Is Sex Once A Week Enough For A Happy Relationship?
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We live in a society where sex is often touted as the secret sauce that keeps a relationship tasty. so more sex must be better for you and your romanticist partner, proper ? well, for established couples, having sex once a week hits the sweet position for happiness and wellbeing, a study finds. This is either big newsworthiness or tragic, depending on how you ‘re feeling about your sex life. It turns out that psychologists are working hard to figure out whether more arouse makes us happier. Researchers looked at data on 25,510 Americans, ages 18 to 89, about two-thirds of whom were either married or in a romantic relationship. For the people married or in relationships, more sex decidedly correlated with more happiness. That was n’t statistically significant for the single people not in a relationship. But when the researchers crunched the numbers to find out if there ‘s an upper limit to improving wellbeing through arouse, they found that the happiness maxed out at sex about once a week. “ This showed a linear association between sex and happiness up to a frequency of once a week, but at higher frequencies there is nobelium longer an association, ” Amy Muise, a social psychologist at the University of Toronto Mississauga who led the research, said in an electronic mail. “ Therefore it is not necessity, on average, for couples to aim to engage in sex angstrom frequently as possible. ”
The results were published Wednesday in the journal Social Psychology and Personality Science. OK, but the data come from U.S. surveys done in 1996 and 1998, years the researchers picked because those sets of data had information on both marital condition and kinship status. surely things have changed on the kinship front since the Clinton administration ?
To answer that question, Muise and her colleagues besides gathered data from a much smaller ethnically divers group of people online. Those 355 participants besides tended to be happier as frequency of arouse increased. But the happiness leveled off with sex more than once a week. To make it more concern, the researchers besides compared whether having more sex made people happier than having more money. It turned out that these people think having money would make them happier than having sex. But sexual activity won out over money in that apparently charming once-a-week spot. This suggests that John Updike was wrong when he wrote : “ arouse is like money ; lone besides much is adequate. ” still doubting ? The researchers besides used a one-third national data set that looked at happiness, sex and relationship satisfaction, and found that frequency of sex accounts for good 7 percentage of the association between kinship satisfaction and happiness .
By nowadays you may have thought, “ Oh, it ‘s unlike for men. ” But the researchers found that the once-a-week correlation held steady regardless of people ‘s senesce, sex or length of relationship. This suggests that Woody Allen was wrong when he wrote this immortal picture in Annie Hall :
Alvy’s therapist: How much do you sleep in concert ? Annie’s therapist: Do you have sex frequently ? Alvy: barely ever. possibly three times a week.
Annie: Constantly. I ‘d say three times a week.
If you ‘re still concerned about discrepancies between the findings and your own know, do n’t fret. These studies merely find associations in big groups of people and ca n’t prove a sexual induce for a given happiness consequence. besides, what emerges from the group does n’t trump your personal experience. You can go on doing what works for you and your honey. The take-home message, Muise says, is that it ‘s “ significant to maintain a sexual connection with a quixotic spouse, but it is besides authoritative to have naturalistic expectations for one ‘s sex animation ( given that many couples are busy with work and family responsibilities. ) ”