Love and Sexual Attitudes, Self-Disclosure and Sensation Seeking

Abstract

Love and sexuality are phenomena of central importance to certain types of intimate relationships. Although love has been a mainstream relationship variable in research, sexuality has often been explored only peripherally within a relationship context. Based on previous findings and using newly developed measures of love attitudes, sexual attitudes and self-disclosure, the present study explored the relation between love and sexuality and their mutual relations with self-disclosure and sensation seeking. Results (n = 218) indicated substantial correlations between love and sex attitudes, and between those variables and self-disclosure to a lover and to a friend, the ability to elicit self-disclosure, and sensation seeking. Males differed from females on only seven of 114 correlations, suggesting gender similarity in the pattern of variable relations. Such correlational evidence is helpful in interpreting mean differences between the sexes for several variables in this study and in previous research. This study shows that a multiplex of attitudes about love interlocks with attitudes about sexuality, and that both relate to other variables such as disclosure and sensation seeking. Such results begin the task of developing the characterizations of the love styles (Lee, 1973) and generalizing love-sex linkages towards the broader context of personality on the one hand, and the complex arena of personal relationships on the other.