Devoutly Religious People Have Better Sex Lives, Study Finds

What does it take to have good sex? A lot of faith, apparently. According to a new study published in the Journal of Sex Research, people who are devoutly religious tend to have the best sex lives. God only knows why that is!

  1. Religious people do have less sex. According to data collected by the British National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles, extremely religious people between the ages of 18 and 59 have less sex than their agnostic and atheist counterparts, but the quality of the sex they have is much better, apparently.
  2. Religious married women are particularly pleased. They reported having more satisfying sex than non-religious women. Religious men also enjoy their sex lives, but when factoring in attitudes about casual sex, they were somewhat less happy.
  3. Sex outside of marriage left much to be desired. While devoutly religious people tend to frown upon sex outside of marriage in general, the God lovers who have had it have been less than pleasurable for all genders. “The relationship between sex frequency and sexual satisfaction is neither simple nor straightforward,” said Nitzan Peri-Rotem of the University of Exeter, who worked with Vegard Skirbekk from the Norwegian Institute of Public Health and Columbia University on the study.
  4. Women have a magic number. The study determined that women who reported feeling most satisfied with their sex lives had a number of partners within the same general range. The same couldn’t be said for men. “For women, it is found that having no sexual partners, as well as having 10 or more lifetime sexual partners is associated with lower satisfaction from sex life,” Peri-Rotem said. “Among men, on the other hand, no relationship is found between the number of lifetime sexual partners and sexual satisfaction.”
  5. There is such a thing as too much or too little sex. One of the most interesting takeaways from the study found that regardless of religious background or beliefs, people who have more sex, particularly more casual sex, were less satisfied than those in long-term relationships. While people tend to be happier with their sex lives the more they have of it, that happiness “declines again at a higher number of sex occasions.” In other words, “having ‘too much’ sex may lead to a lower level of satisfaction from sex life.”
Jennifer Still is a writer and editor with more than 10 years of experience. The managing editor of Bolde, she has bylines in Vanity Fair, Business Insider, The New York Times, Glamour, Bon Appetit, and many more. You can follow her on Twitter @jenniferlstill
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