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.

In May last year, George Loewenstein, professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, proved this when he conducted an experiment where he asked couples to double their baseline weekly sexual frequency for a 90-day period. Loewenstein wanted to see if there was any substantial increase in the wellbeing of the test couples, compared with a control group who maintained their regular frequency. There was not.

Loewenstein concluded that directing couples to increase their sexual frequency removed their motivation to engage in sex, and made having sex a chore rather than a pleasure. His conclusion was that couples should concentrate on the quality and not the quantity.

Last year, psychologists at the University of Toronto did just that, and it turns out that the magic number is not three, or four, but a much more achievable, and less intimidating one. They found that for couples in long-term relationships, having sex once a week was associated with enhanced wellbeing and greater relationship satisfaction, but more than once a week offered no additional boost to happiness.

In any long-term relationship, there is an eventual trade-off between the intensity and novelty that hallmark early sexual interactions and the more predictable lovemaking that emerges over time. Your girlfriend’s sex ban is a naive attempt to outwit the inevitable consequences of that overfamiliarity, but the danger in setting up artificial barriers to intimacy is that she imbues the eventual reunion with such expectation, that she inadvertently creates the correct conditions for performance anxiety and premature ejaculation.

Touching and hugging are fundamental to any relationship and banning them is an absolute no-no. Banning sex is also misguided because research confirms that having sex (that you want to have) can boost rather than diminish libido.

While I can see how it might be fun to do an annual sex detox for a week or so, I can’t see how a routine restriction on all physical contact, including touching, achieves anything other than alienation. If you feel like having sex then you should make hay while the sun shines. After all, sexual frequency only declines with age.

Figures from the most recent Natsal study, published in 2013, estimate that the average person has sex less than five times a month anyway. If you consider the fact that national averages include data from 21-year-olds who can’t get enough sex and 61-year-olds who have a lower libido, your girlfriend may find that this year’s limit is next year’s target.

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