In news that could flood marital bedrooms around the globe with waves of either relief or anxiety, researchers have found that sex once a week is the optimum amount for maximizing happiness. 
 
 Couples having sex more than once a week do not report being any happier, according to a new study published in Social Psychological and Personality Science, but couples having it less than once a week report being less happy. 
 
 The study was based on an analysis of the results of surveys of more than 30,000 Americans collected over 40 years in three different projects. It’s the first study that finds that copulation could be one of those activities that offers diminishing returns. 
 
 Before looking up from this and glaring at your spouse, however, be aware that this research and most experts stress that sex is not a one-size-fits-all arrangement—one person’s feast is another’s starvation diet. Moreover, any study of happiness must perforce be about correlation and not causation. It’s possible that people in happy relationships have sex once a week, rather than vice versa. Or that people are happy having sex once a week because they think that’s what everybody else is having. 
 
 (For single people, in case you were wondering, there seems to be no consistent association between sexual frequency and happiness.) 
 
 The results of the new study are somewhat surprising, as previous investigations into the science of sex had suggested that as far as nooky went, more was always better. “Most people strive to be happier and sex is one aspect of life that is thought to be associated with greater happiness,” says Amy Muise, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto and lead author of the study. She also notes that the media, from movies to music to news reports, has generally echoed the abundance theory. 
 
 But, taking a cue partly from the work of Nobel Prize winning economists Daniel Kahnemann and Angus Deaton, who found that after $75,000 more wealth was not associated with greater happiness, she hypothesized that the same might be true for sex. And according to her results, it is. 
 
 “We found that sexual frequency was associated with greater well-being up to about once a week for the average person,” says Muise. “Having sex more frequently than once a week was not associated with greater well-being.” 
 
 The good news for players is that more sex wasn’t associated with lower well-being either, but having sex less than once a week was definitely associated with a drop-off in contentment. In fact, the study found that the difference in life satisfaction between couples who had sex less than once a month and those who had it once a week was bigger than the difference between couples who were quite poor, making between $15,000 to $25,000 annually, and those who were much wealthier, making between $50,000 and $75,000. 
 
 However, despite the apparent happiness gains that more sex can bring, the sluggish sales of Addyi—the so-called women’s Viagra—have also suggested that high frequency rolls in the hay are not top of everybody’s must do list. 
 
 “Desire is too abstract to measure,” Thea Cacchioni, a sociologist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, recently told Bloomberg News. “It’s a really recent idea that we should have a high sex desire all the time,” she continued. “We now feel a lot of pressure if we don’t meet the kind of hypersexuality we see in the media.” 
 
 Muise says she is still exploring why one appears to be the magic number. “Once a week tends to be the average frequency among established couples so it’s possible that this is the average because more frequent sex is not associated with greater well-being,” she says. “It’s also possible that people feel happy when they think they are at or above the average frequency.” But there’s not a lot of evidence that suggests people are aware how often others are having sex. “Once a week may also be the frequency that people feel is enough to maintain their intimate connection,” she adds. 
 
 John Updike wrote that sex is like money; only too much is enough. Muise’s research seems to suggest that maybe sex is indeed like money, just in the opposite direction: only too little is bad. ||||| More sex may not always make you happier, according to new research published by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology 
 
 More sex may not always make you happier, according to new research published by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. 
 
 "Although more frequent sex is associated with greater happiness, this link was no longer significant at a frequency of more than once a week," lead researcher Amy Muise said. "Our findings suggest that it's important to maintain an intimate connection with your partner, but you don't need to have sex everyday as long as you're maintaining that connection." 
 
 Some previous studies, and a plethora of articles and self-help books, have claimed that more sex equals more happiness. But this study, based on surveys of more than 30,000 Americans collected over four decades, is the first to find that association is not there after couples report having sex more than once a week on average. The study was not designed to identify the causal process, so does not tell us whether having sex up to once a week makes couples happier, or being in a happy relationship causes people to have more frequent sex (up to once a week). 
 
 In addition, these findings were specific to people in romantic relationships and in fact, there was no association between sexual frequency and wellbeing for single people, said Muise, a social psychologist and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto-Mississauga. It's possible that for single people, the link between sex and happiness is dependent on a number of factors such as the relationship context in which the sex occurs and how comfortable people are with sex outside of relationship. The findings, which were published online in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, are most representative of married heterosexual couples or those in established relationships. 
 
 In one study, researchers analyzed survey responses about sexual frequency and general happiness from more than 25,000 Americans (11,285 men, 14,225 women) who took the General Social Survey from 1989 to 2012. The biennial survey, conducted by the University of Chicago, has a nationally representative sample and covers a wide range of sociological issues, including opinions about race relations, religion and sex. For couples, happiness tended to increase with more frequent sex, but this is no longer true after couples report engaging in sex more than once a week. This study and other previous studies report that established couples tend to have sex about once a week on average. 
 
 Despite common stereotypes that men want more sex and older people have less sex, there was no difference in the findings based on gender, age or length of relationship. "Our findings were consistent for men and women, younger and older people, and couples who had been married for a few years or decades," Muise said. 
 
 Sex may be more strongly associated with happiness than is money. The researchers also conducted an online survey with 335 people (138 men, 197 women) who were in long-term relationships and found similar results as the first study. These participants were also asked about their annual income, and there was a larger difference in happiness between people who had sex less than once a month compared to people who had sex once a week than between people who had an income of $15,000-$25,000 compared to people who had an income of $50,000-$75,000 per year. 
 
 "People often think that more money and more sex equal more happiness, but this is only true up to a point," Muise said. 
 
 A third study analyzed survey results collected at three time points over 14 years from more than 2,400 married couples in the United States. There wasn't a strong link between sexual frequency and overall life satisfaction, but couples reported more satisfaction with their relationships as sexual frequency increased up to once per week, with no noticeable benefits of engaging in sex more often. 
 
 The study findings don't necessarily mean that couples should engage in more or less sex to reach the weekly average, but partners should discuss whether their sexual needs are being met, Muise said. 
 
 "It's important to maintain an intimate connection with your partner without putting too much pressure on engaging in sex as frequently as possible," she said. 
 
 ### ||||| According to new research, happiness peaks when couples have sex once a week but does not increase with greater frequency – and quality matters 
 
 Sex matters to couples until it doesn’t, according to new research that finds happiness peaks when couples have sex once a week but does not increase with greater frequency. 
 
 “Although more frequent sex is associated with greater happiness, this link was no longer significant at a frequency of more than once a week,” said lead researcher Amy Muise. 
 
 Noting that research and popular culture have long suggested a linear correlation between sex and happiness – the more sex, more happiness – Muise and her colleagues at the University of Toronto Mississauga asked “Is it true that one can never have enough?” 
 
 For Americans whose survey answers they studied, “enough” amounted to sex about five times a month. Muise and her colleagues concluded that the relationship between sex and happiness was not linear but rather, appropriately, curvilinear. Their findings were published in the the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science. 
 
 “This is the first study to look at a curvilinear association between sex and well-being – so yes, the first to look at the ‘limits’ or ‘levelling off’ of this association,” Muise told the Guardian. 
 
 “Other work – on non-sexual topics – has shown that sometimes seemingly positive things do not uniformly increase well-being – for example, socializing with friends.” 
 
 In one study the researchers analyzed survey responses from 1989 to 2012 about sexual frequency and happiness, from more than 25,000 Americans in all. The findings were consistent regardless of gender, age or the length of the couple’s relationship. 
 
 The findings were specific to people in relationships, and researchers noted they found no association, linear or otherwise, between frequency of sex and well-being. 
 
 “There is not a lot of information about who the single people were having sex with,” Muise said, noting that some could have been in kinds of relationships. “Looking at when and for whom having more frequent sex when single is beneficial is another area ripe for future research.” 
 
 The researchers could not make any concrete claims about the reasons why sex more than once a week does not make couples happier than only once. Muise suggested that a follow-up study could look at whether couples have sex less than once a week become happier if they have more, or that satisfaction might be related to people’s notions of ideal sexual frequency. 
 
 “The big problem with this kind of work is that it’s correlational and not causal,” George Loewenstein, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University who was not involved in the research, said. 
 
 “People are basically having as much sex as they want, and for some reason it seems like couples who have found an equilibrium of about once a week seem to be happier. They didn’t control the independent variable, which is frequency of sex.” 
 
 Earlier this year Loewenstein led a study in which 32 of 64 married couples were asked to double their rate of intercourse and respond to short daily surveys about happiness. On average they managed to have 40% more sex, but not only were they not happier but found themselves feeling less energetic and having worse sex. Loewenstein said the lesson was simple: quality matters more than frequency. 
 
 
 
 “Sex can mean so many different things: there’s good sex, bad sex and we found that the quality of the sex affected happiness more than frequency. They didn’t have a measure of quality of sex.” 
 
 He noted that his studies run into limits of its own design. Researchers can find a curvilinear relationship with exercise or brushing your teeth, for instance. “And ours was worse in one sense,” he said, “it’s an artificial situation of someone telling you how much sex to have.” 
 
 Muise and her colleagues also compared the happiness brought by sex with that satisfaction of money, comparing reported well-being for each category. People who had sex less than once a month were less happy than those having sex once a week, the average, as were people who made $15,000-$25,000 a year versus $50,000-$75,000. The difference was greater regarding sex. 
 
 “People often think that more money and more sex equal more happiness, but this is only true up to a point,” Muise said. 
 
 The context of relationships likely affected survey responses, the researchers said, as did the benefits of sex that carry over one day into the next. 
 
 “The current set of studies help dispel the notion that sex has limitless benefits for well-being,” they wrote. “It’s important to maintain an intimate connection with your partner without putting too much pressure on engaging in sex as frequently as possible,” Muise added.
– Couples who constantly "Netflix and chill" aren't necessarily happier. In fact, having sex once a week is just about perfect. That's the takeaway from a new study, based on surveys of more than 30,000 Americans gathered over 40 years, published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science. After previous research found more wealth wasn't actually associated with greater happiness, lead author Amy Muise began to wonder if the same was true for sex, "an aspect of life that is thought to be associated with greater happiness," she says, per Time. However, researchers found that while couples who have sex once a week are happier than those who have sex less often, "having sex more frequently than once a week was not associated with greater well-being." The findings held regardless of gender, age, or the length of a relationship. The study found couples who had sex less than once a month and those who knocked boots once a week reported a difference in life satisfaction that was even greater than that reported by couples who earn $15,000 to $25,000 annually and those who earn $50,000 to $75,000, according to a release. Muise isn't sure why having sex once a week seems to be ideal, but it may "be the frequency that people feel is enough to maintain their intimate connection," she says. The "big problem" one researcher not involved found with the study is that it identifies correlation, not causation. "People are basically having as much sex as they want, and for some reason ... [those who do it] about once a week seem to be happier," George Loewenstein tells the Guardian (see his sex research here). As for single people, Muise says researchers found no link between sexual frequency and happiness among that group. (It turns out men and women want sex at different times of the day.)