The Right Amount of Sex | Big Think

The Right Amount of Sex

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It depends on your age, says Michael Perelman.

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Michael Perelman:

Internationally renowned, Dr. Michael Perelman is Co-Director, of the Human Sexuality Program, New York Presbyterian Hospital. He is a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Reproductive Medicine, and Urology at Weill Medical College, Cornell University. A National Institute of Health Fellow, he received his MS, M.Phil. and Ph.D. degrees in clinical psychology from Columbia University--where he wrote the first sex therapy doctoral dissertaion in Columbia's history in 1976.

Dr. Perelman's clients, experience common sense advice filtered through the wisdom of over 30 years of clinical practice. Dr. Perelman has been invited to present his Sexual Tipping Point model at professional meetings around the world and has published widely in the professional literature. He is frequently quoted and often featured by the media.

Besides private practice, Dr. Perelman serves on multiple professional society,editorial, and industry Advisory/Directors Boards. He is the Past-President of the Society for Sex Therapy and Research. His research interests are integrating the use of sexual pharmaceuticals with sex counseling to provide better risk/benefit for men and women suffering from sexual problems.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: How much sex is right?

Michael Perelman: I think it varies a little bit with age. We have these slides sometimes we will show in medical educational audiences about when you are very young, it is three times weekly, and by the time you are much older it is tri-weakly, with W-E-A-K-L-Y, so adjusting to a diminishing desire and frequency so that couples over 60 might be having sex, you know, every other week, even once a month. The concept of average and normal is so statistically driven that it becomes meaningless because back to the sexual tipping point, what else is going on in people’s lives? So people can be having great sex at high frequency if they are both attracted and healthy to each other and have limited other responsibilities. The more you pile on other responsibilities and diminished health and capacity, the less frequently people are going to have sex, and that doesn’t mean that that’'s a problem. So I think frequency is overrated as a way of evaluating the quality of a couple’s or individual’s sex life.