The stereotypical idea of ”the more sex, the better” is refuted by new scientific evidence. But scientists do not question the significance of the quality of sex. So, how many times do you need to have sex for complete happiness?
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Until now, it was generally accepted that there is a linear relationship between the intensity of a sexual life and the level of human happiness: the more sex, the stronger the feeling of happiness. Social psychologist Amy Muise of the University of Toronto at Mississauga and her colleagues say this is misleading. “The highest levels of happiness are found in those who have sex about once a week,” they write in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science. Such conclusions were made by them on the basis of a meta-analysis of previous studies.
To be precise, the happiest among the Americans surveyed considered it optimal for them to make love 5 times a month. Those who had sex more often had lower levels of happiness. Overall, the authors analyzed the responses of more than 25 people who participated in various surveys on the topics of sex and happiness from 000 to 1989. The discovered pattern turned out to be true for people of different sex and age, regardless of how long they were in a relationship with a partner.
What is the cause and what is the effect?
But how can this pattern be explained? Why does such a rhythm of sexual relations help a person feel happy? Will partners who rarely have sex become happier if they switch to this rhythm? So far, scientists do not know the answer to these questions.
“The problem with this kind of research is that it only looks at correlation, not causation,” says Carnegie Mellon University of Pittsburgh professor George Loewenstein. People usually have sex as much as they want. And for some reason, those couples who have come to this frequency – once a week, feel happier. But is this sense of self caused by such a frequency of having sex?
Loewenstein himself conducted a study in which 64 married couples took part. Half of them were asked to have sex twice as often as usual and note in a diary how happy they felt. On average, these couples began to have 40% more sex and not only did not feel happier, but they felt that they had less energy, and the quality of sex deteriorated. The conclusion is simple, says Levenstein: in sex, quality is more important than quantity.
“By the word “sex”, we can mean completely different things: good sex, bad sex. And we see that the quality of sex affects a person’s level of happiness more than the frequency with which he has it. But there is no yardstick to measure the quality of sex.”
He acknowledges that the design of this kind of research is quite limited. “You can find a non-linear relationship with anything – even brushing your teeth, and then what? In our case, things were even worse. We constructed an artificial situation by telling people how much they should have sex.”
Sex is more important than money
Amy Mewt and colleagues also asked themselves the question: what increases the level of happiness more – satisfaction with sex or with their income. To do this, they compared two groups of self-reports related to these two topics. Interesting parallels emerged. On average, the difference in happiness between those who had sex less than once a week and those who had sex once a week was about the same as the difference in happiness between those with incomes between $15 and $000 per year. a year, and those who received 25-000 a year.
But in absolute terms, those who had good sex were happier than those who had higher incomes. “Many believe that the more sex a person has or the more money, the more happiness. But this is true only to a certain extent, ”Muse notes.
As for sex, its possibilities to make us happier are not unlimited, emphasizes the social psychologist. “The main thing is to deepen the intimacy between partners, and not to increase the “quantitative indicators” in sex.”
Outside the brackets of the study were people who do not have a permanent partner. “We don’t have a lot of information about the sex life of single people,” says Amy Mewes. – It is difficult to say how the frequency of sexual relations and the level of happiness are related for them. This is a topic for a separate study.”
See more at The Guardian.