You lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, your partner snuggled up against you. You just had amazing sex. But it’s different now. Three times a week has shifted to once a week, maybe once every two weeks. Is it normal? Have you lost something? Or is it just what happens when love settles into an LTR?
You’re not worried, more so curious. The passion is definitely still there, but it doesn’t demand attention like it used to. Maybe love isn’t about how much you are having sex—maybe it’s more about the experience. Still… You wonder. Do all couples go through this? Are you overthinking it?
Turns out you’re not the only one asking these questions. In Romantic Love and Sexual Frequency: Challenging Beliefs, Ph.D. Candidate Adam Bode, Marta Kowal Ph.D., Dr. Fabio Cannas Aghedu, and Dr. Phillip S. Kavanaugh reveal the unexpected when exploring this topic.
We’ve been told that romantic love and sex go hand-in-hand. More love equals more sex, right? But what if how much you’re having (or not having) doesn’t define your relationship as much as you think?
What we thought we knew about romantic love
For years, scholars have suggested that more love means more sex. Early theories also claimed sexual frequency declined as relationships matured, such as R. J Sternberg’s Triangular Theory of Love (1986). This theory pointed to passion as the driving force of sexual activity in romantic relationships. The idea was simple—passion initially runs hot and cools over time.
But not everyone agreed.
Lisa M. Diamond Ph.D. (2003) and Stephanie Cacioppo Ph.D. (2012) argued that love and desire don’t always correlate. They suggested that while love creates a deep emotional connection, sexual desire is a separate biological system. Some couples have strong romantic love without much sex, while others have lots of it without deep love.
Other studies focused on external influences. Physical attraction, personality traits like extroversion, and even religious beliefs have all been linked to sexual frequency. And yet, despite all this academic focus, no one had tested whether romantic love itself—its intensity, obsessiveness, and commitment—actually impacted how often folks had sex.
Until now.
Does more love equal more sex?
A. Bode and their research team wanted to know: Does romantic love really influence how much sex you’re having? Or are we giving love too much credit for what happens in the bedroom? So, they hypothesized that:
- Folks in newer relationships would have more sex.
- Intense romantic love would equal more sex.
- Thinking about your partner more often would also mean more sex.
- And the less committed you were, the more sex you’d have.
While that 4th hypothesis might sound odd, they reasoned that you needed to be more committed to each other to become a long-term coupling. So, if long-term couplings with higher commitment levels were having less sex, then we could theorize that less commitment equals more of it.
To test these ideas, 720 participants completed a survey that measured their relationship length, love intensity, obsessive thinking, and commitment to said partnership. They also answered simple questions like “How many times per week do you have sex with the person you love?”
This is where the results get interesting.
Step aside, misconceptions
Plot twist: none of the hypotheses mentioned above held up. Relationship duration? It didn’t matter. Passionate love? Nope. Thinking about your partner a lot? No effect. Commitment? Irrelevant.
“Our entire model of 14 well-reasoned predictors explained only 4.06% of the variation in sexual frequency,” the researchers admitted. In other words, romantic love—at least how we currently measure it—doesn’t seem to impact how often couples do it.
Some results were expected, such as partner attractiveness. If someone rated their lover as highly attractive, they had sex more frequently. And poor health had a small but noticeable effect on how much sex a person was having.
However, other results were somewhat unexpected. Like age, older participants had more sex. Interestingly, homosexual participants reported doing it less often, which A. Bode and colleagues thought might be due to external social pressures or differing norms in same-sex couplings.
What does this mean?
Maybe we’ve been asking the wrong questions—maybe love and sex aren’t as interdependent as we’ve been led to believe.
“The findings are striking,” the study notes. If love doesn’t predict sexual frequency, then what does? The research team acknowledges, “This highlights how little we currently know about sexual activity and romantic love.”
There’s still so much to discover. Perhaps external factors, like stress, lifestyle, or personal insecurities, play a bigger role than pure love. Maybe some couples naturally land into a less-than-frequent but still fulfilling sex life, while others don’t.
What is clear is love doesn’t come with a built-in sex schedule. And that’s okay. So, if you’re concerned that deeply loving your partner but not jumping into the sack every five minutes means something is wrong—take a breath. Science says otherwise.
