A common topic of contention in the manosphere between men and those few women who brave these choppy waters is the issue of frequency of sex in marriage. Polls say that married men get sex once a week on average, and also that married men get sex considerably more often than single men. So women seem inclined to take this as evidence that most married men aren’t being deprived.
But is that true? Does getting it more often than your single friends equal satisfaction? If the average is weekly, that means about half the men are getting it less often than that (I know mean and median are not the same thing, but it’s close enough for our purposes). The GSS says 15% get it twice a year or less, while only 7% get it four or more times a week. (I wonder if “daily” was so small they didn’t bother to report it, because I’m having trouble finding it mentioned anywhere.)
So, how many of those guys are satisfied? I’m going to save my opinion for another post, so as to try not to skew this poll, but I’m hoping plenty of men will share theirs so we can get an idea what the frequency would be if men were in charge. So here’s the question; feel free to add details about your age or other circumstances in the comments:
Guys, if you were (or are) married to a woman you found attractive — not a supermodel, but someone who doesn’t repulse you or make you want to avoid her — and she seemed to enjoy sex well enough and was happy to have it any time you felt like it, how often would you like that to be?
Cail Corishev 
I’m afraid to view the results, but here goes…
Oh, only two people have voted.
Will you post one for the ladies, too?
Actually, ours would be much more complicated because of ovulation and menstruation. During ovulation, I would vote “morning and night” and during non-ov I’d vote for twice a week.
I thought of posting one for the ladies, but not on how many times they want it (because I don’t care, ha!) but something like, “How many times do you think men really want it?” It might be interesting to compare that result to this one, but only if I get a lot more respondents.
Need another option – 3 to 4 times a week, or basically every other night works.
The answer for me is every other day, but since that wasn’t an option, I put daily.
Thanks, I added a 3-4/week option.
This is a non-issue. Most women get married with the strong expectation that they become mothers as soon as possible, and marital sex pretty much ends for long years after each childbirth. It’s the normal course of things, but it’s also a sh*t sandwich for men.
Hoellenhund2, that’s not at all the situation where I live. Most women (and men, for that matter) seem to get married with the expectation that they’ll wait a few years to start having kids, so they can afford a big enough house and SUV and so on, and so they can have some fun together before the work of parenting starts. The main exceptions are traditional Catholics, Amish, and a handful of evangelicals — all very small minorities.
As for “the normal course of things,” if sex stops for years after each child, one spouse or both is refusing it. I don’t know how common that is; again, most people I know put off childbirth and space out children with birth control, not abstinence. That’s kinda beside the point, though. What I’m interested in here is finding out how much the reality of sex frequency in marriage differs from what men would be truly satisfied with.
People vary widely on this as a personal matter, I think, and then tend to project their personal preferences on the rest of their sex, while simultaneously denigrating the preferences of others as being inconsistent with a legitimate expression of the male sex. Great fun, really.
What would make it more interesting would be age of the man answering the question and # of years married.
We took one of those pre-engagement classes and there was a questionnaire about how often we should have sex and I remember my husband writing in 10 and I wrote 2. I was like, 10! Really? 10!
Artisinal Toad, that’s true. I know male libido — or at least potential performance — tends to lessen with age, but I think that gets overstated. I think I’d need a more sophisticated polling system to cross-reference them, though.
Novaseeker, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a guy if he doesn’t want sex that often. I just hope he’s not paired up with a woman who really does, because that would be a shame.
I’m good with 2-3 per week if a weekly hummer is peppered in on an off day.
Just one more time per week.
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Sis says: “We took one of those pre-engagement classes and there was a questionnaire about how often we should have sex and I remember my husband writing in 10 and I wrote 2. I was like, 10! Really? 10!”
So you compromised and split the difference and agreed to have sex 6 times per week?
Or, did you did you decide your husband was crazy and that your number (2) was the correct goal to set as the number of times to have sex every week?
I’m not meaning to jump on you here, but this seems to be a common pattern for women. They know their husbands desire to have sex more often, but then turnaround and act as if their husbands were defective for desiring sex that often. The woman’s libido is becomes the reasonable standard, and if the man desires exceeds that standard his desires are excessive.
10 is not an outlandish number; certainly not for a young man. I’d wager that if the above poll was broken down by age, that virtually every man under 30 would have checked daily, and that many would have checked “twice a day” if it was an option.
I think this is a major disconnect between men and women. The centrality of sex to a man–the amount of time he spends thinking about sex and the amount of sex he desires–is something the typical woman can’t relate to.
@8to12, I keep typing answers to your question and then deleting it for oversharing :). Let’s just say sex was a big issue for us to figure out and it took several years of mistakes before we got it right. I have always been attracted to him despite our problems. We have an amazing sex life now and I hope we can continue to bless each other.
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People have sex weekly????? whoaaaaaa.
Looks like the lone “monthly” vote was an accidental misvote. See the “comments” link below the poll.
Thanks, I didn’t realize the poll itself had comments. I can’t delete the vote either, since I don’t have a paid subscription to the polling service. I’m just going to assume there have to be some guys out there who want sex that rarely, and let that one vote represent them.
I’m just going to assume there have to be some guys out there who want sex that rarely,
As the culprit who made the accidental misvote, I would NOT make that assumption.
Have you ever known a healthy male of any postpubertal age,. who would be okay with less than weekly? I certainly have not.
Factoring out that misvote. we see that anything less than once a week, is unacceptable deprivation for 100% of men. Not 99%. 100.00000% of men find less than weekly, unacceptable.
It’s important because, even just that 1%, is sufficient hamster food for certain folks to convince themselves that their husbands are, or could be converted into, one of 1%.
But ZERO is a much starker number, harder to evade… and it’s accurate.
(til the poll gets trolled by fems…)
Good point, Byblow. I was going to say that you do see stories written by women who can’t get their husbands interested in sex, but then I realized they don’t necessarily count, because my question wasn’t, “How often would you like to have sex with the wife you have?” but, “How often would you like to have sex if you were attracted to your wife and she gave it up happily as often as you like?” So in those cases of a husband who’s not interested, she may have become physically unattractive to him, or past or current problems between them may have crushed his desire. So those guys might not be interested in sex with their wives, and yet would like to have sex regularly in a happy marriage.
Over at Sunshine Mary’s, we have the example of Lee Lee Bug. If we take her at her word, she’s in good shape and attractive (confirmed by some there who have seen her picture) and she just can’t get her husband to have sex with her. But even in that case, it sounds like he has problems with depression and maybe other physical problems. So he probably doesn’t qualify as a “normal healthy male” either.
So I’d say you’re right: no reasonably healthy male, in the presence of an attractive wife, is going to decline sex for a week or more at a stretch. Not one. In fact, most won’t decline it for more than a couple days. So if a woman’s husband tells her that he’s fine with their “Sunday afternoon unless we’re busy” schedule, there are really two possibilities: he’s lying and telling her what he thinks she wants to hear, or he has mental or physical problems with his manhood (or both).
If he’s lying because he’s too cowed by feminism to speak up for himself or take a chance on ravishing her, is that her fault? Well, no. But it doesn’t bode well for the marriage (neither do mental or physical problems), so if she cares about the marriage, she may want to do what she can about it. Hence my suggestion: offer sex every night and see if he accepts. Nothing fancy, because people are busy and tired and distracted; just go at it until you drain him and then cuddle while he falls asleep. If he never turns you down, add a quickie every morning to wake him up, and see how he responds to that. Keep increasing the frequency until he says he needs a break.
That’s the only way to find out how much he actually wants it. I’m betting that most wives would discover that their husbands would like a whole lot more sex than they’re getting — maybe a lot more than the husbands themselves know they want. Which is why most women wouldn’t try it: they’d be afraid of creating a monster. “What if we get up to three times a day, and then he expects that? When will I do my shopping?”
Cail Corishev says:
November 15, 2013 at 8:18 am
You’re right. Most women wouldn’t even try it for fear of creating a monster.
What they don’t realize is that they’d get a man who’d run into a burning building wearing a gasoline suit for them. Pity that.
I’d have answered one of the “more than daily” options, except that at 47, I can’t keep that up for any significant length of time. Even with two kids, one who is a night owl and one who is a morning person, we’ve managed to have runs of nearly a week where we have managed daily, and by the end of those runs I start thinking about how to get myself into better health.
There’s not an option: “So often I’d get dehydrated.”