Dhru Purohit

Pleasure is critical, and sex is one of those major pathways back to reclaiming pleasure in your own life.

Yes, healthier aging, sex protects against cognitive decline, it improves immunity, it leads to better cardiovascular outcomes.

There's even a very famous study showing, particularly among men, that orgasms are correlated with longevity.

We would expect this finding to be true of women too.

We still need to do, unfortunately, we haven't done that research yet.

But yeah, it really predicts just about every important health outcome that we care about.

And yet it's something that we never talk about in our culture.

We're so used to thinking of sex as something that's extra or a treat, right?

That we get lucky.

But I'm here to tell you that sexual pleasure needs to be part of your repertoire when you're thinking about your overall health.

And that's not even getting into the psychological benefits, right?

It increases our sense of well-being, it increases our relationship satisfaction, right?

Sexual satisfaction, there is just decades of research showing that it is a very strong predictor of relationship satisfaction.

And yet, just like you said, Drew, we tend to think of it as something that needs to be siphoned off into another part of our lives, or where it just shouldn't be prioritized and it's just gonna kind of fall from the sky when the time is right.

Yes.

So sexual satisfaction is a huge predictor of relationship satisfaction.

And to me, what's really interesting with this data is that it's not the case that relationship satisfaction just seems to naturally lead to more sex, right?

Which is what we might think, like, oh, we're in a good relationship.

Sex is just going to kind of start to happen.

What tends to happen when you look at longitudinal data is that couples who are prioritizing intimacy and enjoying satisfying sex later go on to report higher levels of relationship satisfaction.