Researchers found that women’s sexual satisfaction is not affected if she meets her partner while she is already taking the pill Daily Mail reports.

However, women do see their sex drive fall if they stop taking the pill during a relationship. The team, which included researchers from the universities of Stirling, Glasgow, Newcastle and Northumbria - as well as Charles University in Prague - studied 365 couples.

They investigated how both sexual and non-sexual aspects of long-term relationships were influenced by women's current and historical use of hormonal contraception. Lead researcher Dr Craig Roberts from Stirling's Division of Psychology said: ‘Our findings showed women who had met their partner while taking the pill and were still currently taking it - as well as those who had never used the pill at any point - reported greater sexual satisfaction than those women who had begun or stopped using the pill during the course of the relationship.

The study, published this week in the journal Psychological Science, found there was no difference in the non-sexual aspects of relationship satisfaction between the groups of women. Women's history of pill use was also found to make no difference to their male partners' relationship satisfaction in both sexual and non-sexual contexts. The hormones in the pill subtly change which men a woman is attracted to. This means that if she starts or stops taking it during a relationship her sex drive may fall as she no longer finds her partner as attractive ‘The pill has been a tremendously positive social force, empowering women and giving them greater control over their lives, but there is also a lot of controversy surrounding the question of whether hormonal contraceptives alter women’s libido and sexual satisfaction.’

He added: ‘These results show that examining current use is not enough to answer this question. ‘What seems to be important is whether a woman’s current use matches her use when she began the relationship with her partner. ‘We hope our results will help women understand why they might feel the way they do about their partner when they change use.’