You might know and love birth control for its many benefits: namely, clear skin, decreased PMS symptoms, and, of course, preventing a little nugget from entering your life before you're ready for him/her. But a new study finds that sticking with or quitting your hormonal birth control routine can also impact how satisfied you are with your partner and your sex life.
For the study, which was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, researchers surveyed more than 100 newlywed couples about their past use of hormonal birth control and their satisfaction with their marriage and their sex life. The first group of 48 couples was surveyed every six to eight months for fours years, while the second group of 70 couples were surveyed every four months over the course of a year. All the men and women were photographed and had their attractiveness rated by trained research assistants (harsh, we know).
When the researchers analyzed the results of these two studies, they found some pretty fascinating info about how your birth control influences your love life. For starters, the study found some evidence that women who were on hormonal birth control when they met their partners were more likely to choose someone less attractive. They also found that women who changed up their birth control routine after they met their husbands (by either ditching it or starting to take hormonal contraception) were less satisfied with their sex life than those who stuck with their routine. However, if the women stopped popping Pills after they got hitched, they were more satisfied with their marriage than they were at the beginning—if their husband was rated as attractive, that is. Finally, women who had less attractive husbands were less satisfied with their marriage when they stopped taking the Pill after getting married.
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So what's up with all these crazy correlations? As you might have predicted, your hormones could be to blame, says Michelle Russell, the lead study author and graduate student of psychology at Florida State University. She says that women have a stronger preference for guys with qualities that indicate that they'll make healthy, beautiful babies—such as facial attractiveness—when they are most fertile. And since hormonal contraception can weaken the process that causes women to love manly-men during certain times of the month, women who meet their S.O. while on BC may care less about looks than when they aren't on it. In other words, it’s not that women using birth control don’t recognize that their partner is or isn't good looking; instead, their partner’s attractiveness could start to matter more to once they stopped using birth control—and that could influence how they feel about their marriage.
This isn't the first study that's associated a change in your taste with birth control. One study asked women who were not taking the Pill to manipulate images of men to make them more attractive. Three months later, those women took the test again after having started birth control. Researchers discovered that the images of men from the first sans-birth control experiment were much more masculine than the images created when the women were on the Pill.
Another experiment in the same study looked at couples who met while the women were on birth control and compared them to another group of couples who met while the women were not on the Pill. Photos of the guys were shared with other participants who rated how masculine the guys were (using qualities like a defined jaw and eyebrow prominence to judge). The results of the experiment showed that the men dating women who weren't on BC were much more masculine than the Pill-takers' boyfriends.
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While these findings are seriously fascinating, you shouldn't worry that your relationship is doomed if you decide to kick the Pill or that you need to beware of birth control goggles while Tindering. The fact is that this study is on the small side and is completely correlational—meaning the results might show more of a connection than there really is. More research is needed to show if the Pill can actually cause you to change your "type." And let's be real here: Attractiveness is far from everything in a relationship, anyways.
MORE: 7 Crazy, Mind-Blowing Facts You Never Knew About the Pill
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