The Unexpected Way Your Age Affects Your Sex Life

The story goes that as you get older, your sex life gets less satisfying, right? Well according to a new study, that's totally dependent on how you approach it. The study, published in the Journal of Sex Research, actually found that older people had a higher sexual quality of life than their younger, friskier, counterparts - with a few caveats.

For the study, the researchers looked at how sexual satisfaction changed over time using data from a national survey of over 6,000 adults between the ages of 20 and 93, collected between 1995 and 2014.

To analyse the survey data, researchers created multiple models (or charts) to see the association between participants' age and the quality of their sex lives.

The first model, which compared the age of the participants and which wave they took the survey in to how they ranked their sex lives over time suggested that the quality of their sex lives declined with age. The second model found that both men’s and women’s sex lives take a dip as they get older.

However, when the researchers recalculated their model to take frequency of sex, perceived control of their sex life, thought and effort invested in sex, and number of sexual partners into account (in addition to their age and when they took the survey), they found that participants who reported high levels of comfort and control, thought and effort, and frequency of sex were actually more satisfied with their sex lives even as they got older. And those who had only one partner (indicating they were in a committed relationship) were also more satisfied than those with two or more.

In fact, when these factors were favourable, their sexual quality of life increased by about 1.4 per cent over each decade.

The researchers also found that as you get older, how often you have sex and control over your sex life becomes less important to your overall sexual satisfaction. But at the same time, the amount of thought and effort put into each encounter is even more vital to a happy sex life. In other words, the quality of your sex sessions trumps the quantity as you get older.

The future is definitely looking hot.

This article was originally published on WomensHealthMag.com