Sexual satisfaction and dissatisfaction in the marital relationships of male alcoholics seeking marital therapy.

Twenty-six married couples with alcoholic husbands who sought marital therapy were compared with two groups of couples without alcohol-related problems, 26 couples with marital conflict (MC) and 26 with no marital conflict (NC), on a range of sexual satisfaction variables. As predicted, the alcoholic and MC couples did not differ and both of these groups of couples reported less sexual satisfaction than the NC couples. Alcoholic and MC couples, in comparison with NC couples, reported less frequent intercourse, more change desired in intercourse frequency, greater misperception about the amount of change in sex frequency desired by their mate and more disagreement about sex. In addition, the finding that older alcoholics had less frequent intercourse replicated similar results by Jensen. Limitations of the present research and needed future research are discussed.