These Personality Traits Predict How Often You and Your Significant Other Will Bang

Impact

There's no rule on how much sex two people should be having, but for those people in a heterosexual relationship, science can make a few educated guesses as to what's going on between the sheets. As Science of Us reported, a study out of Florida State University found that certain Big Five personality traits could predict a straight, newlywed couple's bang frequency and sexual satisfaction. Apparently, it all hinges on the female half.

As Andrea L. Meltzer, the study's co-author, told PsyPost, that's not necessarily what researchers were expecting. Although the study affirms the role archaically assigned to women as the "gatekeepers" of intercourse, she said "it was somewhat surprising ... that husbands' Big Five did not predict couples' sexual frequency." 

For both parties, however, personality played a role in how enjoyable sex was. Women who were less inhibited in life had a better time in the bedroom, but the same could not be said of their partners. 

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Researchers had 278 hetero newlywed couples take the Big Five personality test, which measures a person's extraversion, or how outgoing and people-oriented they are; agreeableness, or how cooperative and altruistic they are; conscientiousness, or how mindful and organized they are; neuroticism, or how subject to shifting moods and emotions they are; and openness, or how imaginative and adventuresome they are.

Subsequently divided into three groups, participants journaled daily for two weeks, recording when they had sex and how much they liked it. Whereas wives who were more open and agreeable tended to have more sex, if they charted higher in neuroticism, they enjoyed that sex less. Interestingly, husbands who scored low in openness and neuroticism enjoyed sex more — spicing things up in the bedroom didn't seem to suit them so well. 

As Meltzer told Science of Us, there are a few limitations here — the couples were probably still in the honeymoon phase, so this model might not predict long term sex patterns. Also, it only looked at straight couples — data on LGBTQ pairs would be welcome.