On Terra Xplore, sexual psychologist and couples therapist Christoph Joseph Ahlers says that how often a couple has intercourse says nothing about how satisfied they are with their relationship and their sex life: some couples sleep together once a quarter and are happy, while in others three times a week is too little for one of the two. Besides reproduction and pleasure, sexuality has a third function for him, communication: through skin contact, two people meet each other’s need to be seen, taken seriously and accepted, and that, he says, is the real reason people still form couples today. In his experience, people who complain of too little sex in their relationship are often concerned not with arousal and orgasm, which they could also have alone or pay for, but with their own self-worth. And when men come to sex counselling, according to Ahlers, the most common reason in the 21st century is no longer erectile dysfunction, but that they have withdrawn sexually from the relationship and their partners suffer from it.
Sources
- Terra Xplore: Sexualtherapeut erklärt Sex Drive und Beziehungsprobleme (Leon Windscheid in conversation with Christoph Joseph Ahlers, YouTube, in German, 1 October 2026)