Men who have an average emotional and sexual relationship with their partner at home, experience more stress at work, compared to their counterparts in good or bad relationships, found a new survey conducted by the researchers from Sweden.

For more than five years, the study concentrated on and examined the effects of partner relationships on stress associated with work. The conclusion of the study is that those relationships either help relieve stress at work or boost it, pushing individuals over the edge. According to Ann-Christine Andersson Arnten, a psychology doctoral student from the University of Gothenburg, who carried out the research, either a person comes home to something that gives him/her a possibility to relax and recover or there is a situation that makes a relationship even more troubled.

For the study purposes, the investigators involved 900 men and women and asked all of them to rate whether their relationship with a partner had a positive or negative effect on their work life. Andersson Arnten also asked the participants to fill out appropriate questionnaires where the subjects had to rate the quality of their relationships as good, average or bad.

When the results were analyzed, the researchers revealed that, according to male participants, the quantity of sexual life in a relationship was much more important than anything else, whereas women said that they were more interested in the quality. The findings for the women in the survey were very predictable, exactly what the researchers have expected - women in good relationships were more likely to experience less stress at work, and the ones who rated their relationships as poor, had more stress at work.

However, when it came to men, they appeared to be quite a different story. "When we talked to the men, they said that when it is in-between, you have to put more effort into it," Andersson Arnten said. "You keep doing that until the relationship either becomes better or hopeless. When you get to that point, it does not really affect your health anymore," she said.

Andersson Arnten added in the conclusion that the findings of this survey also dismiss the myth that men completely separate work life from their private life.

Tags: Relationships For Men, Stress, Men's Health, Men's Studies

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