Relationship self-help has a load-bearing assumption running underneath a lot of its advice: split things evenly, and desire follows. That assumption has actual research behind it — for women. A 2022 study out of the same research pipeline found that women in equal relationships report more relationship satisfaction and, downstream of that, more desire for their partner than women in unequal ones. It’s one of the more cited findings in the “fix your relationship, fix your sex life” genre. A new study, “Sharing the love: Examining the impact of masculinity, relationship balance, and relationship satisfaction on men’s sexual desire,” published in Psychology & Sexuality on September 23, 2026, ran the same design on men. The fairness-to-desire link didn’t show up. Something else did.

Quick Verdict

Question	Answer
Who ran the study?	Isobel K. Wilson, Eva Johansen, and Simone Buzwell, published in Psychology & Sexuality
Sample	118 cisgender men in Australia, ages 18–39, mean age 28
What’s being measured?	Relationship power balance, relationship satisfaction, traditional masculinity beliefs, and two separate kinds of sexual desire — partnered and solitary
Core finding	Fairness didn’t predict men’s desire for partnered sex. Traditional masculinity beliefs did.
Where fairness did matter	Equal power predicted higher relationship satisfaction, which predicted lower solitary (masturbation) desire
Power split in the sample	101 of 118 men reported equal relationship power. The 17 in unequal relationships scored higher on traditional masculinity

Bottom line: For women, the documented pattern is fairness → satisfaction → more desire for a partner. For men in this sample, fairness → satisfaction → less desire to go it alone. What predicted wanting a partner wasn’t the relationship’s fairness. It was how strongly a man bought into traditional masculine norms.

What the Study Actually Tested

The researchers had 118 cisgender Australian men, most currently in relationships, answer questions about how power and responsibilities were split with their partner — decisions, chores, emotional labor, who bends. They separately completed a scale measuring adherence to traditional masculinity norms: self-reliance, restricting emotion, mechanical competence, and treating sexual conquest as a marker of status. Then two different desire measures, kept apart on purpose: desire for partnered sex, and desire for solo sex.

That split matters more than it sounds like it should. Most desire research — and most self-help built on top of it — treats “wanting sex” as one dial. This design treats it as two dials that can move independently, which is exactly what happened here. Fairness moved one. Masculinity moved the other. Neither moved both.

What Predicts Men’s Partnered Desire, If Not Fairness?

Three variables competed to explain how much a man in the sample wanted partnered sex. Only one of them won:

1. Relationship fairness, directly or through satisfaction, did not predict it. The researchers found no direct or indirect path from equal power to wanting sex with a partner — the exact link that shows up reliably in the women’s research this study was modeled on.
2. Traditional masculinity beliefs predicted it instead. Men who scored higher on self-reliance, emotional restriction, and treating sex as a marker of status reported wanting partnered sex more, independent of how fair they rated their relationship.
3. Satisfaction alone didn’t move it either. Being happier in the relationship didn’t translate into wanting your partner more. It translated into wanting solo sex less — a different outcome entirely, covered next.

The Desire That Fairness Did Move

Fairness wasn’t irrelevant. It just landed somewhere the “equality boosts your sex life” framing doesn’t usually look. Men in relationships with a more equal balance of power reported higher relationship satisfaction — no surprise there, that part replicates plenty of prior work. What that satisfaction predicted was lower solitary desire. Less interest in masturbation, specifically, not less interest in sex generally.

Read plainly: a fair relationship made these men more content, and contentment showed up as needing to handle things alone less often. It didn’t show up as wanting their partner more. Those are two different mechanisms wearing the same word — “desire” — and self-help tends to talk about them as if they’re one thing that a good relationship simply increases across the board. This data says no. One dial responds to fairness. The other responds to something else entirely.

The 17 Men in Unequal Relationships

Most of the sample — 101 of 118 — described their relationship as having roughly equal power. The 17 who didn’t stand out for a specific reason: they scored higher on traditional masculinity than the men in equal relationships. The study doesn’t establish which way that runs. Maybe men who hold more traditional beliefs about gender roles are more likely to end up in, or tolerate, an unequally balanced relationship. Maybe being in an unequal relationship for other reasons pulls masculinity self-concept upward as a kind of compensation. The correlation is real. The direction isn’t settled by this design, and a subgroup of 17 is too small to lean on hard either way.

What is worth sitting with: masculinity beliefs were the variable doing the work on partnered desire across the whole sample, not just the unequal-relationship minority. Even among the 101 men in fair relationships, the ones who scored higher on traditional masculinity reported wanting partnered sex more. Fairness didn’t cancel that effect out.

Why the Female Research Doesn’t Transfer

The 2022 study this one was modeled on looked at 725 premenopausal women and found the pattern self-help has been running with ever since: equal relationships predicted more satisfaction, and satisfaction predicted more desire for a partner. That study also found inequity didn’t touch women’s solitary desire — desire for a partner was the dial that moved.

Run the identical logic on men and the dials swap. Fairness didn’t touch men’s partnered desire here. It touched their solitary desire, the dial that stayed still for women. Same input — relationship power balance — routing to a different output depending on who’s answering. A self-help framework built entirely on the female pattern (“make it fair and your partner will want you more”) isn’t wrong. It’s scoped to women, and this study is the first place that scope gets tested directly against men and comes back different.

Simone Buzwell, one of the study’s authors and a senior lecturer at Swinburne University of Technology, put it simply: male desire is more complex than people tend to expect, and what moves it for men includes factors that have nothing to do with the physical relationship itself.

Where This Fits With What This Site Keeps Finding

This is the third or fourth time a study crosses this desk finding that a relationship variable billed as universally good is actually conditional — good for satisfaction, silent or gendered on the outcome self-help actually promises. The mankeeping research found men’s declining friend networks routing emotional labor onto a female partner, and traditional gender-role beliefs predicting more of that labor absorption. The biological-aging marriage study found “happy marriage” hiding a set of health behaviors underneath the label that weren’t uniformly good for the person carrying them. Here, “equal relationship” is the label, and what’s hiding underneath is that it does real, measurable work — just not the work the female-desire research trained readers to expect it to do for men.

It also connects to the research on relationship power perception, which found men specifically underestimate how much sway they actually hold in a romantic relationship, more than they do in friendships. That study and this one are looking at power from opposite ends — one at how much men think they have, this one at what a fair split of it actually predicts — and both land on the same conclusion: men’s relationship to power inside a relationship doesn’t behave the way the more heavily studied female pattern would predict. The research on touch comfort is a useful companion here too — another case where a factor that sounds like it should matter equally for everyone (comfort with physical affection, there; fairness, here) turned out to predict different things for different people, once anyone actually checked.

What This Doesn’t Mean

• It doesn’t mean fairness is pointless for men. It predicted higher relationship satisfaction and lower solitary desire. That’s a real effect, just not the effect the “equality boosts desire” framing promises.
• It doesn’t mean traditional masculinity beliefs are good for a relationship. The study measured a correlation with partnered desire, not with relationship quality, communication, or a partner’s own satisfaction. Wanting sex more and being a good partner aren’t the same variable.
• It doesn’t prove causation in either direction. The design is correlational and cross-sectional. Whether masculinity beliefs drive desire, or something else drives both, isn’t settled here.
• It doesn’t generalize past the sample with full confidence. 118 men, Australian, mostly educated, mostly currently partnered, skewed heavily toward equal relationships (101 of 118). A more demographically varied or more unequal-relationship-heavy sample could land differently.
• It doesn’t mean the female research it’s modeled on is wrong. It means that research described women, specifically, and the assumption that the same mechanism runs the same way for men was untested until this study tested it.

What Actually Holds Up, Given This

• “Make things fair and desire will follow” is a claim about satisfaction, backed by real data, wearing a claim about desire that this study says doesn’t hold for men. Worth separating the two before building relationship advice on top of either one.
• If a man’s interest in his partner isn’t tracking how fair the relationship feels, that’s not automatically a red flag. This data says those two things aren’t linked for men the way self-help often assumes.
• Traditional masculinity beliefs correlating with more partnered desire isn’t an argument for cultivating those beliefs. The study didn’t measure whether that desire made relationships better — only that it existed.
• A fair relationship still buys something real: more satisfaction, less reliance on solo sex as a substitute. That’s a legitimate outcome on its own, even without the desire boost the female research would predict.

The Bottom Line

A study of 118 Australian men, modeled directly on research that found equal power predicts more sexual desire in women, found something different when it ran the same test on men. Fairness raised satisfaction. Satisfaction lowered solitary desire. Neither touched what men wanted from their partner — traditional masculinity beliefs did that instead, and did it whether or not the relationship was equal. Self-help has spent a long time treating “make it fair” as a universal fix for a flagging sex life. This study says the fix is real, just not universal, and not aimed at the outcome most people assume it is.

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Wilson, I. K., Johansen, E., & Buzwell, S., “Sharing the love: Examining the impact of masculinity, relationship balance, and relationship satisfaction on men’s sexual desire,” Psychology & Sexuality (2026). Additional coverage from PsyPost, September 2026. Background on the female pattern this study was modeled on: Psychology Today, “The Link Between Equality and Women’s Sexual Desire”, citing Johansen et al. (2022) in The Journal of Sex Research. Related reading: Mankeeping Linked to Women’s Burnout, Study Finds, Happy Marriage Speeds Aging With Bad Habits, Study Finds, You Underestimate Your Relationship Power, Study Finds, and Comfort With Touch Predicts Relationship Happiness.