Life and Greatness

"Happiness begets sex, not the other way around." 

We did talk about with 3 different women with different professional backgrounds. 

Men aren’t the only ones who feel self-conscious about how often they’re having sex. (Wait: You do, right, people? I know nothing about you. I kind of just assumed.)

When a woman complains to her friends that she has a rough patch with her boyfriend, the first thing they’ll ask is if you’re still having sex, and how often. And if you’re talking to the absolute wrong friend like Jenna, who has sex five nights a week with her banker boyfriend. 

She claims to have a job (in PR) but also has a flexible enough schedule to attend regular 4 p.m. classes at Physique 57 on weekdays—the number will elicit some kind of judgment.

She’ll wrinkle her nose: Only twice a week?  -  Yes, Jenna.  

That means you guys aren’t in love with me and Morgan Stanley IV. 

Not necessarily, Jenna.

It’s true that the “happier couples have more sex” theory has gotten a lot of play, but earlier this month, a study at Carnegie Mellon found that nobody actually bothered to look into whether the correlation between sex and happiness was a chicken/egg thing rather than cause and effect. They split 64 couples, with various sexual frequencies, into two groups. They asked Group A to keep their sex lives the same, and Group B to have twice as much sex as they usually did.

To the researchers’ surprise, by the end of the study, Group B’s energy and enthusiasm had declined, and moreover, the sex “wasn’t much fun.” Couples are happiest, it seems, when they have sex exactly as often as they want to, without being forced into an upswing. For Science—or, for that matter, by passive-aggressive shaming from their own Jenna, who never seem to factor in the real world when it comes to the frequency of sex in a committed relationship.

To put it more colorfully, as a recent newlywed friend Laura tweeted at me when I did a call-out for this piece: “Is this supposed to be not a lot of sex? Because if so, I need to have a sit down with my vagina.”

The continued emphasis on sexual quantity over quality for committed couples is the reason that women like Christine - 26, are self-conscious about the frequency of sex in their perfectly happy relationships. “When I've discussed my frequency with friends who are having sex more frequently than I am, I have felt pitied (in the nicest way possible).”

"Happiness begets sex, not the other way around."

When she and her boyfriend moved in together three years ago, they went from having sex every night to once a week, occasionally twice. “Sometimes I reassure myself this is totally normal, and other times I get pretty bummed out about it,” explains Christine. “A lot of the time I blame myself. Like, ‘Oh, you just HAD to finish the entire bottle of wine. You just HAD to pass out on the couch.’” Ultimately, however, she says, “There are a lot of positive things about our relationship that seem to have out-shined any strain the infrequency initially put on our relationship.”

Echoing Carnegie Mellon’s findings, she adds, “When [the sex] first decreased, we talked about it and kept telling each other we'd try harder to have sex more often. I'm not sure if we both gave up or just got used to the infrequency.”

Caroline 26, has lived with her boyfriend for two years. They have sex one or two times a week—a pretty typical number, based on conversations she’s had with her friends. And she and her boyfriend are both cool with: “Sometimes I just feel too gross when I'm on my period (though we both are okay with period sex), and sometimes he's just super-stressed and in his head. Only a few times has one of us been like, Hey, it's been kind of a while."

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As the Carnegie Mellon team discovered, happiness begets sex, not the other way around. If you or your partner is overwhelmed at work, dealing with family issues, or generally coping with real-life struggles, your sexual frequency may decline—but that doesn’t mean you’re in a bad relationship. Especially if you start feeling its effects.

“If my husband and I don't bang one out at least every week, we get crabby with each other and fight over the dumbest crap,” says Lisa, 21. “Then we realize why we're acting like teenagers, and make an effort to fit in a sex night.”

“If I feel like too many days have gone by without us having sex, I'm definitely aware of it,” agrees Veronica, 25, who has been dating her boyfriend seriously for two-and-a-half years. They have sex two to four times a week, a decline from the four to five-times-per-week they’d bang when they first started dating. “He's happy with [the frequency], although I'm sure if we had a few weeks of just twice a week, he'd be disappointed.” (And, she admits, “I’d freak out a little.”)

But on the bright side—if this is a bright side—not a single woman I spoke to said that she had a better (read: more orgasmic) sex life when she was single. “I couldn't get my ‘itch scratched,’” says Lisa, “But my husband is pretty great at scratching.” And Veronica’s sometimes-monastic experience as a twentysomething single woman in New York is really common: “I'd go through random dry spells of like a month or two without so much as kissing someone, let alone having actually interacted with a penis.”

Orgasms, for many women, are elusive, and understanding this should shift the focus onto quantity rather than quality—if you’re having sex with your boyfriend once a week, and having an orgasm, why should that indicate your relationship is inferior to someone who sleeps with her boyfriend five nights a week and doesn’t come at all? It shouldn’t Jenna:)

Source : http://www.gq.com/story/how-often-do-happy-couples-have-sex

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