What’s the right amount of sex?

Naturally, this was an uncomfortable conversation to broach, but we had worked on communication and I started with, “When we don’t do this, it makes me feel…” At first, he was understanding, but we soon found ourselves having a similar conversation to the one I walked away from that cold, fall night. This time, my partner asked me if I only measured the trueness of our love by how much we slept together, instead of all the other elements that define our love and intimacy. He told me, simply, that sex isn’t everything. While the rational part of me agreed, the irrational part still felt like it was mostly everything. As far as I was concerned, I was living out my last years of sexual freedom, and I still felt freedom should ring four to five times a week. TV and movies led me to believe that sex is the barometer of happiness in a relationship. When I asked Fischer about this, he said, “[Sex is] a barometer, but not the barometer, and perhaps not a barometer in the way that most people think—that the amount and quality of the sex tells all. What’s happening in one’s sex life with his/her partner is often an expression of the larger dynamics of the relationship.” What I haven’t mentioned is that in my early 20s, I was married to someone I only had sex with two or three times a month. At the time, I felt like a cliché of a midlife divorce crisis, and it terrified me. All my friends were going on casual dates, and I was at home feeling like I was nearing 50 with three children, trying to save my marriage and it felt like the only tangible solution was to have more sex with my husband. (I guess I had seen too many movies about couples getting divorced, too.)

But when we moved in together, I arrived at my inevitable place of feeling like we needed to be having more sex. Maybe it was residual fears from my last live-in relationship, but I didn’t want to make the same mistakes. This time I wanted the relationship to be how I imagined perfect relationships should be: having sex every day either at night or in the morning; a night or two where he rips my clothes off passionately after a double date with a couple I’ve decided is boring, and a crazy romp in an unusual location peppered in once a month for good measure. Naturally, this was an uncomfortable conversation to broach, but we had worked on communication and I started with, “When we don’t do this, it makes me feel…” At first, he was understanding, but we soon found ourselves having a similar conversation to the one I walked away from that cold, fall night. This time, my partner asked me if I only measured the trueness of our love by how much we slept together, instead of all the other elements that define our love and intimacy. He told me, simply, that sex isn’t everything. While the rational part of me agreed, the irrational part still felt like it was mostly everything. As far as I was concerned, I was living out my last years of sexual freedom, and I still felt freedom should ring four to five times a week. TV and movies led me to believe that sex is the barometer of happiness in a relationship. When I asked Fischer about this, he said, “[Sex is] a barometer, but not the barometer, and perhaps not a barometer in the way that most people think—that the amount and quality of the sex tells all. What’s happening in one’s sex life with his/her partner is often an expression of the larger dynamics of the relationship.” What I haven’t mentioned is that in my early 20s, I was married to someone I only had sex with two or three times a month. At the time, I felt like a cliché of a midlife divorce crisis, and it terrified me. All my friends were going on casual dates, and I was at home feeling like I was nearing 50 with three children, trying to save my marriage and it felt like the only tangible solution was to have more sex with my husband. (I guess I had seen too many movies about couples getting divorced, too.)

When my ex-husband and I started dating in college, we had sex all the time. But the failure of that relationship was its inability to develop and strengthen in the real world—not the sex. Once we became adults with careers and late nights, counting the times we had sex was like grabbing for straws, and it was easier to look at our lack of sex as the problem rather than dig into the deeper problems of our relationship. When I think about it now, sex was a microcosm for our relationship, because without it, there wasn’t much there. And when there isn’t much there, the sex can only go so far. With that realization, I was able to open my eyes to the other elements of intimacy in my current relationship. Like when we have giggle-fest, slumber parties where we lie on the bed like we’re at summer camp; or when we talk about money problems and he tells me it will OK and I believe him. The intimacy from those times is sometimes better than sex, and they certainly make the sex better. As Fischer said, “The goal is contentment, and the couple should feel free to set those terms. [Contentment] changes with time, and it’s completely normal if [your relationship] needs change. The key is communication—being open and honest about it.” As an independent, career-driven woman, I was the last person to realize I was using sex for validation in my relationship. It wasn’t until I asked myself (and others) those hard questions that I was able to learn that sex has something to do with sustaining a relationship, just not everything. Intimacy is a multi-faceted, mostly intangible element of a relationship that can manifest in many ways, and ultimately, it’s not the quantity of sex, but the quality of intimacy that keeps a relationship going. No tallies required.