How much sex should you have?

Most people would respond with “the more, the better,” — but let’s dive in.

Starting with science, our medical research, Medical News Today published that sex once a week is associated with greater relationship satisfaction. However, just like income and life satisfaction, there is a plateau for both. In the case of earnings, happiness plateaus after an income of $500,0000 (Fortune Magazine, March 2023), meanwhile our sex research shows that sex more than once per week doesn’t increase our relationship satisfaction.

So, the age-old expression that “too much of a good thing can be bad for me” for sex and money means “too much of a good thing is just no longer a good thing”

So, how much sex is going on?

This is a case of perception vs. reality. Besides your unhappily partnered friends, most people with partners want to project the best view of themselves, which will result in a moderately untruthful view of how much sex is going on. The new term “sexaggeration” was cited in one of my favorite Medium Publishers, Good Man Project (All Goodmen). They referenced the phenomenon of “sexaggeration”, first coined by author Rebecca Reid. This term is the label of our bias to pretend we are having more sex than we are. This cascades naturally into thinking that other people are having more sex than we are.