Dr. Wendy Walsh

Sometimes novelty can just be a different position or a different room.

Because what couples tend to do in long-term committed monogamous relationships is they figure out what strings work on the guitar and they play those same two strings over and over until they're numb and they don't work anymore.

Whereas when you're on a first date with somebody, if you touch baby fingers, your entire body would experience something, right?

So everything becomes numb.

But I want to say this also.

There's a lot of unfair pressure in our highly sexualized culture to have lots of sex and this idea that frequency of sex is a determinant of how healthy that relationship is.

I want to remind people that mature companionate love may involve lots of affection.

but not so much sex, and that's okay.

The truth is that most couples have sex in America on average about once a week.

What they've discovered is that if you increase the amount of sex in a relationship and you compare it with questioning couples on relationship satisfaction, you find that going up to two times a week actually increases relationship satisfaction.

Any more than two times a week,

Doesn't help.

In fact, there are couples who have lots and lots and lots of sex because they're having it out of anxiety.

They're afraid their partner will fool around on them.

They're afraid their partner will leave them if they don't.

They're rushing to try to get connected because they actually don't have the connection.

So they actually have low relationship satisfaction, but plenty of sex.

Yeah.

But he might not be.

He might not be.