There are some questions you don’t ask at dinner. There are others you ask only after the second drink. And then there are the ones that sit quietly in your head, tapping you on the shoulder at 2 a.m. while you stare at the ceiling like it owes you answers.
This is one of those questions.
How many times do other couples do it?
Not celebrities. Not influencers with suspiciously clean kitchens. Real people. Working people. Couples who live together, share groceries, split bills, and argue about whose turn it is to wash the dishes. The kind of people whose romance survives traffic, deadlines, and WhatsApp family groups.
I’ve always been curious. Not in a creepy, notebook-and-spreadsheet way. More in a “Am I normal or am I being quietly starved?” kind of way.
So I asked around.
Among male friends and colleagues, the answer was surprisingly consistent: about three times a month. Sometimes there’s a spike , a holiday, a birthday, a rare weekend with no responsibilities and then, like clockwork, it settles back into the dependable rhythm of three. Not zero. Not wild. Just… scheduled sex maintenance.
The women I asked? That was a different experience altogether. One said every other day, casually, like she was talking about brushing her teeth. The rest seemed either uninterested, evasive, or deeply confused as to why I was asking at all. In hindsight, perhaps I was not the ideal person to conduct this informal research. Or perhaps this is one of those topics where honesty has a very small social window.
Still, once the question lodges itself in your brain, it doesn’t leave quietly.
I don’t even know why it matters so much. But it does. Maybe because we all want to fit in. Maybe because sex has quietly become another scoreboard in adulthood ; one we pretend not to check, but absolutely do. Somewhere between “am I undernourished?” and “am I the king being served all the time,” lies a strange need for reassurance.
So, like any responsible modern adult , I asked AI.
But I had to be specific. No averages polluted by honeymooners or people with unlimited free time. I wanted couples who live together and are working class. Because let’s be honest: unemployment probably boosts intimacy as there is nothing else to do.
What the machines had to say
Deepseek didn’t bother sugarcoating reality:
“On average, these dynamos of romance manage to sync up their exhausted schedules for a passionate rendezvous about once a week — that is, if they haven’t already been defeated by the soul-crushing grind of their jobs, the existential dread of laundry mountain, or the compelling allure of scrolling through their phones in silence.”
Nothing kills desire faster than an overflowing laundry basket and an algorithm that knows you better than your partner.
ChatGPT was equally blunt, but kinder about it:
“On average, working-age couples living together are clocking in at about once or twice a week, not because the spark is dead, but because adulthood showed up with spreadsheets, back pain, and a crippling need for sleep.”
That line hit hard. Not the back pain — that’s already familiar — but the reminder that exhaustion is the silent third party in most relationships.
Claude, meanwhile, brought stats and a little chaos:
“Your average working-age couple living together is getting busy about once a week… And if you’re working full-time? Congratulations, you’ve dropped to a sad 45 encounters annually — because apparently nothing kills the mood quite like a 9-to-5 and a mortgage.”
The kicker? These are just averages, which means half of you aren’t even hitting these numbers.
So… what does this actually mean?
First, it means my friends aren’t broken. Neither are yours. And neither are you.
Second, it means that living together doesn’t increase frequency ,it stabilizes it. When you see each other every day, mystery evaporates. Desire doesn’t disappear; it just stops wearing perfume and starts wearing track pants.
Third, it confirms something we all feel but rarely say out loud: energy matters more than attraction. You can love your partner deeply and still choose sleep. You can desire someone intensely and still lose the battle to fatigue, stress, or the quiet comfort of not talking to anyone for a while.
What surprised me most wasn’t the numbers. It was the consistency. Across friends, across genders, across AI platforms trained on oceans of data — the story was the same. Most working couples aren’t living in a constant state of passion. They’re managing intimacy the way they manage everything else: imperfectly, occasionally, and with a lot of negotiation.
The myth we don’t talk about
We’ve been sold a lie. That cohabitation means constant access. That if the frequency drops, something is wrong.
But frequency isn’t the same as satisfaction.
Some couples are doing it once a week and are deeply content. Others are doing it more often and feel disconnected. And many are doing it less than the “average” while still choosing each other every single day — which, frankly, might be the more impressive feat.
There’s also something oddly comforting about realizing that everyone else is tired too. That the glamorous idea of adulthood quietly dissolves into shared exhaustion, shared responsibility, and the occasional shared moment of intimacy squeezed between obligations.
Am I undernourished?
According to the machines… maybe a little.
But here’s the thing: averages don’t tell you whether your relationship is healthy. They don’t account for stress cycles, emotional seasons, health, kids, grief, joy, or the thousand invisible factors that shape intimacy.
What they do tell us is that we’re not alone in wondering.
We’re all quietly comparing notes in our heads. We’re all curious. We all want reassurance that we’re not failing at yet another invisible adult metric.
So I’ll ask you the same question that’s been rattling around my mind, now slightly quieter but still persistent:
What about you?