Does Having More Sex Actually Make Couples Happier?

What's the "right" frequency of sex for an established romantic couple: Daily? Weekly? Monthly?

For many people, this question can be hard to answer, in part because they have no sense of a baseline. Friends may not talk openly (or honestly) about their bedroom habits and there's no common health-based standard for sex the way there is for sleep (7 to 8 hours is recommended). Norms are unknown, so people move through their relationship hoping their habits are aligned with those of a healthy relationship.

What Does It Mean to Have "Enough" Sex?

A question targeting the "right" frequency for sex is really a question about the link between sexual intimacy and relationship quality. Research exploring this question has suggested that couples that engage in sex more frequently tend to report happier relationships, up until a frequency of once-per-week (Muise et al., 2016). After once-per-week, the link plateaus. In other words, more than once-per-week is fine, but not as predictive of stronger relationship well-being.

The problem with this existing research is that it's based on group-level data, which means it draws conclusions based on averages computed across all individuals in the study. As such, variability is lost. We see one trend, when in fact, there may be important heterogeneity among relationships. Indeed, there may be subsets of people for whom sex is unrelated to their relationship well-being, and others for whom frequency is tightly connected to their satisfaction.

New Analyses Reveal Specific Clusters of Couples

While the field of psychology has long relied on group-level analyses to draw conclusions, a different analytic approach, called Latent Profile Analysis (LPA), allows us to understand a sample of participants not as one homogeneous group, but as a set of small groups made of individuals that share similar patterns.

Can LPA reveal important variability in the link between sexual frequency and relationship satisfaction? The short answer is "yes" (Johnson et al., 2025). Relying on nationally representative data from the German Family Panel and focusing on about 2000 male-female couples, Johnson and colleagues (2025) discovered a set of underlying couple clusters for which sex and satisfaction relate in different ways.

Couples Vary in How Sex Predicts Happy Relationships

Is frequent sex important to your relationship satisfaction? Johnson and colleagues (2025) were able to extract profiles that reflected shared links between sex and satisfaction. Which one describes your relationship? (Note: Profile names were created for this post.)

1. Happy Couple, Frequent Sex. Most participants, 86 percent, reported high relationship satisfaction and fairly frequent sex, a touch less than once-a-week on average.
2. Unhappy Couple, Minimal Sex. About 3.5 percent of people were sorted into a profile defined by lower-than-average relationship satisfaction and lower-than-average frequency of sex. In this case, couples reported having sex somewhere between one and three times a month. Couples with more conflict, less emotional sharing, less commitment by both partners, and those couples with older men were more likely to be in this group.
3. Happy Woman, Unhappy Man, Moderate Sex. Because they used couple data, Johnson and colleagues (2025) were able to reveal profiles where the woman's satisfaction in the relationship differed from the man's. (Note: This sample included exclusively male-female relationships.) About 4 percent of couples had an asymmetry in satisfaction that favored the woman and were also characterized by somewhat frequent sex: 3-4 times a month. Couples with young children were especially likely to be in this group. Couples with high conflict and those including low-commitment men were also often sorted here.
4. Happy Man, Unhappy Woman, Moderate Sex. About 6 percent of couples had women who were generally unhappy in the relationship, but men who reported strong satisfaction. This group tended to have sex about 3-4 times a month. High-conflict partners also frequently found themselves in this group, with women's commitment decreasing the likelihood of landing here.
5. Happy Couple, Negligible Sex. A type of relationship in which both members are happy but there's barely any sex did not emerge from the scholars' latent profile analysis. To probe this issue, the scholars identified 124 couples (5.9 percent of the entire sample) that hadn't had sex in at least three months. They uncovered that 39.5 percent of this identified group had both partners with markedly high relationship satisfaction. In other words, about 2 percent of the full sample was best characterized as rarely (if ever) having sex but being both very satisfied in the relationship.

Sex and Satisfaction are Often, but Not Always, Related

Can you guess your overall relationship well-being by looking at how much sex you have?

No.

This is a critical finding from Johnson and colleagues' (2025) work. Whereas prior research appeared to suggest an increasingly strong link between sex and relationship satisfaction for most people (e.g., up until once a week [Muise et al., 2016]), that finding may reflect the majority group uncovered in Johnson and colleagues' (2025) work. In fact, there are plenty of couples who have active sex lives but one or the other is dissatisfied in their relationships. Even more interesting, though not emerging from the primary analysis, there appears to be a rare minority of couples that don't have sex often (i.e., "sexless" couples), but in which both partners are still highly satisfied in their relationship.

The take-away here is the importance of variability. The kind of couple you are can't be determined by how frequently you have sex, even as sexual frequency tends to be linked to more satisfying relationships for most people. So don't try to add more sex thinking it'll necessarily improve your relationship. The correlational nature of the study prevents us from concluding that increasing sexual frequency would alter relationship satisfaction, or the reverse; we can't assume one causes the other. This idea is especially pronounced given the lack of a link between frequency of sex and an individual partner's relationship satisfaction for a notable minority of this sample.

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