Sex File: His cheesy playlist of '90s ballads is turning me off in the bedroom

Being forced to listen to music you don't like is going to make you miserable.

I've started dating a guy who is sweet and romantic, but I don't enjoy his 'sexy music'. He has a bedroom playlist of cheesy 1990s soul ballads. I find it off-putting and not sexy at all.

It's worth considering that the playlist isn't actually for your benefit. Your partner's playlist may be putting you off, but it is probably turning him on. Music is an intensely sensory experience and neuroscientific research has uncovered the fact that it affects the endogenous opioid system, the same pleasure pathways that make food, drugs and sex so moreish. It also activates specific parts of the brain that are involved with movement and dance.

In 2016, research by Adam Safron at Northwestern University in Illinois equated the rhythmic stimulation required to achieve orgasm, which is itself a trance-like state, to the trance-like feeling you experience when you lose yourself while dancing.

Music, dance and sex are universal human behaviours, so it is not surprising that there is a link between them. They all cause an escalation in the feelgood neurochemical dopamine. In 2011 researchers at McGill University in Canada made positron emission tomography scans of people listening to their favourite music. The scans showed that after 15 minutes the participants' brains were flooded with dopamine. If they had scanned them having an orgasm they would have seen the same thing.

Interestingly, clinical studies have also shown that if you block the opioid system, music loses its power to please. The neuroscientist Adiel Mallik, also at McGill University, did just that. He gave either the opioid blocker naltrexone or a placebo to a group of participants who were listening to one of their favourite emotive pieces of music. The musical experience didn't change for the placebo group, but the music lost its emotional salience for the people in the opioid blocker group.

Listening to music is good for us. It helps to ease pain, improve blood flow and lower the level of the stress hormone cortisol. 

Because anxiety inhibits sexual desire, anything that reduces stress is going to be sexually beneficial. Music makes us feel relaxed - and when something makes us feel good, we have a tendency to repeat that behaviour over and over again. When the stimulus is something as uncontroversial as listening to music it shouldn't be a big deal, but sometimes the link between a stimulus and a reward gets muddled, and that's when it causes problems.

If music during sex makes your boyfriend feel less anxious, he'll feel stressed without it, and that could interfere with his sexual performance. When people get anxious, the hormone epinephrine increases their heart rate and the stress hormone cortisol narrows their arteries to force blood to pump harder and faster and prepare them for "fight or flight". This sequence is problematic for men because stress affects erections. A single failure is enough to plant the seed of doubt, and once a man starts worrying about his ability to perform, erectile failure becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

As you get to know each other better, his confidence may increase and at that point you will probably be able to press pause without a problem. In the meantime, it's better to try to find a playlist that makes you both happy. Music amplifies emotions in a positive and a negative way, so being forced to listen to music you don't like is going to make you miserable.

Music is a matter of personal taste. There must be a place of common ground - you just need to find it. Instead of telling him you hate his music, invite him to spend an afternoon compiling a soundtrack for the bedroom that pleases you both. As a starting point, avoid lyrics because they can be distracting: classical or instrumental is a better bet. You can then spend the evening testing it out.