From the sublime (the Aristotelian “Golden Mean”) to the ridiculous (“Are three prunes enough…are five prunes too many?”), we seem to spend a lot of time and effort searching for just the right amount of just about everything.
After all, even the Three Bears wanted porridge that was “just right…not too hot and not too cold.”
So what does that tell us about sex and love?
An article appeared in The New York Times about a study in The Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization that sought to find out if more sex resulted in more happiness…it didn’t.
What the researchers found was that just having more sex didn’t make the participants happier…but the “quality” of the experiences made a difference.
“Instead, Dr. Loewenstein (the study’s author) says, concentrate on quality rather than quantity if you wish to be happy. Studies associating sexual frequency and happiness may have missed the underlying link between the two, which is the pleasurability of the sex. People who like their couplings probably have more of them, and it is the pleasure of the act, he says, that raises moods, not how often it happens.”
While this study doesn’t tell us how often to have sex, it does point to the connection between experiences and the desire for those experiences — that having sex when a couple wants to improves the quality of the experience, and that leads to more happiness (and more sex).