The Not-So-Surprising Link Between Sex and Happiness

LifeTwo just spent a week focusing on improving midlife happiness, but we missed one key driver: sex.

In a 2004 paper, "Money, Sex and Happiness: An Empirical Study," Dartmouth's David Blanchflower and Andrew Oswald of Warwick University (UK) conclude that data from surveys of some 16,000 people shows that "The more sex, the happier the person."

They found that "Having sex at least four times a week is associated with approximately 0.12 happiness points, which is a large effect (it is, very roughly, about one-half of the size of the effect of marriage on happiness)."

Having one sexual partner the previous year -- not none, and not many -- was linked to higher levels of happiness. Stereotypes aside, married people had "much more sex" -- and were happier -- than unmarrieds.

But a little sex is the same as no sex at all -- at least as far as happiness is concerned. The authors write that "Celibacy and small amounts of sex have statistically indistinguishable effects on happiness."

There's bad news as you age. One third of women over 40 did not have sex the previous year; for men over 40, the figure is 15% (the authors note that they and others suspect that males over-report their sexual activity in this interview-based survey).

And despite decades of Hollywood plot lines from Dynasty to The OC, the researchers found that "Income has no clear effect. Money buys neither more sexual partners nor more sex."

One element the authors didn't consider was what we'll call the Causal Caution: just because people who have more sex are happier does not mean that more sex is the cause. What if cause and effect runs the other way -- happier people are more sexually active?

Yet another reason to improve your own happiness, courtesy of LifeTwo.

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Among other tidbits sussed out by Blanchflower and Oswald: despite the classic use of "gay" as a synonym for "happy," homosexual men and women are no more or less happy than the rest of the population.

The paper can be downloaded from Dartmouth here, as a pdf.