Study Finds More Sex Does Not Equal More Happiness For Married Couples

It has been a widely accepted phenomenon that sexual pleasure contributes to the general feeling of well being and overall happiness. It is not unusual to come across studies and research concluding that couples who have sex more often are happier than couples who have less sex.

Some of those studies concluded that sex is the number one activity people regard as "making them happiest." Some researchers even came up with the conclusion that having sex once a week instead of once a month brings as much happiness as an extra $50,000 in the bank would, The New York Times reported.

Even though all these studies and years of research shed some light onto the link between more sex and happiness, a problem with the measurement remains; all the previous studies basically compared two different kind of couples (the ones who have more sex compared to the ones who have less) and measured their reported happiness levels, instead of measuring the happiness level of the same couples over time as they increase the frequency of sex.

The Times noted that the more happiness measured on couples having more sex could be simply due to the fact that happier people tend to have more sex, not the other way around. In order to overcome this problem, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University decided to convince couples to have more sex than usual so that they can compare the change in happiness level.

The researchers of the study, which will be in The Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, picked 64 married, heterosexual couples among the volunteers based on how often they have sex; the minimum was once a month and the maximum was three times a week. The couples were asked to give detailed information about their sex life, including their satisfaction level from the sex and their overall happiness.

Then the researchers asked half the couples, which were assigned randomly, to double the number of sexual encounters they have. The participants also needed to fill out a short questionnaire about the sex during the 90 days of the experiment.

The results were quite curious; more sex did not make half the couples happier, it also reduced their energy and enthusiasm. Participants even reported a lower sense of well-being in addition to a lower quality of sex, Times reported.