Aunque no lo parezca, más sexo no te hace más feliz

INDEPENDENT.- “Although it seems plausible that sex could have beneficial effects on happiness, it is equally plausible that happiness affects sex,” the team wrote in their paper. “ ... or that some third variable, such as health, affects both.”

To help settle this riddle, the team carefully designed an experiment that would clearly determine, once and for all, if more sex causes greater happiness.

A straightforward experiment to solve a confusing riddle

The experiment was straightforward: Measure how happy couples were with their current sex schedules. Then, split them into two groups and ask one group to have more sex (twice as much, to be exact) and ask the other group to change nothing about their sex live. Finally, compare their how happy they were afterward. (As part of the experiment, for example, couples having sex three times a week had sex six times a week; those having sex once a month had it twice a month.)

A total of 64 adult couples volunteered. Each pair was legally married and heterosexual, and all volunteers were between the ages of 35 and 65.

The team asked half of the couples to double the amount of sex they were having while the other half of couples kept their normal sex schedule.

Throughout the duration of the experiment, which lasted 90 days, both sets of couples completed the same online questionnaire at the end of each day. This questionnaire helped the researchers measure each couple's mood as well as how satisfied they were with each sexual episode — the quality of the sex.

What they found surprised them:

“Contrary to what one would expect if the causal story running from sexual frequency to happiness were true,” the team wrote in their paper, “we observed a weak negative impact of inducing people to have more sex on mood.”

In general, the researchers found that the couples who doubled the amount of sex didn't enjoy the sex as much and were less happy overall. Although the team can only speculate as to why this was, they did answer their question: More sex does not make us happier.

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