Promoting healthy sexual relationships: The benefits of perspective‐taking and self‐expansion in interracial relationships

Abstract People in romantic relationships experience a decline in sexual desire as the relationship progresses, leading them to seek couples therapy. Discrimination and added stress exacerbate this decline. Prior research has identified self‐expansion (i.e., a person's need to expand their selves to take on more perspectives and worldviews) as a relational process to bolster sexual desire. It remains untested if self‐expansion can enhance sexual desire among couples who are the targets of discrimination, such as people in interracial relationships. We considered previous research that identified perspective‐taking as a process to promote positive self‐expansion (i.e., perceiving greater positive vs. negative traits from one's partner into their self‐concept) among White partners in interracial relationships. In our pre‐registered study, we predicted discrimination salience will be positively associated with positive self‐expansion for people who engage in high levels of perspective‐taking and negatively associated with positive self‐expansion for those who engage in low levels of perspective‐taking. In turn, greater positive self‐expansion would be associated with greater sexual desire. There was no interaction between discrimination salience and perspective‐taking on positive self‐expansion. Alternatively, we did find that White partners who considered their partner's perspective, regardless of discrimination salience, reported greater positive self‐expansion, which predicted greater sexual desire.