In a world obsessed with success and comparison, it’s easy to feel like you’re the only one not living an exciting, sex-filled life.
The reality is that our perceptions of sexual frequency are highly skewed and hopelessly inaccurate: most of us believe that others are having way more sex than we are, and that makes us feel bad.
It’s time for a reality check.
How often we have sex depends on so many factors that it’s almost impossible to predict what the other person is doing.
Forget drunken bragging and sexy Instagram posts, these are the things that really reveal what goes on in other people’s bedrooms.
Read and then relax!
Tracey Cox says our perceptions of sexual frequency are highly skewed and hopelessly inaccurate (file image)
How old are you
The younger you are, the more sex you have. The older you are, the less sex you have.
No one will be surprised by this: our energy levels decline as we age, and so do the levels of hormones that fuel our sex drive.
What may surprise you is how quickly our maximum heart rate declines, even from a very young age.
Men and women between the ages of 20 and 30 have sex an average of eight to nine times a month. After two years, this figure drops to six times a month. People under the age of 25 have sex about eleven times a month, but even they have sex less often the longer they are with their partner.
Which brings me to the second most crucial factor affecting frequency…
How long have you been together?
One study (Archive of Sexual Behaviour) estimates that couples have sex 146 times a year during their first year together, a figure that drops to 86 times during the second year.
Yes, it falls that fast.
Why does desire decrease the longer we are together? Because desire likes new things, and a new body to have sex with is the best thing of all! We also desire what we can’t have: sex all the time can dampen the most lively libido.
Then there’s overfamiliarity, which produces the “brother effect.” The closer you get to your partner, the less you want them. Intimate contact and connection fuel love, not desire. The drop in frequency over time is even more drastic if you’re a woman.
The drop in frequency over time is even more dramatic if you are a woman.
British expert Tracey Cox (pictured) revealed that the statistic that “most people have sex 2.5 times a week” was never correct
What gender are you?
The longer a relationship lasts, the more a woman’s sexual desire decreases.
A German study found that while 60 percent of women want to have frequent sex at the beginning of a relationship, within four years that figure drops to less than 50 percent and after 20 years it falls to about 20 percent.
Four years into the relationship, less than half of 30-year-old women wanted to have sex regularly. Men’s libido, in general, remained stable throughout the relationship.
Why do women give up on sex faster than men?
Boredom is a major factor.
American sex therapist Ian Kerner studied 341 people in committed relationships: women were twice as likely as men to report being bored in the first year and in the first three years of the relationship.
Women are also more strongly influenced by another important factor that determines how often a couple “does it.”
How good is sex when you have it?
The better your sex, the more likely you are to have it.
The rule that “quality beats quantity” applies in all the reputable research and studies: couples who report higher levels of sexual satisfaction have sex more frequently. About twice as often as couples who don’t score high on satisfaction.
No one has great sex all the time. It’s normal for 5 to 15 percent of sexual experiences to be mediocre or unsatisfying. (If you’re not “failing,” you’re not trying new things.) If you pile on more than that, however, you could be in trouble.
What is your natural sex drive?
How often we want to have sex is partly predetermined – there is a genetic element. The messages we receive about sex during childhood also influence adult desire, as does any traumatic experience.
If both partners have a strong sexual desire, they will be the couple that has the most sex. Although everyone’s libido increases at first, this usually becomes apparent quickly.
How often you have sex during the first year of living together determines how often you will have sex thereafter. Research shows that this sets a pattern: if you have an above-average amount of sex, this continues even after two years, when you reach a point of decline.
It is also true that the person with the lower sex drive determines how often the couple has sex. It is rarely, if ever, established how often the person with the higher sex drive would like to have sex.
Visit traceycox.com for Tracey’s blog, books, podcast and product range.
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