Sex advice with Suzi Godson: Is my girlfriend’s sex ban a good idea?

My long-term girlfriend likes to impose a sex ban every so often, where we spend a week not allowed to touch each other. She thinks it increases the excitement by making us mad with desire for each other, but I think we shouldn’t need that crutch to have good sex.

Couples waste an inordinate amount of time worrying about whether or not they are having the right amount of sex. Mixed messages from the media don’t help. In their 2013 New York Times bestseller The Normal Bar, Chrisanna Northrup, Pepper Schwartz, and James Witte surveyed 70,000 people about their level of marital and sexual satisfaction and they concluded that the magic sex number is three to four times per week. Others have conducted exhaustive year-long personal experiments to prove that daily sex is the best way to keep the fizz in a relationship.

This assumption that “sex makes people happy, so having more sex must make them more happy” is unhelpful. In the same way that eating a chocolate cupcake is a treat, but eating five in a row would put you off cupcakes for life, too much of any good thing can be problematic.