Having More Sex Doesn't Make Couples Any Happier; It's The Quality, Not Frequency, That Counts

 

By Samantha Olson

Let’s talk about sex. Are you having enough of it to make you and your spouse happy? Because it turns out frequency might not even matter. A team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University studied how sex plays a role in our levels of happiness, and found frequency can make or break the mood. The study, published in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, found a busy bed doesn’t mean a happy marriage.

Researchers randomly assigned sex frequencies to 64 healthy married couples between the ages of 35 and 65.  Half of the participants were nominated to have twice as much sex as they normally would in a week while the other half maintained the same pace, at their leisure, for three months. Each person was required to complete three different surveys throughout the experiment, with questions asking about a range of things, including health behaviors, happiness levels, frequency of sex, and types of sexual pleasures.

Participants weren’t happier the more they did the deed. In fact, they were less happy. The researchers explained this by saying an increase in sex frequency led to a decline in desire and enjoyment. In other words, it was the experiment's fault. 

"Perhaps couples changed the story they told themselves about why they were having sex from an activity voluntarily engaged in to one that was part of a research study,” said the study’s lead author George Loewenstein, from Herbert A. Simon University Professor of Economics and Psychology, according to CBS News. “If we ran the study again, and could afford to do it, we would try to encourage subjects into initiating more sex in ways that put them in a sexy frame of mind, perhaps with babysitting, hotel rooms, or Egyptian sheets, rather than directing them to do so."

Human beings were created to want to have sex because their biology is dictated by the need to procreate, according to the Harvard Business Review. Our instincts drive us to the bedroom, where women find a mate with quality genes and men find a mate healthy enough to bear a child. From an evolutionary standpoint, instincts naturally kick in to increase frequency, and neurohormones such as oxytocin and vasopressin are released, flooding the body with happy feelings that keep us wanting more.

The study may have put a damper on the sexual impetus. All of a sudden, participants weren’t drawn to each other with the primal urge to procreate, but instead to follow through on their assignment by increasing the frequency of intercourse. Sexual satisfaction relies more on the quality of sex than the quantity, as it relies more on those happy hormones flowing without pressure than tallying up notches on a bedpost.

"The desire to have sex decreases much more quickly than the enjoyment of sex once it's been initiated," said Tamar Krishnamurti, a research scientist in CMU's Department of Engineering and Public Policy, who designed the study. “Instead of focusing on increasing sexual frequency to the levels they experienced at the beginning of a relationship, couples may want to work on creating an environment that sparks their desire and makes the sex that they do have even more fun.”

Why Sex Feels Good: Neuroscientist Finds Orgasms Enhance Brain Activity, Leading To Altered State Of Consciousness

Repetitive sexual stimulation can lead to a trance-like state of mind during an orgasm.Photo courtesy of Pexels, Public Domain

The slightest touch from our partner can send shivers down our spine and travel through the most erogenous zones of the human body. Repeated stimulation can make our toes curl, our breath short, and our body move rhythmically to this touch. Before we know it, we’ve entered a trance-like state, and orgasm. Researchers at Northwestern University suggest orgasms feel so good because sexual stimulation sends the brain into an altered state of consciousness; it blocks out everything else, and allows us to solely concentrate on the sensation.

"Sex is a source of pleasurable sensations and emotional connection, but beyond that, it's actually an altered state of consciousness" said Adam Safron, study author, a neuroscientist, and a Ph.D candidate in the psychology department's Brain Behavior Cognition program in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern, in a statement.

During sex, our brain acts as a “pleasure center” to let us know what is enjoyable and what is not. The various nerves in the genitalia communicate with the brain about the sensation experience; this is why sensations can be perceived differently depending on what part of the body is being touched. The “cloud nine” feeling reported by many during sex is linked to the nerves sent to the brain’s pleasure center, or reward circuit.

Sexual pleasure floods the brain with a surge of neurochemicals — chemical messengers that forge emotions, feelings of attachment, and even love, according Psychology Today. The level of pleasure we feel is connected to the release of the chemicals, which can be used to measure the intensity of our orgasm. The areas of the brain impacted by sexual stimulation include the amygdala, nucleus accumbens, ventral tegmental area (VTA), cerebellum, and the pituitary gland.

In the study, published in the journal Socioaffective Neuroscience & Psychology, Safron and his colleague Victoria Klimaj, reviewed related studies and scientific literature to come up with a model in which rhythmic sexual activity likely influences brain rhythms. The model showed stimulating certain nerves in a particular way at a particular speed over and over again focuses our neurons. They begin to synchronize their activity in a process known as neural entrainment.

Eventually, if stimulation continues long enough, this synchronization can spread throughout the brain, which helps us become more focused than ever. If sexual stimulation is intense enough and goes on long enough synchronized activity could spread throughout the brain. This intense focused attention outcompetes usual self-awareness for access to consciousness, and so produces a state of sensory absorption and trance.

“This then caused me to hypothesize that rhythmic entrainment is the primary mechanism by which orgasmic thresholds are surpassed," said Safron.

The researchers were surprised to find parallels between sexual climax and seizures as well as with music and dance, In both orgasm and reflex seizures, rhythmic inputs into high-bandwidth sensory channels result in an explosive process after certain stimulation thresholds are surpassed. This could potentially be an evolutionary advantage.

The ability to keep rhythm may serve as a test of fitness for potential mates. Safron believes this is consistent as rhythmic song and dances are nearly universal parts of mating; dating back to hundreds of millions of years to our common ancestors with pre-vertebrate animals such as insects.

The trance-like state of mind could also have an evolutionary aspect. For example, the entrainment during sexual stimulation could be nature’s way of saying to continue having sex with this person because they are attending to your sexual needs, which means they’re more likely to be attentive in a relationship.

“Before this paper, we knew what lit up in the brain when people had orgasms, and we knew a lot about the hormonal and neurochemical factors in non-human animals, but we didn’t really know why sex and orgasm feel the way they do,” Safron said

So, this is why sex and orgasms feel so damn good.

How Long Should Sex Last? Average Time In Bed May Be Linked To Penis Shape

How Long Should Sex Last, Really?

The pressure put on men to last longer in bed is epitomized in modern pop culture by rapper Missy Elliot who sings how she doesn’t want “no one-minute man,” and dancehall artist Ms. Thing who needs a “one-, two-, three-hour man.” Most men don’t want to finish first in the bedroom for fear of coming up short.

So, how many minutes of sex are enough, and how many are too few?

In an article for The Conversationalist, Dr. Brendan Zietsch, a psychologist from the University of Queensland, writes about what he has learned researching how long heterosexual couples report penetrative sex actually lasts.

He writes: "I know there’s a lot more to sex than putting the penis into the vagina and ejaculating, but the rest is not always easy to define (kissing? Rubbing? Grinding?). To keep things simple and specific, we’ll just focus on the time to ejaculation."

The average time it takes for couples to have sex may be linked to a man’s penis shape.Pexels, Public Domain

How do we define the beginning and end of sex? The definition is penis-centric. Zietsch measured the official time from penetration to ejaculation by observing data from 500 couples around the world who used a stopwatch to time their sex acts over a four-week period. Participants pressed "start" at the time of penile penetration and "stop" at ejaculation. A stopwatch was the preferred method of choice because people are more likely to be biased if simply asked how long they take without proper measure. Also, it’s a difficult measure since people don't normally stare at the clock while having sex.

The findings revealed the average time for each couple, across all the times they had sex, ranged from 33 seconds to 44 minutes. Meanwhile, the average across all couples was 5.4 minutes. This means a couple will typically go for an average of 5.4 minutes every time they have sex.

Interestingly, condom use and circumcision did not affect duration in the bedroom. Some men believecondoms make them lose an erection because it removes all the sensitivity and feeling. However, a 2015study found heterosexual men aged 18 to 24, who cited condoms as a barrier to an erection, were more likely to be suffering from general erectile dysfunction whether or not they used a condom.  

Meanwhile, the country of origin did not affect sex duration, unless the couples came from Turkey, which tended to be significantly shorter (3.7 minutes) than couples from other countries. A couple’s age did influence how long sex lasts, with the older the couple, the shorter the sex.

Depending on what side of the sex duration spectrum men fall on, an average of five minutes could be good or bad. But, according to a 2008 study of United States and Canadian sex therapists, sex that is “too short” lasts one to two minutes, “adequate” lasts three to seven minutes, and “desirable” is seven to 13 minutes. The range for “too long” went from 10 to 30 minutes.

It seems that anything longer than ten minutes is ideal, but unusual.

So, why do we last as long as we do? Whether it’s two minutes or 30?

Zietsch suspects penis shape could affect sex duration in bed. In a 2003 study, using artificial vaginas, artificial penises, and artificial sperm (corn syrup), researchers found the ridge around the head of the penis is able to scoop out pre-existing syrup from the vagina. In other words, the repeated thrusting men do during sex could function to displace other men’s semen, before they ejaculate. This ensures their swimmers will have a better chance at reaching the egg first for fertilization.

“Incidentally, this could explain why it becomes painful for a man to continue thrusting after ejaculating, since that would risk scooping out his own semen as well,” writes Zietsch.

So, how long does sex really last? Clearly there’s no “normal” definition.

When it comes to the heat of the moment, pleasure has no number.

By Lizette Borreli

MALE SPIDERS TIE UP THEIR MATES DURING SEX TO KEEP FROM GETTING EATEN

Spider Bondage

EIGHT-LEGGED BONDAGE

By Charles Q. Choi

Male spiders sometimes practice bondage during sex, wrapping the legs of their mates with silk during trysts to prevent the females from cannibalizing them, researchers say.

Black widows and many other kinds of spiders are infamous: Their females are the deadlier of the species, devouring males before, after or even during sex. In these species, males have often devised a number of tricks to survive these dangerous liaisons, such as rendering females unconscious with knockout gas.

Previous research suggested that male nursery web spiders (Pisaurina mira) might have an unusual way of protecting themselves from sexual cannibalism — they tie up females with silk before and during sex. Scientific descriptions of the encounters read a bit like excerpts from an arachnid version of Fifty Shades of Grey.

First, male nursery web spiders slowly approach females to see if they are receptive. If a female likes her suitor, the spiders next play a little footsie, with the male gently touching his front legs to her hind legs. After this foreplay, they hurry off to a place where they can both dangle freely upside-down on threads of silk. The male then wraps the female's legs in a veil of silk, cradles her with his legs, and enters the female. When the female finally gets fidgety, the male retreats to safety while she frees herself.

Until now, scientists had not directly tested the idea that this bondage reduced the risk of sexual cannibalism. To see if these restraints protected the males from the females, behavioral ecologist Alissa Anderson and her advisor Eileen Hebets at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, used a silicon adhesive to seal the spinnerets of 16 male spiders so they could not spin out threads of silk. They next exposed these arachnids and 15 male spiders whose spinnerets were not sealed to females of random sizes.

The scientists found that relatively large males were more likely to mate than their smaller counterparts, and less likely to be eaten before sex. Regardless of size, males that could wrap up females in silk were roughly seven times less likely to be cannibalized during or after sex, and about seven times more likely to enter females twice.

The researchers are continuing to work  "on teasing apart the potential costs and benefits of copulatory silk wrapping for both males and females in an effort to understand the current function and the evolutionary history of this behavior," Anderson says.

Anderson and Hebets detailed their findings online in the journal Biology Letters.

Sex shouldn't be widespread in nature, but a new study shows why it is

It is not just an emotional mystery; its very existence poses a deep question

GUILT-FREE intercourse may, as Philip Larkin wrote, have begun in 1963, but sexual reproduction has been around a good deal longer than that. About two billion years ago single-celled organisms began exchanging and mixing up genetic information in ways modern biologists recognise as rudimentary forms of sex—though it would be well over a billion years more before animals evolved nervous systems that would let them derive any pleasure from it. Yet the question of why sex exists at all remains troublesome. A creature which reproduces asexually passes on all of its genes to each of its progeny. One that mates with another, by contrast, passes on only half of them. On the face of things that is a huge selective disadvantage. There must therefore, evolutionary biologists believe, be equally huge compensating benefits.

Two ideas exist about what these might be. One is that the genetic variety sex creates prevents parasites and pathogens evolving a single, optimum technique for exploiting a host species. This is the “Red Queen” hypothesis, an allusion to a character in “Through the Looking-Glass” who had to run as fast as she could to stay in the same place. The other idea is that the continual mixing of genes from generation to generation separates good and bad mutations, permitting the bad ones to be purged by natural selection without taking the good ones along for the ride. This process was described by Joel Peck, one of its progenitors, as plucking rubies from rubbish.

“Plucking rubies” and the “Red Queen” are not mutually exclusive. Both could be true. But, while the queen has experimental evidence to back her up, rubies have had little such validation. Until now. For Michael Desai of Harvard University believes he has demonstrated such plucking experimentally in brewer’s yeast. This is a well-understood experimental organism and one ideal for Dr Desai’s purpose because it can reproduce both sexually and asexually. Studying the switch between the two modes, he hoped, might illuminate the purging process. And, as he and his team write in Nature, it has.

Despite having two sexes, known as mating types a and alpha, yeast’s default mode of reproduction is asexual, so Dr Desai’s first task was to work out a way to turn his yeast cells on to sex, as it were. He did this by adding to their DNA genes for resistance to two antibiotics, hygromycin and G418, and arranging for this resistance to be turned on only when the gene for mating was also active. Adding the antibiotics to the yeast’s growth medium meant only sexually active yeast cells could survive.

This done, he and his team set up 24 lines of this modified strain (12 of mating type a and 12 alpha) and let them grow for six months, a period that corresponds to about 1,000 yeast generations. Six lines of each mating type were forced to undergo sexual reproduction every 90 generations, by mixing the sexes together and adding the antibiotics. Others were left to carry on cloning themselves. At these 90-generation break points the researchers also sampled each line to look for any genetic mutations that had arisen in the intervening period. Such mutations are the stuff of evolution, and Dr Desai hoped they might tell the story of why, in an evolutionary sense, sex works.

They did. The researchers found, as predicted, that when a beneficial mutation appeared in a few of the asexually reproducing cells, it would spread only if its positive effects outweighed the negative effects of any deleterious mutations that appeared in the same cells. Even if a good mutation prospered, it did so slowly, as any bad mutations associated with it came along for the ride when the genome it was in passed from one generation to the next.

In the sexual yeast population however, good and bad mutations often went their separate ways when the parent cell’s genome was chopped up and mixed around during reproduction. This permitted different combinations of good and bad mutations to pass to the genomes of different offspring of the same parent cells. That made it easier, in an evolutionary sorting of wheat from chaff, for the good mutations to spread, even if they first appeared in bad company. So, as evolutionary theory predicts, over the course of the experiment genomes containing deleterious mutations disappeared and positive mutations accumulated in the genomes of cells that remained.

The crucial test, though, came at the end of the experiment, when Dr Desai compared the asexual to sexual strains. In every case, the descendants of sexually reproducing yeast cells bested their asexual rivals in the competition for food and resources. His experiments thus confirm that the ruby hypothesis works—at least, in a laboratory. That puts it on an equal footing with the Red Queen. What goes on in the wild, though, has yet to be determined.

Absurd Creature of the Week: The Anglerfish and the Absolute Worst Sex on Earth

DEEP-SEA ANGLERFISH FEMALES like this one dwarf the males, so much so that the male doesn’t even look like the same species. A male will bite onto his lady friend, then fuse his face to her body. He lives the rest of his days like this,releasing sperm when she releases eggs. That little bump at the back of her belly? That's her husband.

A Linophryne brevibarbata species of anglerfish. That attachment at the rear of her belly is not an appendage. It's a tiny male that has permanently fused to her. Had the pair not been caught, he would have lived the rest of his life like this, supplying sperm and pulling nourishment from her blood. Photo copyright London Natural History Museum

A female Chaenophryne quasiramifera. Photo: Theodore W. Pietsch

A female Caulophryne pelagica. Photo copyright London Natural History Museum

A female Bufoceratias shaoi. Photo: Hans Ho

Photocorynus spiniceps. Notice the male attached at top. Photo: Theodore W. Pietsch

A female Thaumatichthys binghami. Photo: Christopher P. Kenaley

A female Haplophryne mollis. Photo: David Shale

A female Melanocetus eustales. Photo: Theodore W. Pietsch

A female Himantolophus appelii. Photo: Theodore W. Pietsch

Teen movies are, at their core, veiled studies in evolutionary biology, with young men and women coming to sexual maturity and either giving into or resisting what is arguably an animal’s sole purpose on this planet — to find a mate. Some decide to wait until they’re married, others lack the desirable traits to even get that far, and still others succeed and consequently have to put off college for a while.

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A female Linophryne polypogon. Photo: Peter David

But if the deep-sea anglerfish happened to have the cognitive and physical capabilities required to produce its own such films, there’d be decidedly fewer plot twists. Every single movie would go a little something like this: Boy meets girl, boy bites girl, boy’s mouth fuses to girl’s body, boy lives the rest of his life attached to girl sharing her blood and supplying her with sperm. Ah, a tale as old as time.

The over 300 extremely varied species of anglerfishes inhabit everything from shallow to super-deep waters, and are so named because they are fish that fish for fish using lures, which are actually highly modified spines of dorsal fins that have migrated to their snouts. But among the 160 deep-sea species, only some 25 engage in the aforementioned biting-fusing-mating, what is known as sexual parasitism. In this group, the diminutive male looks like an entirely different species, lacking the female’s enormous jaws and characteristic lure.

This is because he doesn’t need to hunt. He only exists to attach to a female, and according to evolutionary biologist Theodore W. Pietsch of the University of Washington, mates are so scarce down here that it might be that only 1 percent of males ever find a female. The rest starve to death as virgins — unfortunate guys in a sea that doesn’t have plenty of other fish.

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Close-up of the head of a male Linophryne sp. showing its greatly enlarged nostril. Photo copyright London Natural History Museum

But it isn’t for lack of trying. The male has the biggest nostrils in proportion to its head of any animal on Earth, according to Pietsch. These sniffers are paired with extremely well-developed eyes, “so we think that it’s kind of a dual approach,” he said. “The female emits a species-specific smell, a pheromone, and the male searches out based on that, and then when the male gets close enough, the eyes can be used to distinguish the female of the correct species.”

And with two dozen other species of anglerfishes that engage in this manner of reproduction, the male had better be damn sure he chooses the right one. Luckily, the femaleputs on the red blue light — in the form of glowing bacteria living in her lure. Incredibly, some 90 percent of species in the deep utilize such bioluminescence.

“The bait out there is not only an organ of luminescence, but structurally it’s species-specific,” said Pietsch. “Every species of these 160 forms within this group, they have a pattern of filaments, and pigment patterns, and probably also light flash patterns, like fireflies. And they separate themselves out that way so that males can find females,” distinguishing “the tiny little differences between the structure of the bait.”

Once the male closes in, he bites onto the female, usually her belly, and their tissues fuse together to permanently join the pair in incredibly unholy matrimony. The male’s eyes and fins atrophy away, and here he will live out the rest of his life nourished by her blood, still breathing with his own gills and, importantly, still producing sperm.

“This establishes a hormonal connection,” said Pietsch, “so that probably the maturation of eggs and sperm is synchronized by the sharing of hormones. And once the eggs are mature and the male is ready, she extrudes the eggs” in a kind of gelatinous sheath that can be 30 feet long. This acts like a sponge, readily absorbing the water that the male has released his sperm into.

Keep in mind that this is happening several miles down, where there is little plankton for juvenile fish to eat. So the whole gelatinous mess is buoyant, slowly making its way to the surface, where the larvae hatch and feed, ideally growing big and then migrating down to the depths.

The females of these species can live 30 years, according to Pietsch, and over that time might collect several males, who provide sperm season after season after season (there is no “not now, honey, I have a headache” with anglerfishes). But other than the security of maintaining a constant source of sperm, why evolve such a complex ritual of reproduction in the first place?

“The idea is basically that it’s a deep-sea economy measure,” ichthyologist James Maclaine of London’s Natural History Museum wrote in an email to WIRED. “An anglerfish couple requires about half of the amount of food they would if the male was the same size as the female (and presumably living an unattached life). He is stripped down to the absolute bare essentials, she has to remain big due to the relative cost of making large eggs as opposed to tiny sperm.”

Where such a size difference between sexes, known assexual dimorphism, gets really interesting is its manifestation in the world at large. The famed evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote about this in his essay“Big Fish, Little Fish” — which stars the anglerfishes, of course — arguing that in the majority of animal species, females are larger than males, because the latter often never need to fight for the former.

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A female Lasiognathus amphirhamphus. Photo: Theodore W. Pietsch

For creatures like lions and gorillas and even humans, the largest male has an obvious advantage in the quest to mate (and therefore better odds at passing along his genes). But with deep-sea anglerfishes, the male not only doesn’t fight other males, he’s lucky to even find a female in the first place. Hence their puny size and remarkable mode of reproduction.

He’s really missing out, though, on all those great fishing trips that the females take, with their gaping maws, needle-like teeth, and highly expandable stomachs, which are yet more remarkable adaptations to the abyss.

“At the depths at which many deep-sea anglers live … food rapidly becomes more scarce the deeper you go,” said Maclaine. “Therefore, a lot of fish have evolved various means of being able to tackle large prey items. When you’ve managed to catch your first meal in weeks, you don’t want to have to let it go because it’s too big. Therefore big mouths, fearsome teeth, and elasticated stomachs have all become common features.”

In fact, many female deep-sea anglerfishes can swallow prey twice their size, as Maclaine shows in the video below. They are, after all, sometimes eating for several freeloading males.

High school boys. They’re all the same.

• MATT SIMON