If your sex life has quietly slowed down, it doesn't mean the love has drained out of it. A new scientific review finds that how often couples have sex tracks the stage of the relationship, not how intensely you feel about each other — being in love lifts the frequency, but the strength of that love barely moves the needle.
The review, published July 22 in Current Sexual Health Reports and led by Adam Bode at the University of Melbourne, pooled data from the Romantic Love Survey 2022 — more than 1,500 young adults across 33 countries who said they were in love. People in the early, in-love phase reported sex about 3.5 times a week, well above the one-to-two times a week that's typical for long-married couples. But when the researchers zoomed in on people together under two years and asked what predicted frequency, the intensity of their feelings — obsessive thinking, how strongly they rated their love — explained almost none of it. Brain-imaging work cited in the review shows frequency tends to slide as a relationship nears the one-year mark even when the love stays just as strong.
Worth being honest: the sample was young adults in love, not new parents, so this isn't a postpartum study. But the core signal is reassuring. A slower bedroom isn't a readout of how much you love each other — frequency has its own arc, tied to time and life stage. After a baby, exhaustion and logistics simply pile on top of that arc.
Source: Bode et al., "Romantic Love and Sexual Frequency," Current Sexual Health Reports, July 22, 2026
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