Rico's rants: How often do happy couples have sex?

27 April 2016

How often do happy couples have sex?

Daniel Barna has a StumbleUpon article about the sex life of happy couples:

As anyone in a long-term relationship can attest, the pressure to have a lot of sex with your significant other is real, mostly because we’ve been programmed to associate sex with happiness. Call it The Sex and the City effect.
But a new study from researchers at the University of Toronto asserts that we don’t all have to be as sexually voracious as Samantha to find true happiness. In fact, the study suggests that people who only have sex once a week are, in fact, the happiest.
“For the average person, having sex more frequently than once a week was not associated with greater happiness, but it wasn't associated with less happiness, either,” said Amy Muise, who led the research team.
The findings were based on data gathered from over twenty-five thousand Americans aged 18 to 89, who were asked how often they have sex and how happy they were.
In a second survey, researchers polled three hundred people in relationships, and this time they included their annual income into the equation. The researchers found that the disparity in happiness is greater in people who have less sex than it is in people who make less money.
“People often think that more money and more sex equal more happiness, but this is only true up to a point,” Muise said.
A third and final survey polled twenty-four hundred married couples over the course of fourteen years, and yet again couples who had sex once a week were happiest.
The findings help ease the pressure felt by couples to have regular sex, a feat that is pretty unrealistic for people who subscribe to all the requirements of modern life. “I do think couples can end up feeling pressure to try to engage in sex as frequently as possible,” Muise added. “It's important to maintain a sexual connection with a romantic partner, but it's also important to have realistic expectations for one's sex life.”