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I've always assumed it’s normal to waste your life wondering if everyone’s having more sex than you. It seems there are these “numbers” we’re supposed to hit in order to achieve sexual adequacy. I’m not sure who comes up with them—whether it’s Cosmo, scientists, Samantha Jones, or Satan—but they’ve infiltrated the culture. For instance, in my 20s, I read an article claiming healthy couples have sex three times a week. I filed this away as fact, somewhere in the junk drawer of my brain, for over a decade. But now I’m 35, in a long-term relationship, and I'm pretty sure whoever wrote that was either bad at math or the leader of that NXIVM sex cult.
According to the internet, if you’re single, going a handful of months without sex makes you an incel gargoyle. And yet, having sex multiple times a week with different partners is too far in the other direction. It’s a delicate balance— you should have enough sex to prove you’re a hot, empowered girl-boss, but not so much that you become a slut from hell, desperately trying to fuck away your childhood trauma. But with all this mixed messaging, will someone just tell me: How often should I have sex?
In my 20s, I kept an actual calendar of how much sex I was having. If I went a few weeks without smashing, a siren would go off in my brain, alerting me to send frantic “sup?” texts to my phone reserves (“Adam Ponytail,” “Jake L train,” “Fingers,” etc.). Not only did being sexually prolific validate my worth as a sex object, it also made me interesting. Arriving at a party without a hilariously tragic sex story felt akin to a comedian walking onstage without material.
When I met my boyfriend, we had so much sex that I developed a limp. Somehow everything from making English muffins to organizing my desktop became foreplay. But the first time we hung out and didn’t have sex, I immediately thought: “We’re doomed.” In those early days of manic infatuation, even literally crippling amounts of sex felt insufficient. Now, nearly four years into our relationship, I still sometimes find myself Nate Silver-ing our sex life. If we have sex three days in a row, we’re winning the game! If we don’t have sex for more than a week, we may as well swan dive onto the concrete slab called “The L.A. River.”
It’s a common belief that sexual frequency is an indicator of a relationship’s strength. But famed couple’s therapist Esther Perel disagrees. In her book Mating in Captivity, she describes toxic relationships that breed steamy sex lives and deeply loving relationships that lack sexual passion. Maybe that’s why the most popular erotic novel is about being sexually bullied by a sulky businessman?
When I fall into a shame spiral, I often call my friend Ryan. He and his boyfriend have been together for six years. They’re one of the strongest couples I know, and yet, being hot and vaguely famous hasn’t spared them the sexual stress of your average monogamist. Ryan confessed, “Honestly, as gay men, I thought we were immune to these problems—I was like, light a candle for straight couples! But, it’s a tale as old as time: We had sex regularly for the first couple years, then it gradually became once a week. Then, starting year four, we’d have dry spells that would last up to six weeks.”
For Ryan and his boyfriend, these sexual droughts felt too awkward to acknowledge, like when your date has something stuck in his teeth. Ryan explained, “It’s as if there's a pressure valve in our relationship. When we’re not fucking, the pressure keeps building. Sex becomes this bogeyman looming over us. But then the second we break the dry spell, we’re like ‘Oh my God! We went a whole month without sex, wasn't that crazy?!’ Suddenly we’re able to talk about it openly.”
I’ve been there. If you’re in a sex slump, once you finally rail it’s like resetting the clock—“Okay phew, we've got a week before it gets weird again!” Of course, if you’re able to address it before paranoia sets in, it makes the whole thing less threatening.
“What I've learned is that you can’t catastrophize,” Ryan said. “In the past, my boyfriend and I created our own private narratives about why we weren’t having sex, which inevitably leads to a K-hole of anxiety. But the narratives you write say more about your own issues than they do about the relationship.” In the mutilated words of Joan Didion: “We tell ourselves stories in order to not have sex.”
Unfortunately, writing disturbing narratives is my specialty. For instance, in all my relationships, I’ve preferred that my partner initiate sex—it makes me feel wanted. When they don’t, my story quickly becomes: “I guess I’m literally Shrek and they’re disgusted by my presence and I should sleep outside with the raccoons.” When in reality, maybe they just, like, have a headache? When our dark imaginations overpower our curiosity, sex can easily become a proxy for myriad insecurities—that we’re not skinny enough, smart enough, or that our podcast is failing.
But even if you’re somehow evolved enough to create a healthy dialogue around sex, it still doesn’t answer the essential question: How often should you bang? What are the magical Goldilocks numbers that tell us when to panic, feel smug, or check into rehab?
To answer this once and for all, I turned to my friend Dr. Zhana Vrangalova, sex researcher and professor of human sexuality at NYU. Zhana told me, “In my mind, the only way to answer that question is to ask yourself: How often do you want to have sex? Sex matters differently to different people. Some people are happy having it once a year. Some couples want sex several times a week, even after 20 years. Both can be healthy.”
It sounds obvious: Just fuck as much as you want, duh! But it’s not so easy. Often—for women, in particular—desiring sex is so linked to being desired, that it can be difficult to separate the two. Sometimes I can’t tell whether I actually want sex, or if I just want to want it, or if I feel guilty for not wanting it, or if I just want my boyfriend to want it so I don’t have to melt my brain trying to answer these questions.
According to Zhana, healthy desire is a combination of “how often you’re spontaneously horny, and how often you want to have sex for other reasons that are in line with your values—for instance, because you’re single and want to explore your sexuality, or because you love your partner and know that sex brings you closer.” Basically, pushing yourself to have sex doesn’t have to be bad, so long as it’s authentic. It's like working out—sometimes you’d rather die than go to the gym, but once you’re there you’re glad you bought a smoothie and went home.
Zhana continued, “Anxiety is an unhealthy incentive to have sex. Autonomy is extremely important to our wellbeing, so feeling pressure—whether it’s internal or external—is antithetical to desire, because it feels inauthentic. Basically, if the reason you’re having it is that ‘I think everybody else is having more sex than me,’ then that’s a problem.” (Sounds like someone’s not having enough sex, tbh.)
Of course, fixating on numbers fails to address whether the sex is actually, ya know, good. Looking back, it’s creepy to think how marginal enjoyment was in the equation. For instance, in my mid-20s I was in a relationship where we had tons of sex—it was rapid, joyless, and yielded more UTIs than orgasms. Success!
Essentially, when evaluating your sex life, ask yourself: Does being sexually successful mean zombie fucking your life away to fulfill an arbitrary quota, or does it mean being honest with yourself about your desires, and getting a Xanax prescription? Choose your own adventure.