Everyone assumes the couples having the most sex are the ones most madly in love. A new study says that’s not how it works.
A review published in Current Sexual Health Reports found that being in the early stage of romantic love does correlate with higher sexual frequency. Young adults in love reported having sex around 3.5 times per week on average, compared to the once-a-week average for married couples in the general population. But the intensity of that love, how obsessive the thoughts, how deep the feelings, how committed the partner—none of it really predicted how much sex the couple was having.
“Surprisingly, scientists have not tended to investigate sexual frequency in people experiencing romantic love,” said Adam Bode, the University of Melbourne researcher who led the review, per PsyPost. He drew on the Romantic Love Survey 2022, the world’s largest publicly available dataset of people experiencing romantic love, pulling responses from over 1,500 young adults across 33 countries.
It sounds like it should work the other way—more love, more sex. But the data says being in love is what drives sexual frequency, not the degree of it. How obsessive the thoughts, how consuming the feelings, none of that really mattered. Brain imaging research cited in the review also found that as a relationship approaches the one-year mark, sexual frequency drops even when the emotional intensity stays high.
Which Category of Lover Are You In?
The researchers also identified four distinct categories of lovers in a related cluster analysis: mild, moderate, intense, and libidinous. The intense group reported the highest romantic feelings and commitment—but not the highest sexual frequency. That distinction belonged to the libidinous group, who averaged nearly ten times per week and displayed the highest openness scores, the most reported energy, and the strongest desire to travel. They also had the highest proportion of people on SSRIs, which was unexpected given that those medications are well-documented to suppress sex drive. The researchers suggest that early romantic love might be strong enough to override that particular side effect.
This lands against a backdrop of a broader American sex recession. In 1990, 55% of Americans reported having sex at least once a week. By 2024, that figure had fallen to 37 percent. Among married couples, the drop went from 59% reporting weekly sex between 1996 and 2008, down to 49% by 2024. Being newly in love is still a meaningful buffer against that decline—but apparently, how hard you’ve fallen has nothing to do with it.
Bode, for his part, admitted some personal surprise at the numbers. “To be honest, I was a little surprised the average frequency of sex among young adults experiencing romantic love was so low,” he said. “In my personal experience, when I was young and in love, I was having sex that often each day. So I guess I’m a bit of an outlier.” Good for you, Bode. Good for you.
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