Dollars and Sex
Why You Should Learn Less In Order To Have More Sex !!!
Investing years of your life in education will not improve your sex life...
No one was more surprised than I when my German publisher announced that the title of that version of my book would be Warum man weniger lernen sollte, um mehr Sex zu haben,
which, translated into English, is the title of this post. Apparently,
if you are German this title is amusing - as evidenced by the two little
books doing it “doggy style” on the cover – but I have to admit that it
is not a topic that I have ever explored, until today.
According to research published in Kykos, coincidently using German data, the better educated you are the less satisfied you are with your sex life.
Before you get too bummed that your sex life might have been better had you spent less time in school, I should point out that while there is a statistically significant negative relationship between sexual satisfaction and education, that relationship is absolutely minute. By comparison, age is a much more important determinant of sexual satisfaction; being one year older increases a person’s sexual satisfaction by just as much as it is decreased by having eight more years of education.
The authors of this study argue that education has two, offsetting, effects on sexual satisfaction. The first effect is that education increases a person’s ability to clearly communicate their sexual preferences to their partner, which leads to a more satisfactory sex life. The second effect is a clearly economic effect; those of us with more education simply choose not invest in having a satisfactory sex life because the opportunity cost of our time is so high.
Here is the best way to think about is this. Imagine we can allocate our time over three different activities: working for wages, engaging in leisure activities or having mind-blowing sex.
The more educated you are the higher the return to the first two activities; educated workers earn higher wages and, as a result of having a higher income, the leisure activities they engage in are of higher quality. Because of the higher return to these two activities, the more educated you are the more time you spend on work and leisure and the less time you spend on having mind blowing sex.
And so when, one day, you are asked to rate you level of sexual satisfaction on a scale of zero to ten, if you are well educated you chose a rating that is somewhat lower than a person who is less educated and has more free time for high quality sex.
I have to say that I am little skeptical about this opportunity cost theory, which is unproven in this paper. If I had to guess why the authors’ found that sexual satisfaction is slightly lower for the better educated I would start with a theory that better educated people are more likely to be in a relationship in which both partners are working outside the home. Two working partners means that more “leisure” time has to be spend on home production and that it is harder to co-ordinate schedules for mind-blowing sex. The difference being is that in this scenario no one is choosing to have a less satisfying sex life simply because their time is better spent in other activities.
I wonder if there is a relationship between time spent reading blogs and sexual satisfaction.That must be positive, right?
Living Single The truth about singles in our society.
Is It Healthier to Live with Someone? Always-single women are healthier than married women, study shows
There are people who believe that getting married transforms sickly single people into healthy couples. I think they are wrong. They use cheater techniques to make their case, and even then, getting married does not always seem to result in better health. Along the way, they spin various tales about why getting married should protect you from bad health.One of those why-marriage-wins theories is that when you are married, there is someone else around. That person can nag you to eat your vegetables and get off the couch or call 911 if you look like you are having a heart attack. There are lots of ways to poke holes in that fantasy. For example, even if you are married, your spouse is not always right there at your side monitoring you for heart attack symptoms; conversely, single people are not always home alone. Also, it is actually the always-single people who exercise the most.
Even more relevant is a study that addresses the issue directly. The researcher asked two questions:
(1) Are divorced, widowed, and always-single people less healthy than currently-married people?
(2) If the unmarried people are living with someone (such as parents, other relatives, or friends – grown children were excluded), are they less healthy than currently-married people?
This is not an ideal design for many reasons I’ve discussed before (e.g., we don’t know whether any differences between the groups really are due to marital status or some other way that they differ), but the study was at least based on a good-sized sample. The data were from more than 25,000 white women, ages 18 to 55, who participated in the National Health Interview Study in the U.S. in 1979.
The study also included a variety of measures of the participants’ health:
- The participants’ ratings of their overall health
- The number of chronic health conditions they experienced
- The number of acute conditions they experienced
- The number of days their activities were restricted during the two weeks prior to the interview
- The number of days in the previous year in which they stayed in bed because of health problems
- The number of doctor visits in the previous year
So let’s look first at the divorced women. In the results that averaged across all divorced women, regardless of whether they were living with another adult (such as a parent, other relative, or friend) or not, they did report worse health than the currently-married on most measures. (On overall health and doctors’ visits, they were no different from the currently-married.) As the authors predicted, though, taking living arrangements into account did matter, and in a good way.
The divorced women who were living with another adult had the same health as the currently-married on 5 of the 6 measures. On the sixth, doctor visits, they looked better than the currently-married: They went to the doctor less often.
Now for the widowed women. Averaging across all of them (regardless of whether they lived with another adult), they looked mostly the same as the currently-married women except for spending more days in bed because of a disability. When living arrangements were taken into account, again the authors were correct. Widowed women living with another adult had the same health as the currently-married on 5 of the 6 measures. On the sixth, doctor visits, they too now looked healthier.
Of course, the currently-married, the divorced, and the widowed all have something in common – they have had the marriage experience. How healthy were the women who had always been single?
Averaging across all of the always-single women, they already had the same good health as the currently-married women on three of the six measures. (Remember that the design is stacked against them; the currently-married group excludes anyone who got married, hated it, and got divorced. There are no such set-asides in the always-single group.) On the other measures, the always-single women had better health than the currently-married women. They rated their overall health as better, they had fewer bed disability days, and fewer doctor visits.
So what happens when we look at the always-single women who are living with another adult? Not much. Just looking at the numbers, it appears that the women who live with another adult may be a shade healthier, but it is not clear if any of the differences are significant. Women who had been single all their lives already were as healthy, or healthier, than women who were currently-married. Having another adult around the house just didn’t seem to matter all that much.
Here’s a hypothesis I’ve never seen considered in any of the hundreds of articles about marital status that I’ve read over the years: Maybe the best situation is the one that is the best fit for the particular individual’s profile of preferences, needs, interests, and inclinations. Maybe many people who have always been single like living solo. It suits them. Maybe one of the reasons some people marry is that they do better when they are living with another person, and so after they divorce, they do better if they again find someone to live with. Perhaps for all of us, there are health benefits to finding the living situation that is most compatible with who we really are.
God bless,
Kendra Young
Sunday, February 17, 2013
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