Sexual Fantasies About Your Partner May Strengthen The Relationship

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Daydreaming about your sweetie could add some spark to your relationship, a new study shows. For many women, foreplay starts in the mind, so adding your partner to your mental fantasies may ramp up real life interactions. A team of Israeli social scientists discovered that fantasizing about your significant other can increase the strength of the relationship. This is called “dyadic fantasizing.”

Dyadic fantasizing can amp up your attraction to your partner and encourages you to invest more into the relationship.

“Daydreams have been found to increase feelings of love and connection that presumably foster pleasant future interactions,”  Baruch Ivcher and co-author Gurit Birnbaum, Ph.D. told Inverse. “The rewarding aspects of fantasizing might become associated with the partner and the relationship, coloring them in a more appealing light.”

The research team studied the study participants over four studies. The first asked the study group to fantasize about their partner or some else and then analyzed their desire to do “relationship-promoting activities” with their person. In the third and fourth studies, participants kept diaries and kept count of how often they fantasied about their person along with notes on how the relationship was going. As you can probably guess, fantasizing about someone else can weaken your relationship, but fantasizing about your partner was linked to a stronger connection.