Study Reveals Having More Sex Doesn't Mean More Happiness
The surprising evidence that more time in the bed doesn’t mean a more successful relationship. (Photo: Getty Images)
Contrary to what basically everything we’ve heard, having more sex doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to suddenly be beaming with joy all day long. Arecent study by Carnegie Mellon researchers found that there seems to be no causal link between fornication and feeling really good about your life.
In fact, the study discovered that having more sex decreased happiness. However—since this was the first study to look at the relationship between the frequency of sex and happiness—this decline in happiness could have something to do with the way the study was conducted.
Researchers randomly assigned 138 “healthy individuals between the ages of 35-65 who were in a male-female marriage to one of two groups. In one group, couples were asked to keep living their lives and have sex as much (or as little) as they usually do. The second group was asked to double the amount of sex they have every week.
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In addition, couples were asked to answer survey questions at the beginning of the study—which lasted three months—that measured “health behaviors, happiness levels an the occurrence, type and enjoyableness of sex" and again at the end. Tamar Krishnamurti, one of the study’s designers, told us “ researchers asked participants daily about whether they had had sex and separately about whether they experienced an orgasm as a result of that sex.”
The researchers found that among the couples who were in the group asked to have more sex, there was actually a “small decrease” in happiness levels. When they looked further into their research, they found that the couples attributed the reason for not being happier to the fact that being instructed to have sex caused “lower sexual desire and a decrease in sexual enjoyment.”
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We wonder: Did the fact that all the couples were married—and not just in a relationship— have any effect on the decreased happiness? Krishnamurti says it could have factored into the result. “Of course, married people and people who are dating often do differ in lots of ways, including the length of time that the couple has been together,” says Krishnamurti. “Married couples, on average, tend to have been together for longer than their dating counterparts and sexual desire generally decreases over time together. If we had done this study with newly dating couples, it may have been easier for them to attribute the increase in sexual frequency to their own personal desire, even if they had been asked to increase their sexual frequency by our research time.”
George Loewenstein, the study’s lead investigator, said it wasn’t without flaws: “If we ran the study again, and could afford to do it, we would try to encourage subjects into initiating more sex in ways that put them in a sexy frame of mind, perhaps with baby-sitting, hotel rooms or Egyptian sheets, rather than directing them to do so.”
By Renee Jacques
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