Your level of contentment with your sex life may not be linked to how much sex you actually have, but rather to how much sex you think everyone else is having, according to a new study. This sexual health research, carried out at the University of Colorado Boulder, revealed that if people believe that others are having more sex than them, they feel less content with their own sex life and this reflects on their own sense of sexual wellbeing.
The study did find that wellness and contentment associated with sexuality is linked to frequency of sex, but there is also a very strong comparison link, where people who feel that their sexual frequency is high compared to their peers will be happier with their sex life than those who feel that others are having more sex than them.
A professor of sociology at the university analysed data from a survey of 15,386 people, taken over the course of more than a decade. By looking at the data, he was able to see that those who had sex two or three times a month were 33 percent more likely to report that they were happy, compared with those who had had no sexual encounters during the past year. As the frequency of sex increased, the respondents reported higher levels of happiness, with couples who had sex once a week being 44 percent more likely to be happy and couples having sex two or three times a week being 55 percent more likely to be happy.
The interesting data, however, occurred when couples were having sex fairly frequently, but believed that their peers were having far more frequent sex than them. In these cases, the respondents’ happiness levels dropped again.
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