How Much Sex Is Enough? Sexual Satisfaction Survey

Oh, yeah.

With some of the best sex positions, couples through exactly how to. I was gonna say the ins and outs of how to have intercourse.

Oh.

But I guess that applies. So, you know, there are a lot of couples who just are like, grab.

Your knapsack, Start walking. I said.

You can't start a video.

All right. It's the question everyone wants to know. How much sex is everyone really having? Oh, yes.

This is such a big one.

It's juicy. Let's go.

It is really hard not to compare our relationships and our sex lives in particular to other people's. We all just have this natural tendency to want to know how we stack up against other people. So do you and your partner get it on multiple times a week, or are you lucky to get it maybe once a month? Are you having a normal amount of sex, or should you guys be having more? So we decided to do a little experiment and see what the sex lives of our followers really look like.

So if you're new here, then hello, we're Vanessa and Xander Marin. Vanessa is a sex therapist, and we've been together for 13 years.

And we are here to give you the tools, tips, and tricks for creating a truly extraordinary relationship inside of the bedroom and out. So if you are interested in that, go ahead and subscribe to our channel right now.

In this video, we're going to reveal the results of our sexual frequency and satisfaction survey. We received over 7,000 responses, and the results were super interesting.

So we are going to break down exactly how much sex people are having, as well as some other juicy observations from this survey.

So this all started a few weeks ago when someone asked us on Instagram how often we have sex. We think just offering one data point isn't super useful and really can actually be quite harmful. So we are always trying to be transparent about the fact that our sex life, it's not perfect. And we don't want people thinking that because we have sex a certain number of times per week or per month that that's the frequency that they should be having sex, too.

Yeah. Just because something works for our relationship doesn't mean that it's automatically this magic number that will work for anyone.

Yeah. So instead of just answering them, we decided to take it as an opportunity to do a little research. So we asked our community to participate in a survey about how often they are all having sex and how satisfied they are with their sex lives.

Yeah. So we tossed together this little survey pretty quickly. We thought, like, oh, maybe we'll get a few hundred people responding, but the responses that we got blew our minds. Like, I said, we got. I think Xander said we got, like, 7,000 responses, which we were not at all anticipating. So you guys really seem to love this topic. So while we know it's totally fascinating to hear about how much sex every everyone else is having, before we get into the results, we just want to be super, super clear that there is no magic number when it comes to sex. So there's no normal or healthy amount of sex to be having. I always get these messages on Instagram, people saying, like, well, is it normal to have it this much? What's the bare minimum we need to have to have a healthy relationship? And seriously, I know I drive people nuts sometimes, and I write back, like, there is no magic number, but there really and truly is no magic number.

So, yeah, we'd probably be out of business if there was a magic number.

That's very true. So, you know, just having sex, like, once a week or twice a week or three times a week, that in and of itself is not going to magically make your relationship great. And also, the frequency that you're having sex says absolutely nothing about the quality of the sex that you're having. So you'll be having a lot of really bad sex.

Yeah. Or you could be having a little amazing sex. You could be really happy in one situation and not happy in the other, or vice versa. Who knows?

Yeah. It also doesn't say anything about the level of satisfaction that you feel in your sex life. So we have worked with couples, Seriously, who have sex multiple times a day and were totally miserable with their sex lives. And we've worked with couples who have had sex a couple of times a year, and they felt really satisfied, really intimate and connected. So our goal with this video is not to, like, prescribe this specific frequency of sex that every couple should be having. It's simply to open up a conversation. So, without further ado, let's talk about what we learned from this survey.

Okay, so lesson number one is that, like, Vanessa was alluding to, sexual frequency is really. It's all over the place. So when it comes to that frequency, it was a close race between a few categories. So the top three response categories varied by less than one percentage point. That's nearly a dead even split between two to three times a month, once a week, and two to three times a week. So it was really, really close. And despite there being a wide range between two to three times a month, up to two to three times a week within those three categories, 75% of people fell into that. So the vast majority of people are within those three even categories.

I guess we should say what our categories were. We had like no sex at all or just a few times a year. We had once a month. We had a couple of times. And then on the other end of the spectrum, we had like five to six times a week or multiple times a day. But yeah, like 75% of people fell into that two to three times a month. Up to two to three times a week, which is a pretty wide range. It definitely seems to be that there's a lot of different frequencies that can work for couples.

Yeah. But no clear winner at all. Yeah.

Alright, lesson number two. Most people want to be having more sex. So no matter the sexual frequency that each responder answered with, the majority of people reported wanting to have more sex than they are currently having. Now, there are so many things that get in the way of intimacy, and we know it can be tough to make sex a priority when it feels like you have a million other things to worry about. So people talked about things like being overworked, too tired to have sex as frequently as they might want to. They talked about not feeling comfortable with their bodies, not feeling comfortable initiating having mismatched sex drives, having a baby or kids in the house, even pets that can get in the way, or just straight up not having the time. So we also had a question where we asked people how much sex they thought their partner wanted to be having. So, interestingly enough, most people said that their partners wanted to be having more sex too. So this just goes to show that you are much more likely than you might realize to be on the same page with your partner. You probably both want to be having more sex, but maybe you just need a little bit of help in getting there.

So.

So one of the best ways that you can work on increasing your sexual frequency is to start talking about sex with your partner.

Yeah. Don't just wait for it to happen.

Yeah. This is something that so few couples do. So we know that the idea of talking about sex openly can seem really daunting to a lot of people, especially because there are so many couples who've literally never had a conversation about sex in their relationship before. So we've got your backs. We've created this free guide called how to start talking about sex with your partner. You can even if you never have before. So we'll include a link to that guide down in the description box below for you to check out.

All right, so lesson number three is that most people are Generally pretty satisfied with their sex lives. So in this survey, we gave participants the option to rate their sex lives on the scale of one to five, with one being not at all satisfied with the quality of sex they're having and five being extremely satisfied. And the most common answer that we received was a four out of five. So solid satisfaction. And yeah, that's. That's surprising given that so many people indicated that they would like to be having more and they think their partner wants to be having more. So despite that, they are, you know, pretty satisfied.

I was shocked by this. I really thought that we were going to get more in the, like, two to three kind of range. So, hey, you guys are doing a better job than you might realize.

Yeah. You know, also, to be fair, 30% of respondents answered three, which is, you know, kind of in the middle. Neutral, quasi satisfied, perhaps. So we know there's still a fairly large chunk of people who are, you know, somewhere neutral. I wouldn't say dissatisfied, but neither satisfied nor dissatisfied. So in our eyes, there's always room for growth, connection, and improvements in everyone's sex life, whether that's just having more sex or whether it is having higher quality sex.

Yeah. Even if you think you're a five, like, there's still always ways to improve. Get to, like, 5.5.

Oh, this is a over 4.0 GPA person speaking here. It is.

It is.

We also found that there is a relationship between frequency of sex and satisfaction with sex. So in general, the more often people have sex, the more satisfied they are with their sex lives. Of course, we don't know the causality, so we don't know if one causes the other. The, you know, the other cause is the first one. They are correlated, but they, you know, one doesn't cause the other one. So do couples who have great sex want it more, or does having more sex lead to more enjoyment? Chicken or egg?

Now, my hunch, based on decades of experience of working with thousands of couples, is that the quality tends to come first. So I found that when you get that quality dialed in, you're having sex. It feels really enjoyable and pleasurable to both of you. The frequency naturally increases. So just my hunch, but we don't have the exact data.

Yeah, I think a lot of people get hung up on the frequency because that's something that's easy to compare to other people. It's not easy to talk about. How do you rate your quality of your sex? Asking, like, 10 other people.

Yeah, I think a lot of people will have conversations with their Friends, like, how often do you guys do it? And we can answer that, but you wouldn't really ask your friends, like, okay, on a 1 to 10 scale, what would you rate your sexual satisfaction?

And even if you did, how would you know that their six is year six? It's. It's so hard to compare that. But it's easy to compare numbers. Yeah, but, yeah, another interesting finding is that the satisfaction seems to peak at around two to three times a week. So the relationship between frequency and quality really started to diminish beyond that two to three times a week. So it's not just more is always better.

Yeah. So this reminded me of some really interesting research that I saw a long time ago about salary and how that contributes to happiness. So researchers found, you know, they kind of postulated, okay, we all think more money makes us happier.

That's what we're all trying for. Right.

So they compared people's happiness levels at different salaries, and they found that happiness does increase as salary increases, but it hits a limit, which I believe was about $75,000 a year. So once you're making more than $75,000 a year, there's not a noticeable increase in happiness. So this seemed to be the same kind of thing. Like, once you get to that peak satisfaction, having sex more isn't going to make you feel more and more satisfied.

All right, so the next lesson number four is that people value quality over quantity. Just like Vanessa's hunch, here we ask people if they would rather be having lower quality sex but more frequently than other people, or higher quality sex with less frequency than others, or just a normal amount with medium quality.

And we were really pleased to see that about 75% of people said that they would rather be having great sex, even if it meant having it less frequently than their peers. So some people said that they would rather just know that they were having sex a normal amount of times, regardless of the quality. And a small percentage of people said that they actually prefer having more sex over having better sex less frequently. So even though the majority of people prefer quality over quantity, it was still really interesting to see this portion of people who are just so concerned about this idea at being normal. Like, they didn't even care about the quality. Like, I'm fine to settle with totally average quality. I just want to know that I'm normal. I think this shows how powerful that idea is for us. Like, sex is just such a challenging topic for so many of us that we just all want to feel normal. We want to feel like you know, we're doing everything right, so. All right, that brings us to lesson number five, which is that concern about sexual frequency isn't just a man's game. So we pride ourselves in prioritizing diversity. We really want to make our content feel applicable to people of all genders, races, sexual orientations, everything. That being said, our audience varies greatly over our different platforms. So here on YouTube, we're pretty heavily skewed male, but over on Instagram, we are very, very skewed female. So in the case of this survey in particular, we definitely have to point out that about 90% of our respondents were female. We put out some calls to get more men to fill out the survey, but we didn't quite get as many as we wanted. So while we would have loved to see data that was much more evenly balanced, we thought this just was a great example that shows how gender stereotypes are so inaccurate. So we have all these stereotypes that men are always the ones who want sex more, especially in heterosexual relationships. And, you know, the woman's always having to, like, pat him away and, like, how can you want sex? How do you want it all the time? You never get enough. But according to our survey, and from a lot of the responses that people, like, wrote in at the end of the survey as well, like, there are so many women who want to be having more sex just as badly, and we heard from so many women who said that they have a higher sex drive than their male partner. So I'm thinking we might even need to do maybe some more surveys about, you know, is it really that women might want sex even more than men? So we're really curious to hear from you. Pop down into the comments. Let us know if you're in a heterosexual relationship, is it that the woman has a higher sex drive in your relationship? Because I think this is something that we don't talk about very often, but I found it exists much more frequently than most people realize.

All right, now, lesson six is kids don't kill your sex life.

Shocker.

Yeah. Interesting one. I know it's super easy to look at these results or look at the fact that you wish you were having more sex and point to something like, oh, we used to have more sex before we had kids, et cetera, et cetera. But we specifically looked at couples with kids and couples without kids, and we really found no discernible differences between these two groups of people. So, you know, I know that having kids can pose a lot of challenges to intimacy. We thought there would be a big difference, but there really Weren't.

All right. And lesson number seven, age doesn't really matter either. Maybe it even helps. I know. So we also broke down the data based on different age groups. We asked people to identify, you know, what age group that they were in, and we thought that sex might start to slow down as people got older. Again, this is like another common complaint that you hear people talking about, but we found that age really didn't make much of a difference on sexual frequency. Regardless of age. Most couples were still in those three most common categories. The two to three, three times a month, once a week, and two to three times a week age.

So while we did find that people who are in the higher age groups are a bit more likely to be in the lower frequency of sex buckets, we did find one very interesting thing.

Which was that people who are 50 and older were much more likely to be having sex the most out of any age group. So 9% were having sex with four or more times a week.

Yeah. And at those lower age groups, it was way less than 9% in that four times or more a week. So very interesting. Maybe something to look forward to.

Get it? 50 plus.

So those were some of the biggest lessons that we learned from the Sexual Frequency and satisfaction Survey, and we really hope that you found them illuminating and encouraging for yourselves.

So remember, there is no magic number.

You are normal. So make sure to hit that red button and subscribe to our YouTube channel. While you're at it, click the notification icon so you can keep getting notified about the videos. And smash that like button while you're at it.

Yeah. All right, thanks so much for watching.

See you next time. Edit that in.

Then let's go have sex 50 times.

50 times. Oh, no. Help.