You can’t spell sex without ex. Unfortunately.
One of the regularities of breaking up is break-up sex.
No matter how much you think it REALLY isn’t going to help, no matter how much your friends warn you away from it, sometimes these things just happen, and you might feel guilt afterwards for doing it.
Well, it turns out you probably shouldn’t feel that way!
The study, published in Archives of Sexual Behavior, involved researchers from Wayne State University, Western University, and the University of Toronto Mississauga conducted two separate studies.
In the first, they analyzed the daily experiences of 113 people who were dealing with a recent breakup, which was followed up with an online survey two months later.
The questions that were asked involved whether or not participants had any physical contact their former partners, how attached they remained to those people, and how they felt at the end of each day.
In the second, 372 people reported on their actual and attempted sexual contact with an ex and whether or not they were still emotionally tied to them.
The results found that having sex with an ex didn’t have a negative influence on the post-breakup recovery mode. In fact, it helped the process along in a lot of the cases, particularly those who still had strong emotions for their recent ex.
Lead author of the study, Stephanie Spielmann of Wayne State University, said the following about its findings:
“This research suggests that societal handwringing regarding trying to have sex with an ex may not be warranted. The fact that sex with an ex is found to be most eagerly pursued by those having difficulty moving on, suggests that we should perhaps instead more critically evaluate people’s motivations behind pursuing sex with an ex.”
Spielmann also says that the whole process of breaking up needs further study, and that a two month window is really enough to dictate a full outcome, but still. Turns out that all your friends saying you made a mistake by heading into the bone zone with your ex were actually wrong. Bone zone away!
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