Ziba Karimi, Bahman Kord Tamini and Fateme Gheysari Panch, Ramalingam
University of Sistan and Baluchestan, Iran Pondicherry University, India
One of the important aspects of marital relationships is having sexual intimacy which
affects the improvement of the marital relationship. Sexual intimacy involves sharing
romantic experiences with each other, the need for physical contact, arousal, intercourse,
and relationships, which lead to sexual relationships and sexual satisfaction. Feelings
of shame and narcissism are factors that can affect sexual intimacy between couples.
The present study was conducted with the aim of investigating the relationship between
sexual intimacy and narcissism and shame in married women. The statistical population
included all married women of Isfahan city. The sample size consisted of 164 participants
that were selected through the convenience sampling method. Three questionnaires,
Ruskin and Terry’s Narcissistic Personality Questionnaire (NPI-40), Cook’s Internalized
Shame Scale (1993), and the Sexual Intimacy Questionnaire – Botlani et al. (2009)
were used to collect the data. To analyze the data, the Pearson correlation coefficient
and simple linear regression were used. The results revealed a significant negative
correlation between sexual intimacy and narcissism (P<.05), and sexual intimacy was
significantly positively correlated to feelings of shame (P<.05). Sexual intimacy could
predict significantly 5.4% of the variance in 12.9% of the variance in feelings of shame.