reasons to have sex

Keep a sex journal to figure out which reasons for having sex make you feel better afterward.

Both men and women have sex for lots of reasons, a new book reveals.

RODALE NEWS, EMMAUS, PA—Ask any one woman why she has sex, and you'll likely get a different answer—if they're answering honestly. Sex researcher Cindy Meston, PhD, co-author of the new book, Why Women Have Sex: Understanding Sexual Motivations from Adventure to Revenge (and Everything in Between) (Times Books, 2009), and professor of clinical psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, found that the reasons to have sex ranged from attraction and pleasure to "I wanted to get rid of a headache" or "to get my husband to take the trash out." Respondents listed more than 200 reasons total.

"There's a lot of good research on types of sexual behaviors, and frequency in which people engage in them, such as the Kinsey Report from the 1950s, the ultimate survey of 18,000 people," explains Meston. "But with exception to a few small studies, no one has asked why people are having sex."

THE DETAILS: Meston has been researching women's sexuality for more than 20 years, and started focusing on reasons people have sex in 2004. Building on previous research that found men and women list more than 200 reasons to have sex, Meston spent two years interviewing more than 1,000 women, talking about sex scenarios and the reason they have sex.

Meston's research found that attraction, pleasure, love, and the desire to please a partner ranked high among top 50 reasons women have sex. But co-mingled in the mix included such less romantic reasons as "I got carried away," "I wanted to feel loved," and "I was drunk."

An interesting point in that across all three age groups and life stages of women looked at in the study, the top 10 reasons were identical.