Are You Happier Than Your Neighbor? You Must Be Having More Sex

For over 40 years, social scientists have been taking the "pulse of America" with the General Social Survey. Every other year, the survey asks thousands of Americans whether they are "very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy," and then correlates those answers to dozens of answers to questions. Conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, the General Social Survey (as of 2010) has sent interviewers to over 55,000 randomly selected participants and asked them questions about 5,417 different aspects of daily living. 

The questions asked by the General Social Survey cover every conceivable aspect of daily living. When I was assigned the task of analyzing the data set from the survey's 1985 data, the single most predictive factor in the millions of responses in the survey turned out to be, to my considerable chagrin, since I was employed by a prestigious university at the time, astrological sign. (I don't know whether General Social Survey interviewers still ask about astrological sign, but I do know most analysts would prefer not to deal with it, especially when it turns out to have more statistical predictive power than another variable in the set.) And since 1989, the General Social Survey has asked randomly selected respondents about dozens of indicators of quality of life including frequency of sexual intercourse.

Dr. Tim Wadsworth, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Colorado Boulder, recently published a paper entitled “Sex and the Pursuit of Happiness: How Other People’s Sex Lives are Related to Our Sense of Well-Being" in the academic journal Social Indicators Research. Dr. Wadsworth's novel analysis of the survey data has found that not only does frequency of sex make a difference in reported happiness, perceived frequency of neighbors having sex makes a difference, too.

Professor Wadsworth found that:

• People who had not had sex in the previous year were 33% less happy than those who reported having sex a minimum of two or three times a month.
• The more sex people had, they happier they were. People who said they had sex at least once a week were 44% more happy and people who had sex two or three times a week were 55% more happy. No big surprises there, but
• People who had sex two or three times a month, but who believed their peers were having more, were less happy than those who did not believe their neighbors had sex more often, happiness levels 14% lower.

"There's an overall increase in sense of well-being that comes with engaging in sex more frequently, but there's also this relative aspect to it," Wadsworth said in a press release from the University of Colorado Boulder. "Having more sex makes us happy, but thinking that we are having more sex than other people makes us even happier."

But exactly how do Americans know how much sex their neighbors are having?

Where Americans Get Their Ideas About Other People's Sex Lives

If thinking you get less sex than your peers makes you unhappy, it might be a good idea to reassess your ideas about how much sex your peers have. Discussion of sexual activity with casual acquaintainces and neighbors, of course, violates strong social taboo, and even with close friends the topic is usually off limits.

Nationally circulated magazines such as Cosmopolitan, Men's Health, Vogue, and the AARP (American Association of Retired Persons) Magazine regularly publish their non-scientific surveys of reader sex lives. And, of course, millions of American men and women get impressions of how other people have sex, most of them entirely unrealistic, from porn.

Self-Esteem and Sexual Satisfaction

But does Dr. Wadsworth's novel interpretation of data from the General Social Survey really tell us why anyone should care about how much sex a neighbor may or may not be getting? The answers of another widely quoted study suggest that sexual satisfaction may be at least in part a matter of self-esteem.

A May 2012 study published in the online journal LiveScience concluded that women in their 20's who are involved with men who are "into" porn were significantly less happy with their relationships. University of Florida clinical psychology intern Destin Stewart and University of Tennessee Dawn Sczymanski recruited 308 women aged 18 to 29 attending university to fill out an online questionnaire about their current partner's online porn use and their satisfaction with the relationship. All of the women in the study were heterosexual and most were white.

While comments from the participants about porn ranged from "scathing" to "mildly positive," there was a clear trend in the data showing that women partnered with men who watched more pornography were less satisfied with their relationships than women partnered with men who watched less. But this widely reported finding was just part of what Stewart and Sczymanski concluded from their study.

The women who were partnered with porn-watching men also reported significantly lower self-esteem, and it's likely that the longer they stayed in relationships with men who watched porn, the lower their self-esteem became. As Stewart told a LiveScience reporter, "You might be more dissatisfied knowing that your husband of 10 years is looking at pornography versus your 18-year-old boyfriend where you have no idea what he looks at on his computer." But what does this tell us about the more recent General Social Survey results?

Not Everyone Who Has a Limited Sex Life Is Unhappy as a Result

Not everyone who thinks neighbors may be getting more sex is unhappy about it. For that matter, not everyone who has no sex life at all is unhappy. Frequency of sexual intercourse is one factor in satisfaction with life in general--and the better you feel about yourself as a human being, the less difference deprivation in any single aspect of life makes in your general happiness.