Your Sex Life Is Contextual

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Why does sex seem to gradually fade in committed relationships? Most of us have experienced the pattern of having sex less often the longer a relationship lasts. We have all probably attributed it to the same reason—a loss of passion over time. Even relationship researchers seem to agree that this is usually the reason. Romantic love seems to motivate us to find a partner, spend lots of time bonding, and settle into a committed relationship with them—and then, once its mission is accomplished, its intensity wanes (Bode & Kushnick, 2021).

A famous theorist of love called this passion, grouping it along with intimacy and commitment as his three pillars of romantic love (Sternberg, 1986). Subsequent research found that passion, by this definition, is closely related to sexual desire (Sorokowski et al., 2017). Less passion, less sex, right?

A recent study challenges the idea that sexual frequency is related to the amount of passion we feel—and to many core characteristics of romantic relationships, in fact. In an article published this year in the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, Bode and colleagues (2024) put all of our favorite explanations for sexual frequency to the test—and found they weren’t very useful predictors at all.

Let’s look a little closer at their study. Just over 700 participants, English speakers drawn from dozens of different countries, completed an online survey in late 2022. To make sure they were capturing the potential effects of romantic love, the researchers only included participants in relationships of less than two years’ duration because this is when romantic love, as we traditionally think of it, seems to be strongest (Bode & Kushnick, 2021). Predictors included the degree of passionate love felt, the amount of obsessive thinking about one’s partner, commitment to one’s partner, and hypomanic symptoms, while the outcome variable was the frequency of sex (as defined by participants, not the researchers) each week.

To the authors’ surprise, almost none of their predictors, and none of the variables they controlled for, such as relationship status, biological sex, and whether partners were cohabiting, significantly predicted sexual frequency. Furthermore, putting all the variables into one big model could explain only 4 percent of the difference in sexual frequency across participants. Statistically speaking, that is a tiny amount of predictive power—far less than one would expect, given how closely related all those predictor variables should be to a relationship behavior like sexual frequency.

So what’s going on here? The authors note a significant limitation of their study: in surveying only one partner in each relationship, they omit critical information about who the other partner is and how they see the relationship. This is a common criticism in the field of relationship science, as people in close relationships are always affected by their partners, especially when it comes to shared activities such as sexual behaviors.

This study reaffirms my belief that sexual frequency is contextual as much or more than it is driven by the enduring characteristics of the partners or the relationship itself. How much sex you have depends on how tiring work is this week, or whether your kids are sick or not. It depends on whether your in-laws are visiting next week, if you are coming home from a business trip, or if your partner always gets depressed at this time of year. In other words, even the strongest of bonds may not translate into sexual connection in a busy or stressful week, while a struggling relationship might be reignited by a great date night or a sudden financial windfall.

Any couple’s sexual frequency—including your own—marches to the beat of its own drum. Your sexual frequency has its own unique algorithm, a combination of predictors specific to your relationship, that determines how it looks week to week, even year to year. Keep in mind that you may have very limited influence over many of those factors. It’s nobody’s fault when life stress makes it harder to connect. At the same time, you know what those key variables are; to the extent that you can, work on them, rather than comparing yourselves with other couples, when you want to change your sex life.