How much sex is normal in a relationship – it is a question that has remained persistent over the years. Some would say it is essential that you frequently get intimate with your partners, while for others, it depends on the social constructs around the idea of a healthy relationship. Often, people end up judging their sexual lives by what others perceive to be normal. But it is complicated to evaluate the extent of intimacy that is healthy and normal. To simplify the problem, there are some studies that have tried to give a quantifiable answer to the above question.

A 2015 peer-reviewed study, which was published in Social Psychology and Personality Science, was conducted on 30,000 spouses over 40 years. They found that once a week was the ideal amount of sex for couples; nevertheless, couples who had more sex were neither happier nor less happy. The study found that getting intimate with your partner more than once a week does not necessarily mean that you will have a happy relationship. Additionally, those who had less sex reported a lack of sexual fulfillment. The researchers mentioned that the results of the study do not necessarily imply that partners should have more or less sex to attain the weekly average, but they suggest that couples should talk about whether their sexual needs are being satisfied.

Adding value to the above conclusion, another study published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior in 2017 mentioned that the typical adult presently enjoys sex 54 times a year. They also added a caveat that the frequency of getting physical with partners was dropping among married adults.

However, one question that remains unanswered in the above studies is – Does more sex lead to more happiness in a relationship?

Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University experimentally assigned certain couples to have more sex than others, and then assessed both groups’ happiness over a three-month period in order to examine the link between sexual frequency and happiness. The study, titled ‘Does Increased Sexual Frequency Enhance Happiness?’ was published in the Journal of Economic Behaviour & Organisation in 2015. The report stated that merely having more sex did not make couples happier. In fact, the desire for and enjoyment of getting intimate with their partners decreased as the frequency of sex increased.

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