London - Newly married women who stop taking the Pill can have a radical change of heart over how attractive their husbands are, researchers have found.
They become less satisfied with husbands deemed to be less handsome, the study claimed, while men considered attractive saw their wives’ satisfaction rating rise.
The findings suggest hormonal contraceptives can interfere with the way women assess male attractiveness and how satisfied they are with their partner.
While relationships are usually built on a range of traits, the researchers warn that contraceptives can have an unexpected influence on what women look for in a partner.
The team monitored 48 couples for four years of marriage, and another 70 for a year. They asked the couples about their birth-control use and their marital and sexual satisfaction, and got independent judges to rate the attractiveness of the husbands’ faces based on photographs.
The US researchers, whose work was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also found that women who had not been taking the Pill when they met their husbands but later started also saw a change in how they felt about their relationship.
Those who changed their use of the Pill reported that their relationship became less sexually satisfying regardless of what their partner looked like.
The researchers suggested that the chemicals in hormonal contraceptives could affect women’s fertility, and therefore what they were looking for in a partner, but added that more work was required to explain their results.
In particular, they want to assess how different brands of birth control affect women. Study leader Michelle Russell, a psychologist at Florida State University, said: “Marital satisfaction is strongly associated with mental and physical health and a host of physical, mental and social outcomes for children.
“The fact that wives’ hormonal contraceptive use was linked to their marital satisfaction suggests that hormonal contraceptives may have far-reaching implications, both beneficial and harmful.”
The findings echo previous research that has indicated that hormonal contraceptives interfere with women’s preference for male body odour and can influence how sexually satisfying they find a relationship.
But fertility experts warned women against abandoning the Pill for the sake of their relationships.
Dr Allan Pacey, chairman of the British Fertility Society and a fertility expert at the University of Sheffield, warned: “To even think about coming on or off the Pill to influence any aspect of a relationship would be the wrong thing to do, in my opinion.
“The Pill is an important contraceptive and a pregnancy when not planned could change a relationship irreversibly.” - Daily Mail