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How much does personality impact your bedroom antics?
By Merethe Najjar — Written on Jan 17, 2023
Your personality type might actually determine if you’re going to have a lot of sex in your relationship. And science can prove it based on just how curious and conscientious you are.
According to a study by Florida State University involving nearly 300 newly-married heterosexual couples, there's a reliable way to determine the amount of sex a couple will have. And, yeah, it has a lot to do with your reactions to the world — and people — around you.
Psychologists Andrea Meltzer and James McNulty got very involved in the sex lives of their participants and asked them to keep a daily diary of the number of times they did the deed. Afterward, they were asked to take a test to determine their “Big Five” traits.
That is, the five dominant aspects of their personality, and how they interact with everything around them.
Here is how your personality type affects how much sex you have:
And that’s where things got pretty interesting because the results started to spell out a connection between someone’s likeliness to be conscientious to others and the amount of sex they were getting on the regular.
The couples were asked to keep diaries for two weeks, to record whether they had sex and if they were satisfied with it on a scale from one to seven.
While men are typically more likely to initiate sex (as any woman can tell you), your sex life — or lack thereof, at least in a heterosexual, monogamous relationship — relies in a weirdly traditional way on the missus. Why? Because women are considered the “gatekeepers of sex” in a relationship.
Men might try to start the hanky-panky more frequently than women do — like a dog with a bone, really — but it’s up to us to respond in a positive manner and seal the deal. So, yes, your ability to be considerate to people really does play a part in your horizontal tango’ing time.
A woman’s willingness directly affected the amount of time the couple spent having sex, and the man’s personality played absolutely no factor in it at all. Ladies, it really, honestly, truly is up to us.
According to the study, women who are “more open” to new experiences or exude a certain “agreeability factor” stand a chance to have more frequent sex than women who are difficult to be around, or less willing to try new experiences and things in their lives. So ladies, don’t be finicky, because you’re the only one standing in the way of your sexy time.
Having lots of sex might require input solely from the lady in the relationship, but the study also determined that sexual satisfaction relies on both partners to make it work.
So, what was the norm for those newlyweds? The happy couples reported having sex approximately every three to four days, on average.
While the authors suggest that their study is not a direct representation of all couples in every stage of a relationship, since it was based solely on newlywed, heterosexual couples, they still believe it’s a good way to begin to study the subject.
There are plans to determine the amounts of sex in other couples, based on homosexual, non-monogamous relationships, and even on location, because science is nothing if not thorough... even if it is a bit intrusive.
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Merethe Najjar is a professional writer, editor, and fiction author.