Providing support for a point I made in my previous post, Marina Adshade finds an unsurprisingly correlation between promiscuity and unhappiness:
Sex makes us happy (do I need to cite my source for that?), but how about 1970’s style love-the-one-you’re-with sex? You know the kind of sex that is preceded by fishing around in a bowl at a party for a set of car keys? Research suggests that promiscuity is not associated with increased happiness and, in fact, that the number of sexual partners needed to maximize happiness is exactly one.*
First, you should know that everyone else is having less sex than you think. The median adult American has sex (with another person) 2 to 3 times a month. Even younger people, under forty, only have sex once a week, on average. Only 7% have sex more than 4 times a month and 18% have none at all. Students have less sex than others of the same age (except my students, who have assured me that is impossible) and married people have more.
August 23rd, 2010 | 1:15 am
This study makes sense: how could one find happiness, in encounters, where no emotional intimacy is formed? Really the only way, to develop an emotional bond, is with one other person. Some guys, think that they would like to try, and see if they could form an emotional bond, with a lot of women, but it never works. Women, I think, have had it right, all along, on this issue: have only one parter, form a bond with her/him, and happiness is more likely to emerge.
August 23rd, 2010 | 4:28 am
Bret,
You are giving women too much credit, when the cards are down they are as complicit in destructive practices as men. It is the Godfearing men and women who have been right all along.
August 23rd, 2010 | 1:45 pm
Not to rain on everyone’s parade here but this seems to have left too many variables not locked down as well as causation running the wrong direction.
For example, married partners who cheat tend to be unhappy. Well yea, why would happy married people cheat?
More importantly, the motivation for promiscuity seems to have been overlooked. What do I mean by that?
OK most people like ice cream. Some people have a little ice cream, others have a lot. Suppose you look at people who have a lot of ice cream. I bet they will tend to be unhappy. That doesn’t mean eating ice cream makes you unhappy. Quite often people who are less happy than the average person will try to boost their happiness by grabing something that is quite high in happiness content….ice cream serves this purpose quite well. So a person who is emotionally devastated may eat a quart of ice cream. He is unhappy relative to other people but the question we’d want to know is he unhappy relative to someone just like him who *doesn’t* eat all that ice cream?
Likewise Bret’s comment that its hard to be happy when no emotional intimacy is formed is correct but may miss the point. Why is no emotional intimacy being formed? If its due to some other reason than the person is having lots of sex, then the sex may simply be a coping mechanism to make a bad situation more bearable. In that case, technically, more sex does make you happier…..or to put it another way making unhappy people have less sex will just make them unhappier on average.
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