Who doesn’t love great sex? OK, I’ll wait.
Most of us love great, satisfying, sweaty, orgasm-induced sex, right? Right. So it just seems right that more of it would be better, right? Well…wrong. Huh? That’s exactly what I was thinking too.
Researchers from the University of Toronto say you shouldn’t stress if you’re not having sex constantly, even if you’re in a committed relationship. They analyzed data from nearly 28,000 people in a series of studies and determined that people who bone once a week are the happiest.
“On average, people who reported having sex once a week or more also reported the greatest well-being,” says lead study author Amy Muise, Ph.D., to Women’s Health. “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.”
For the study, published in the journal Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Muise and her team analyzed survey responses from 25,000 Americans about how often they had sex and how happy they were (most established couples say they also get it on about once a week, BTW).
A similar sex study from earlier this year of asked half of a pool of 64 couples to double their usual rate of sex to see if it would make them happier. Instead, those who were having roughly 40 percent more sex weren’t just less happy, but also felt less energetic, and even reported having bad sex.
Finally, researchers analyzed survey results collected from more than 2,400 married couples over 14 years. And to our surprise, couples who did it at least once a week were more satisfied with their relationships.
So why is having sex once every seven days associated with so many happy people?