highly disliked emotional event since people’s behaviour was expected to display

continual and constant concentration of their devotion to, in this case, God even under

physiologically/cognitive tedious situations (Lyman, 1986).

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Contributors

NETA D. TUNARIU, BSc hons

AULA REAVEY, PhD in Psychology

Appendix A

Transcription Convention. Adapted after Edwards & Potter (1992) and Wetherell & Edley (1999).

(.) = indicates a short pause (e.g. 0.5 – 5 seconds)

:: e.g. reca::ll = colons used to signal elongation

italics e.g. recall = text in italics shows added emphasis

:: & italics e.g. recall:: = indicates elongation & emphasis

[. . .] e.g. [. . .] = indicates text extracted during transcription due to poor

quality of recording

[text] e.g. [recall] = indicates information added by the author for the purpose of

clarity

Appendix B

The 18 items of the Sexual Boredom Scale (Watt & Ewing, 1999, p.60).

Sexual monotony factor

12. Sex frequently becomes an unexciting and predictable routine

15. Maintaining my sexual interest in a relationship is never difﬁcult

10. Sex frequently becomes unexciting in a long-term relationship

13. I often get bored having sexual intercourse with the same partner

18. Sex with the same partner can become tiring over time

16. It would be very hard for me to ﬁnd a relationship that is sexually exciting enough

11. It’s only natural to grow old of having sex with the same partner

1. I frequently ﬁnd it difﬁcult to sustain my sexual interest in a relationship

14. I get tired of having sex in the same ‘old ways’

Sexual stimulation factor

8. I would not stay in a relationship that was sexually dull

4. I would prefer a short-term sexual relationship to a longer one

3. I get very restless if I remain in the same sexual relationship for any length of time

2. I could never get enough sexual pleasure from just one relationship

17. I’m more interested in excitement and stimulation in a sexual relationship than security and

commitment

6. I sometimes doubt whether or not I could remain sexually faithful in a long-term (or monogamous)

relationship

93Men in love

5. It takes very little change and variety in a relationship to keep me sexually satisﬁed

7. I prefer sexual relationships that are exciting and unpredictable

9. I usually feel constraint and frustrated in a long-term sexual relationship

Note: When in test format ‘responses are made on a Likert-type scale ranging from (1) Highly disagree to (7)

Highly agree. Higher scores indicate greater sexual boredom’ (p.59). Items 5 and 15 are reversed scores.

94 Aneta D. Tunariu & Paula Reavey

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Adult male appreciation of his body can affect sexual satisfaction. In addition, boredom caused by a lack of variety in sexual relations can also have an impact on sexual satisfaction in marriage. The aim of this study was to examine the role of body appreciation in predicting increased sexual satisfaction, either directly or indirectly through the mediation of sexual boredom, in early and middle-aged married men. Data were collected from a total of 382 participants (mean age 38 years) using a cross-sectional survey method with convenience sampling. Participants completed the extended satisfaction with life scale (ESWLS), body appreciation scale-2 (BAS-2), and sexual boredom scale (SBS). The results showed that sexual boredom partially mediated the indirect role of body appreciation in predicting sexual satisfaction (B=0.159; z=4.383; sig.=0.001<0.05) because body appreciation can also directly predict increased sexual satisfaction (B=0.814, t=11.418; sig.=0.001<0.05). This result indicates that body appreciation as an internal factor plays a greater role in predicting high sexual satisfaction in early and middle adulthood men.

(055) Sexual Boredom and Sexual Desire in Men and Women in Long-term Relationships: A Latent Profile Analysis

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May 2023

Introduction Research suggests a linkage between sexual boredom and sexual desire but without a detailed understanding how these are intertwined. Individuals in long-term monogamous relationships seem especially affected by low sexual desire and might present with varying degrees of sexual boredom. Objective This study aimed to identify different groups of women and men in long-term, monogamous, and cohabiting relationships based on their levels of sexual boredom and sexual desire and to verify if they differed in sexual orientation, relationship duration, sexual satisfaction, and relationship satisfaction. Methods A latent profile analysis (LPA) was conducted using online self-reported data from a sample of 1223 Portuguese participants aged 18-66 years (M = 32.75, SD = 6.11) on sexual boredom, and sexual desire (partner related, attractive other related, and solitary). Regression analyses were conducted to explore predictors and correlates of the latent profile classification. Results LPA indicated three distinct profiles in women and two profiles in men. Two of the women’s profiles and one the men’s profile were characterized with above-average sexual boredom. Among women, above average sexual boredom was paired with below-average sexual desire for partner in two profiles. Women in the profile with the highest level of sexual boredom also presented the highest levels of solitary and of attractive-other sexual desire and had substantially lower odds of reporting been strictly heterosexual. In men with high sexual boredom, levels of attractive-other and solitary sexual desire were higher than among men who reported below-average sexual boredom. Both groups of men presented similar above average levels of sexual desire for their partners. Latent profiles characterized by below-average sexual boredom had higher sexual (both men and women) and relationship satisfaction (women only) compared to other participants. Relationship duration did not predict profile membership. Conclusions These results indicate that lower levels of sexual boredom are related with better sexual outcomes in long-term relationships and suggest and that higher levels of sexual boredom might be linked to low sexual desire and to high sexual desire. Women’s dyadic sexual desire seems to vary according to the level of sexual boredom, as in higher sexual boredom is linked to lower sexual desire for partner. Men’s level of sexual desire for partner does not differ between men with different levels of sexual boredom, but higher sexual boredom seems to be accounting for higher levels of the men’s solitary and attractive-other sexual desire. Results potentially mean that women prone to sexual boredom might require active implementation of novelty in their sexual relationships to manage low sexual desire for familiar partners and that autoeroticism and fantasizing about attractive others might contribute to higher overall sexual desire, but not necessarily to higher satisfaction. In addition, men highly prone to sexual boredom might be seeking solitary sexual activities and/or sexual activities with attractive others to manage problematic high sexual desire. This study adds evidence that sexual boredom and relationship characteristics are better predictors of sexual desire in long-term relationships than relationship length and that sexual boredom might be particularly relevant for the understanding of low sexual desire and of hypersexuality. Disclosure No

Sexual boredom and sexual desire in long-term relationships: a latent profile analysis

Article

Jan 2023

Background Research suggests a general link between sexual boredom and sexual desire, but its understanding is currently very limited. Aim To identify distinct (latent) groups of women and men in long-term relationships based on their reported levels of sexual boredom and sexual desire. Methods Latent profile analysis (LPA) was conducted in an online sample of 1223 Portuguese participants aged 18 and 66 years (mean ± SD, 32.75 ± 6.11), using indicators of sexual boredom and partner-related, attractive other–related, and solitary sexual desire to categorize participants. Multinomial logistic regression analysis was carried out to explore predictors and correlates of the latent profiles. Outcomes Sexual boredom was assessed by the Sexual Boredom Scale, while sexual desire was measured with the Sexual Desire Inventory. Results As compared with women, men reported higher levels of sexual boredom and sexual desire. LPA indicated 3 profiles in women and 2 profiles in men. Among women, P1 was characterized by above-average sexual boredom, below-average partner- and attractive other–related sexual desire, and very low solitary sexual desire; P2 by below-average sexual boredom, attractive other–related sexual desire, and solitary sexual desire and above-average partner-related sexual desire; and P3 by above-average sexual boredom, attractive other–related sexual desire, and solitary sexual desire and below-average partner-related sexual desire. In men, P1 was characterized by high sexual boredom, above-average partner-related sexual desire, and high attractive other–related and solitary sexual desire and P2 by below-average sexual boredom and above-average partner-related, attractive other–related, and solitary sexual desire. The latent profiles did not differ according to relationship duration. Overall, the sole consistent correlate of the latent categorization was sexual satisfaction. Clinical Implications In women, above-average levels of sexual boredom were linked to below-average levels of partner-related desire, which suggests likely benefits of helping the couple to minimize or cope better with their sexual routines. In men, participants in the 2 profiles did not differ in partner-related sexual desire, suggesting that clinical interventions dealing with male sexual boredom should investigate factors beyond the current relationship. Strengths and Limitations This study explored different facets of sexual desire and used LPA, rendering advantages over previous research. The male sample has lower statistical power than the female sample. Conclusion Patterns of sexual boredom and sexual desire among individuals in long-term monogamous relationships are distinct and consistently related to sexual satisfaction in women and men and to relationship satisfaction among only women, which have important clinical ramifications.

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Article

Feb 2021

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Article

Dec 2020

This study explored the definitions of sexual boredom in a large community sample of Portuguese individuals. A thematic analysis of written responses to the question “What is sexual boredom for you?” was conducted with 653 participants aged 18 to 75 (M = 33.14; SD = 9.01) of multiple genders, sexual orientations, and relationship types. Three main themes were identified: definitions of sexual boredom, predisposing and maintenance factors of sexual boredom, and managing of sexual boredom. Sexual monotony, sexual desire, and hedonic value stand out as defining features of sexual boredom. Findings suggest the need of a multidimensional measure of sexual boredom.

Evaluation of efficacy of sexual novelty as a novel therapeutic strategy to treat Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder in women in monogamous heterosexual relationships attributing reduced sexual desire to sexual boredom: A prospective randomized study

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Jan 2025

Hypoactive Sexual Desire Dysfunction (HSDD) in women has a complex origin, and addressing modifiable factors can lead to the best outcomes. One contributing factor is sexual boredom, particularly in women in monogamous relationships and we decided to evaluate sexual novelty as a therapeutic strategy in such women using prospective randomized study design These women were recruited following screening using a Decreased Sexual Desire Screener (DSDS). Participants’ baseline sexual boredom was assessed using the Sexual Boredom Scale (SBS). Reasons for sexual boredom were identified, and customized novelty packages were developed accordingly. The participants were divided into two groups: Group A received psychotherapy alone (n = 196), while Group B (n = 202) received psychotherapy along with a customized sexual novelty package. Sexual desire levels were measured and compared at baseline and after a six-month intervention using the Elements of Desire Questionnaire (EDQ). The groups were similar in age, duration of monogamy, SBS scores, and baseline EDQ scores. Post-intervention results indicated that the sexual novelty group experienced a statistically significant improvement in EDQ scores. Moreover, multiple regression models showed that lower age of the participant and a longer period of monogamy adversely affected sexual desire.

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Been There, Done That: The Impact of the Novelty of Penile Vaginal Intercourse (PVI) and Participants' Sex on Delay and Probability Discounting of PVI

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Delay and probability discounting tasks are useful for understanding aspects of decision making. The current study, which employed a mixed-model design to assess discounting of penile-vaginal intercourse (PVI), was conducted online with male and female participants recruited from Prolific (N = 300; mean age = 34.1 years). Results of the novel delay and probability discounting tasks indicated that as the delay to PVI increased, or as PVI became less certain to occur, participants were instead more likely to choose to receive oral sex, the reward initially indicated as less desirable. Having previously engaged in PVI, however, enhanced this reversal of preferences on both tasks, which suggests PVI loses some of its value when no longer novel. Males and females similarly discounted PVI on the delay discounting task, which suggests biological sex may not impact the propensity to wait for a preferred sexual behavior. On the probability discounting task, however, males were more averse to a reduced probability of PVI occurring and instead opted for receiving oral sex. The sexual behavior discounting tasks developed in the current study, and ones like it, may prove useful for identifying preferences in sexual behaviors, and ultimately enhance sexual and relationship satisfaction.

A Cluster Analysis on Sexual Boredom Profiles in A Community Sample of Men and Women

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Full-text available

Jun 2021
J SEX RES

Research evidence of the attributes of sexual boredom is extremely limited. Understanding variability in the experience of sexual boredom may offer relevant insights for the field of human sexuality. This study aimed to explore the co-occurrence of sexual boredom and other sexuality-related dimensions. The sample consisted of 1021 participants aged between 18 and 75 years old (M = 32.68, SD = 8.79). A gender-stratified cluster analysis was performed to classify individuals regarding their scores on sexual boredom, general boredom, sexual sensation seeking, sexual desire, sexual excitation, sexual pleasure, and sexual satisfaction. A three-cluster solution was revealed for both men and women. Based on our findings, we put forward a profile for the sexually bored individual, who is more likely to be married or cohabiting with a partner, to have a boredom prone personality, to lack sexual sensation seeking, experience low sexual pleasure and satisfaction, and to present with sexual arousal and/or desire problems. Women dealing with sexual boredom might present low sexual desire for their partner but experience high sex desire for attractive others. Results are critically discussed and implications for sexual therapy explored.