Finding the<i>Love Guru</i>in You: Examining the Effectiveness of a Sexual Communication Training Program for Married Couples

Abstract

One specific area of communication that has the potential to elicit a wide range of outcomes, such as enhancing a couple's feelings of intimacy, offending one or both partners causing conflict, improving the communication climate within the relationship, or embarrassing the partners involved, is the discussion of sex. The current project theorized how to initiate and maintain sexual coaching conversations, taught participants the components of skillful and unskillful messages in an online training program, and then evaluated the overall effectiveness of said program. Forty couples participated in an online sexual coaching training program and completed several pretest and posttest measures. Results reveal that participation in the training program led to an increase in sexual and relationship satisfaction, a decrease in sexual communication apprehension, and an increase in sexual coaching knowledge and skill. These results, along with the value of interventive research and the implications of this training program, are discussed.