The Research: what 12,000+ survey responses say about sex in Christian marriage
The Research
What married Christians actually do.
Original surveys of thousands of couples on sex, intimacy, and marriage, written up in plain language.
- 46 write-ups
- Since 2013
Most of what gets written about sex in Christian marriage is somebody’s opinion. Ours started that way too. Then in 2013 we started running surveys, and we have not stopped since.
What follows is every survey we have published, with what each one actually found. Some of it confirmed what we expected. A fair bit of it did not, and we published that too. The numbers below are what our readers reported, not what we hoped they would say.
This page is the guided tour, organized by topic. If you would rather just browse, every write-up is in the survey archive, newest first.
What this data is, and is not
These are surveys of our audience: overwhelmingly Christian, mostly married, mostly between 35 and 64, and self-selected in the sense that they chose to answer.
That makes them a good picture of the kind of person who reads a site like this one, and a poor picture of the general population. Where a sample was small enough that we would not lean on it, we say so.
Start here if you only read one
Manual sex, oral sex, mutual and solo masturbation: the full survey results
The biggest and most recent survey we have run, covering the four activities most couples never quite get around to discussing. The clearest current picture of what is actually happening in Christian bedrooms rather than what people assume is happening.
Read the full resultsThe findings
Orgasm
of wives have never had an orgasm during intercourse alone
Orgasm difficulties survey, 2015. A great deal of frustration in Christian marriages comes from treating intercourse-only orgasm as the normal case when for a large share of women it has never once happened. The same survey: 98% of all respondents have had an orgasm; 3.5% of wives never have.
Orgasming from oral sex
Started from a single reader question: how many men cannot orgasm from oral sex? It turned into a fuller look at who gives, who receives, and how often either finishes that way.
Simultaneous orgasm
- 36% of wives can delay theirs
- 37% of husbands can
Treated in a lot of writing as the target; the data says it is a minority experience and largely a matter of who can delay. Husbands’ estimates of their wives matched the wives’ own answers closely, which is rarer in this data than you would think.
Female ejaculation: the perception gap
“Has this ever happened in your marriage?” Wives and husbands should agree. They do not. Either a lot of women are experiencing it without their husbands realising, or the two groups mean different things by the word.
Share answering “yes, experienced it” (wives about themselves; husbands about their wife).
Oral sex
Oral sex survey results
- 88% practise oral sex
- 81% of wives enjoy giving it
Still one of the most-read pages on the site. Small sample, so treat the precise figures loosely, but the direction has held up in every later survey, including the 1,058-response 2026 re-run above.
Many wives actually like giving oral sex
The counter to the assumption that it is universally a chore wives tolerate. A large share genuinely enjoy it; they just rarely hear anyone say so.
Frequency, duration and refusal
Why sex doesn’t happen tonight
The single most common reason is not conflict, and it is not lack of desire.
When it is skipped, whose idea? Wives 50%, mutual 31%, husbands 19%.
Are you happy with how much sex you have?
Buried in a survey about favorite positions, the finding that mattered more:
68% want more31% happy as is1% want less
And 41% said they were not happy with the quality either.
How long does sex last
We re-ran an older, smaller survey rather than keep citing its numbers, and added questions about what “sex” is being timed in the first place.
Post-sex dynamics and routines
- Women’s drive: 35.5% high
- 42.9% medium
- 21.9% low
Refractory periods, what couples do afterwards, and self-reported drive. The stereotype that low drive is the female default does not survive contact with the numbers.
What you do, wear and say
The noises couples actually make
Moaning splits hardest by gender, grunting runs the other way, and silence is a perfect tie. About half of both talk during sex.
Going to bed naked
- 50% of couples: neither does
Ran to test a hypothesis from a post that had a sample size of exactly one marriage, our own. In the other half of couples, one or both do.
Sex, clothing and lighting
- Naked 78%
- Lingerie 29%
- Fully clothed 6%
How wives are dressed for sex, according to both the wives and their husbands, plus pyjamas at 15% of the time.
Sexual positions
- Man on top 28%
- Woman on top 28%
The favorite-position race is a dead heat, used about 60% of the time by the couples who named one.
Mutual masturbation
Notably fewer responses than our other surveys of the period, which is itself a finding about how comfortable people are with the topic.
BDSM survey results
One of the most involved analyses we have done: couples for whom this is routine, couples doing it without calling it that, couples who want to start and do not know how, and readers who objected to the question being asked at all.
Talking about it, and what came before
Talking about sex
“Talk to your spouse about it” is the most common advice we give, so we went looking for whether it measurably helps rather than continuing to assume it.
Does pre-marital sex impact married sex lives?
Run against the promise a lot of us were handed growing up, that waiting earns you a great sex life later. The regret findings are the interesting part, and they work differently for men and women.
Christians and naked home videos and photos
How common it actually is among Christian couples, asked because we kept getting the question and had nothing but anecdote to answer with.
Behind the numbers
Why we run these
People in Christian marriages are constantly told what is normal by people who have never counted. When you are the only couple you have data on, every difficulty feels like evidence something is wrong with you specifically. Often the survey answer is that half the room is in the same position.
The second reason is that it keeps us honest. More than one of these surveys came back and contradicted something we had written. The going-to-bed-naked survey started as a hypothesis based on our own marriage. Publishing the number that disagrees with you is the whole point of collecting it.
If there is something you have always wondered about and nobody has counted, tell us. A good share of the surveys on this page started as one reader’s question.
Where to go next
Browse every write-up
All the survey results, newest first. New surveys publish there automatically.
Open the archiveNew here?
Start here for the shortest path to the thing you are actually dealing with, or go straight to when your spouse won’t if the willingness gap is the problem.
Start hereRather talk than read?
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