How often should we be intimate?

Every Friday, we open our Instagram to the Ours community and let couples submit questions to our team of couples therapists. We pick the most interesting ones and write our thoughts here. This week’s question is: “What is a healthy number to be intimate a month?”

So, what’s the magic number? Is there even a magic number? What else should we factor in?

Let’s start here – recently, researchers surveyed over 2,000 couples in happy long term relationships for 10+ years. They found that these happy couples had sex 7x a month on average. But, researchers found that sex wasn’t the #1 factor for relationship success. The top determining factor for success in a long term relationship was having fun with each other (amongst other things).

When couples ask me this question, I find that my answer is never satisfactory for them. I don’t ever want to give out a number. How many times you have sex in any given week is in itself personal and intimate. Most importantly, it varies couple to couple.

If a couple were to come to me and say that they have a great relationship and only have sex once every 6 weeks, that’s fantastic! I wouldn’t question the greatness of their relationship, but TBH, I’d still have some burning questions on the inside, because I’d be willing to bet that one person in that partnership wishes they had more sex.

Yet, it still feels so prickly to bring up. I’ve spoken to therapist colleagues who are reluctant to have this conversation with their clients. Reasons being — it’s too personal, why bring it up if it doesn’t come up from them? I call bullshit.

Therapists need to work equally as hard as our clients to understand why they feel uncomfortable talking about sex. When I think about the lifecycle of a relationship, I think of myself as being responsible understanding how sex and intimacy is being experienced in the relationship. What is currently happening and what is the desired state?

Here are 4 questions that can help you and your partner start talking about sex:

1. How do you and your partner define intimacy?
2. How are you aligning your sexual compatibility?
3. How do you visualize yourself as a sexual being? How have you visualized it in the past? Present? Future? What does your desired future with your partner look like?
4. What are you sexual accelerators? What are your sexual brakes?

How do you and your partner define intimacy?

This is a big question! Creating space to individually reflect on and understand how you and your partner experience intimacy is vital to the success of your relationship. In the beginning phases of a relationship, it’s pretty formulaic. It turns out we’re really good at noticing what we’re immediately attracted to — the ‘automatic turn on.’ And then we take all of that, the passion, the ease of how that feels, and make it permanent. We convince ourselves that we always have to feel that in order to feel sexual. Sustaining the attraction and getting caught up in the comparison to the intimacy in the honeymoon (read: easier) phase of a relationship that makes talking honestly and vulnerably about intimacy hard. We have to think about the quality of the relationship as a whole when considering how we define intimacy — by talking to our partners about what moves them to feel closer to us.

How are you aligning your sexual compatibility?

Our emotional needs are not always in alignment with our sexual needs. What makes us feel good emotionally may not excite us sexually. Talk to each other about how your emotional needs are being met. Is it necessary to shift this? Or is it good as is? Think about how you might assume the idea that the thread that connects you sexually is by solely by meeting the emotional needs of each other. This may or may not be true. When we are noticing a difference in libido or someone in the partnership has a higher sex drive, we often associate being on the other side of that (i.e. the person with lower libido) as a bad thing. We’re often missing other enormous pieces of our partner — we view them differently. We can de-eroticize our partners when we choose someone who answers one set of needs (emotional ones) in the interest of other needs that have to do with having a secure attachment and stability.

How do you visualize yourself as a sexual being? How have you visualized it in the past? Present? Future? What does your desired future with your partner look like?

This is more of an individual exercise to share with your partner later. But some questions to ask yourself here include:

• How do I view sex and intimacy? What stories do I tell myself?
• How was sexuality described to me as a child?
• How did that view impact me when I first started having sex?
• How has that shifted my view of it now?
• What do I want it to be for the future?

What are you sexual accelerators? What are your sexual brakes?

For all of my people out there who feel “shame-y” that their libidos are lower than their partners — this one is for you. We were never taught to listen to our bodies and understand what feels good. We were taught that this process should be automatic.

Let’s define this first. A sexual accelerator is something that makes us feel good. It helps us feel present in our bodies. It excites our sex drive. Examples of this include: exercising, cooking dinner with your partner, having a deep conversation, massages, cuddling.

A sexual brake is something that halts our sex drive. It makes it difficult for us to get in the mood. It’s frenetic energy, but not the good kind. It’s messy. Like, a dirty house, or feeling rushed.

How can you notice this for yourself? This requires not only the physical practice of understanding what feels good, but also noticing what your thoughts and feelings around sex.