MA Ramezani - Psychosexual Health and Clinical Psychology, Family Research Institute, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran Iran

Studies have shown that infertility is a stressor to effect on qual-ity of life in marital state. In fertility, marital satisfaction and sexual satisfaction form a triangle which involves sexual and family health professions. It has been defined that sexuality has three major dimensions including sexual self-concept, sexual relationships and sexual function.Sexual self-concept refers to the image one has of oneself as a man or a woman and the evaluation of one’s adequacy in masculine or feminine roles, including body image, sexual self-schema and sexual self-esteem. Sexual self-esteem decreases in infertile men and women and it associate to infertility treatment result. Thus sexual self-concept is affected.Sexual relationships is defined as the interpersonal relation-ships in which one’s sexuality is shared with another. Infertil-ity have a negative impact on sexual relationships in couples. Sexual dissatisfaction is obviously in male with infertility prob-lems. It was hypothesized that this was due to the psychological pressure associated with efforts to conceive, or to reduction of power according to evolutionary theory. In female with infertil-ity, the most profound change of sexual satisfaction depends on the treatment stage. Infertility and its treatment have anega-tive influence on sexual relationship and satisfaction because the shared stress of infertility can involve both couples with the same problem.The third part of sexuality is sexual function. It is about the ability of an individual to give and receive sexual pleasure, in-cluding various physical and psychological progresses in the sexual response cycle. Totally the findings from the different studies showed that infertility could influence sexual activity in infertile couples, and that fertility problem stress tended to decrease frequency of intercourse. Premature ejaculation and erectile dysfunction in men and sexual interest and arousal dis-order in women are prevalent in infertile couples.According to these issues, relation between infertility and sex-uality needs further investigation and clinically, couples with infertility needs to evaluate and treat regarding their sexual problems.

Infertility, Sexuality, Sexual Problems.