Are you married but can't take your eyes off a good looking co-worker? No need to feel guilty, as having a crush may actually boost your desire for your significant other, a new study has found.
Researchers from Columbia University, Indiana University and the University of Kentucky-Lexington in US surveyed 160 women in relationships of three years or longer.
The researchers wanted to explore their experiences with attractions and feelings for people other than their primary romantic partner.
In the anonymous internet-based study, women were asked open-ended questions about the kinds of sexual attractions they had, and their strategies for dealing with them.
Those questioned were typically married to highly educated men and were aged from 19 to 56 years old, 'Stylist Magazine' reported.
The results showed that 70 per cent of women had at some point experienced a crush on someone else while dating their current partner. A majority of them said their crushes were on people they worked with.
However, the women questioned were not worried about the significance of being sexually attracted to someone else.
Most felt it had no impact on their primary relationship - to the point that they did not even tell their partner about it.
"Women had varied experiences with, and diverse strategies for, managing crushes," the researchers said.
"The majority of women reported the crush did not impact their relationship, participants also reported that these crushes improved their desire for their partner," they said.
For these women, the crush acted as a conduit to sexual desire with their partner, as they "described transferring the emotion from the crush to the partner and acting on this with their partner."
The researchers concluded that "women often funnelled increased sexual desire from a crush into their primary relationship."
The study was published in the Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy.
