Women's emotional well-being: The importance of communicating sexual needs

Abstract

Women's emotional and sexual well-being have been shown in recent work to depend on gynaecological health. Women experiencing gynaecological problems are generally worse off on measures of depression, self-esteem and satisfaction with their sexual life than those who either have no gynaecological problems or have undergone hysterectomy. The present work, based on a study of 656 Western Australian women, shows that psychosexual health is also strongly related to the quality of a woman's communication with her partner about sexual needs. The disparities in emotional well-being between those who communicate well and those who communicate poorly in this area are of greater magnitude than the disparities associated with health status. Further, the disparities attributable to quality of communication are unrelated to those associated with health status, so that the dependence of well-being on communication is essentially new information, and information of a kind that could support the development of useful non-medical interventions for problems which might otherwise be seen as primarily medical.