Every Friday on the blog, I answer people’s questions about sex, love, and relationships. This week’s question comes from a reader who wanted to know the following:

“Is there any good data on how often married people have sex, on average, at different ages, or at different stages of their marriage? Or how often, for example, on average, married people in the 40s have sex? I am sure there is an immense range of variation here, but it would help to have some kind of reference point, at least, for gauging where in the spectrum one's own experiences lie. And I think this must be a fairly urgent question for a fairly large number of people, especially in marriages where there is a significant desire gap between the two partners.”

Thanks for this question. There is definitely some data that can speak to it; however, it is important to keep in mind that most research looking at frequency of sex in marriage has looked very specifically at frequency of penile-vaginal intercourse within heterosexual marriages. As a result, we do not know quite as much about frequency of other sexual activities (e.g., oral sex) or how the frequency of those acts might vary for married partners of the same sex vs. those of different sexes.

That said, let’s take a look at some data from the National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior (NSSHB) [1,2]. The NSSHB was conducted in 2009 and involved a nationally representative U.S. sample of over 5,000 adults. In the table below, you can see the frequency of penile-vaginal intercourse reported by married men and women of different ages.