Washington: A new study has found that both men and women change their gender roles when they are in an intimate relationship.

A study by the University of Florida suggests that men are under a lot of pressure to have sex with different partners and women are regarded as porters of sexuality. However, this conventional notion vanishes once both the genders are in a romantic relationship.

Once they are in a relationship, the pressure on men to have sex is not as strong and the pressure on women to not have sex reduces", said Paul Perrin, a graduate in psychology and one of the study’s researchers. Expected gender roles give way to partners’ romantic feelings for each other, which turns out to be stronger than society’s roles for them”, he said.

The study, titled My Place or Yours? , published in the April edition of the journal Sex Roles , found that men are more likely to find sex pleasurable, while women tend to think that sex breaches social taboos. Too often, these sexually restrictive gender roles become self-fulfilling prophecies.

The study also found that men and women can transform when it comes to conforming to pre-arranged gender roles. “Although men showed greater interest in sex as measured by three of the four categories, when sex was examined in an intimate relationship, men and women were more similar than different”, he said.

The study involved 219 women and 161 men. They answered 160 questions about sexual behaviour and attitudes relating to four different areas- whether they considered sex to be personally and physically pleasurable, a benefit in creating positive feelings about oneself, a violation of social injunctions and personally costly in terms of having negative emotional, psychological or physical consequences