Is Sex Once A Week Enough For A Happy Relationship?

We live in a society where sex is often touted as the secret sauce that keeps a relationship tasty. So more sex must be better for you and your romantic partner, right?

Well, for established couples, having sex once a week hits the sweet spot for happiness and well-being, a study finds. This is either great news or tragic, depending on how you're feeling about your sex life.

It turns out that psychologists are working hard to figure out whether more sex makes us happier.

Researchers looked at data on 25,510 Americans, ages 18 to 89, about two-thirds of whom were either married or in a romantic relationship. For the people married or in relationships, more sex definitely correlated with more happiness. That wasn't statistically significant for the single people not in a relationship.

But when the researchers crunched the numbers to find out if there's an upper limit to improving well-being through sex, they found that the happiness maxed out at sex about once a week.

"This showed a linear association between sex and happiness up to a frequency of once a week, but at higher frequencies there is no longer an association," Amy Muise, a social psychologist at the University of Toronto Mississauga who led the research, said in an email. "Therefore it is not necessary, on average, for couples to aim to engage in sex as frequently as possible."