How Married Couples Master Sex—and Money
With the season two premiere of
Showtime’s Masters of Sex debuting this Sunday, MONEY decided to dip
into our own trove of data about people’s romantic lives. But while Masters sexologists
William Masters and Virginia Johnson explored the nature of human sexual
response through lab work, we dug into the matter from an angle closer to our
hearts: couples' paychecks.
As part of June's exclusive Love & Money survey, we
reported on how earning power impacts marriages, including the fights, secrets,
and lies money inspires. But we also learned quite a bit about how who wears
the pants in the relationship affects how often those pants come off. Here are
some of the more titillating findings.
Egalitarian households where the
husband and wife earn roughly the same have the most sex, with about 47% of
couples reporting getting frisky at least once a week. Couples where the women
earns less than her husband were more likely to do the deed at least once a
month than other earning pairs. But couples where the woman out learns her
spouse were most likely to say they have sex less than once a month.
Of course, as Masters and Johnson
could no doubt tell you, quantity doesn’t equal quality. So we also asked our
survey respondents how satisfying their sex was.
Again, couples with similar
paychecks outperformed their peers. Egalitarian marriages reported having the
hottest sex of any earning pair, with more than half rating their sex life as
“hot” or “very good.”
Households where the wives earn
nothing were least content with their current sex lives. These pairs were most
apt to say their sex life “could be better” (or “what sex life?”), with the
women more dissatisfied than the men.
But women weren’t fond of the other
extreme either: Women who earned more than their husbands were least likely to
report a satisfying sex life, while men in those types of relationships were
more likely to feel sexually satisfied than their counterparts in marriages
where the wives earned less or nothing.
Across the board, men were easier to
please when it came to sex, the size of their paycheck notwithstanding. More
men than women said they felt satisfied with their sex lives in every single
type of earning relationship.
But there was one area where men and
women largely agreed: Over two thirds of husbands and wives said they check
their bank balance more often than they have sex.
