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

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.