If you’ve ever been mid-sex with your partner and started to think about someone else, you’re normal—and you’re not sabotaging anything.
A new study published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior found that sexual fantasies shift pretty significantly depending on context. Researchers at the University of Northern British Columbia and Queen’s University recruited 546 adults in committed relationships and asked them to describe their most recent fantasy during solo masturbation and their most recent fantasy during partnered sex. What they found challenges many of the assumptions people carry around about what their own imagination means.
When it came to solo masturbation, 56% of fantasies involved someone outside the relationship. During partnered sex, that dropped to 38%. Only 35% of participants said their partner was the only person in their head during sex—meaning most people had some version of an outside thought.
A New Study Says Thinking About Someone Else During Sex Is Pretty Normal
“Many participants reported fantasizing about someone other than a partner, including during partnered sex, suggesting that these experiences may be more common than assumed and not necessarily a sign that something is ‘wrong’ in a relationship,” said study authors Aki Gormezano and Sari van Anders.
One of the more interesting findings is what partnered sex fantasies actually look like emotionally. The researchers were examining two distinct themes — eroticism, focused on physical pleasure, and nurturance, which involves intimacy, warmth, and emotional closeness. Fantasies during partnered sex skewed more nurturant. Even when someone was thinking about a person other than their partner, the texture of those thoughts was usually more about connection than straight-up arousal.
“Sexual fantasies, especially for men, are often assumed to be mostly about explicit erotic content, but many participants’ fantasies also involved closeness, affection, feeling cared for, or emotional connection—especially during sex with a relationship partner,” the researchers noted.
The study also found no direct line between fantasizing about someone else and relationship dissatisfaction. People with higher sexual satisfaction were more likely to think about their partner, but it wasn’t a hard rule. Who someone fantasizes about appears to be shaped by a mix of context, desire, and individual variation that has very little to do with how happy they are in their relationship.
“If your own fantasies look different from the patterns we observed, that does not necessarily mean anything unusual is happening,” the researchers said. “That variation is part of the natural diversity of human sexuality.”
In other words, the mind doing what it does during sex isn’t some dark confession. It’s just the mind doing what it does.
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