More sex = more happiness, right?
Studies have long told us that sex, and lots of it, is the route to a better mood and a happier life, and they’re probably right – to an extent.
But there might just be such a thing as ‘too much sex’, if this latest scientific study is correct.
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University wanted to test the theory that more sex equals more happiness with some good old fashioned academic rigour.
So they got lots of people to have sex and studied it, obviously. What they found was probably not what anyone was expecting.
What George Leowenstein, a professor of economics and psychology at CMU, and his team wanted to examine the causal relationship between sex and happiness – i.e. does having more sex make you happy, or does being happy make you have more sex.
The study then got 128 heterosexual married couples who already had a solid sex life to either have more or less sex over a three month period.
One group was told to double the amount of sex they had, while the other group were given no instruction about sexual frequency and just keep their sex lives the same.
The 90-day study saw each couple fill out a questionnaire about their sexual experiences and happiness at the end of each day.
When the results were in they found the double-sex couples largely enjoyed the sex less and saw their happiness decrease over the three months.
The bottom line from this experiment is that more sex led to less happiness.
Professor Leowenstein and his team posit that being made to have more sex, the couples became less motivated to have sex over time and enjoyed the sex less. This led to a drop in the quality of the sex they had which seemingly had an impact on their happiness.
However, Professor Loewenstein still believes that most couples have too little sex, and thinks that increasing sexual frequency in the right ways can be beneficial.
Tamar Krishnamurti, who helped design the study, suggested the findings may actually help couples to improve their sex lives and their happiness.
“The desire to have sex decreases much more quickly than the enjoyment of sex once it’s been initiated.
“Instead of focusing on increasing sexual frequency to the levels they experienced at the beginning of a relationship, couples may want to work on creating an environment that sparks their desire and makes the sex that they do have even more fun,” added the CMU Department of Engineering and Public Policy research scientist about the 2015 study.
