But the couples may also be on to something. “There’s a strong relationship between rating your marriage as happy and frequency of intercourse,” said Tom W. Smith, who conducted the “American Sexual Behavior” study. “What we can’t tell you is what the causal relationship is between the two. We don’t know whether people who are happy in their marriage have sex more, or whether people who have sex more become happy in their marriages, or a combination of those two.”That's from a NYT article talking about two new books on "married sex." In the first book, a couple of Christians from North Carolina had sex everyday for one year. I'm totally buying that book. The article also references this NORC study on American sexual behavior, which shows the high correlation between sexual frequency and happiness in marriage. The above quote is cautious about inferring causality - rightly so - because maybe happy people just have more sex. But I suspect there is some causality going the other direction, too.
Monday, June 9, 2008
365 Days of Sex
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The direction of the causality is interesting, and I share your suspicion that it runs both ways. Most of the Christian marriage manuals I read assumed that it ran from happiness to sex, but I am on a crusade against the bias in Christian marriage and sex advice that assumes that the wives' typical desire to have emotional intimacy first as a prerequisite to physical intimacy is the "right" way to do it, the Godly way, for some reason. I think of them more as feedback loops, with both partners occasionally having to give the intimacy that their partner wants in order to get the intimacy that they want in order to keep the loop going.
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