Tabby’s Deep Dives 3
How Long is Long Enough in Bed?
What does research have to tell us about how long sex should last?
We cheat on ourselves about sex. Almost every time researchers investigate how long couples would like sex to last, their answer has been, ‘longer than we actually spend doing it.’ So what is our problem?
In a study where separate figures were requested for foreplay and penetrative sex, men came back with a target total of 37 minutes, while women opted for 7 minutes less. These figures were for the optimum time that the participants in the survey thought that sex should be lasting. Most of the differences between the men and women surveyed were accounted for by a desire for more penetrative sex, but although men wanted that to last just under 19 minutes, women chose just over 14 minutes. The one place where the sexes agreed was foreplay, which everyone thought should last about 18 minutes as the ideal.
Now for a reality check. I have very rarely had sex with a man who has lasted 19 minutes from penetration to orgasm. I have never timed it — well okay, I have sneaked the occasional glance at the clock—but most of my lovers have only lasted about half as long as they tell their friends. And do you know something? I am fine with it.
Despite my own experience, both sexes believe that sex should last much longer than it does, on top of which, research has repeatedly shown that women significantly underestimate how long their men aspire that foreplay and penetrative sex should last. The word ‘aspire’ is important here — we are talking about women’s guesses about men’s desired timings. Men, on the other hand, often have more accurate ideas about women’s desired timings.
Most couples almost never hit those desired timings in real life, at which point I feel honor-bound to point out that there is no escaping the fact that in well-established relationships, the man is usually in control of when he comes.
Did I come too quickly?
Let’s flip this over and look at the reverse side of the coin, which is that somewhere between 12 and 30% of men are worried that they come too soon.
This is not the same as premature ejaculation, where a man comes when there has been minimal sexual stimulation before, or shortly after penetration. Instead, the group we are talking about is made of guys who think that they come too soon, and in my experience, there are a lot of men in it.
Comparing the actual figures for how long penetrative sex lasts for the average couple against the expected figures, there is a good reason why this group should be as large as it appears to be. It turns out that a good proportion of men who think they come too quickly are basing their worries on the belief that they should be having penetrative sex for longer than they can actually manage. If the sexual scripts they learned while they were growing up were reset, they could quit worrying, because measuring yourself against an aspirational performance which you rarely or never achieve is just plain silly.
So how long does sex actually last?
In 2005, a team studied 500 couples from Europe and the US, who timed themselves having sex with a stopwatch, measuring the total time between first penetration and the moment when the guy began to come. All the partners were over 18, and all had been in their relationship for at least six months — the reason for the bar being that men in new relationships come so much more quickly that they would throw the numbers out.
The researchers in the 500 couple study were expecting the timings to vary wildly, but they didn’t. The survey population was split into three age groups, 18–30, 31–50, and 51 or more. In the 18–30 group, median time to ejaculation was 6.5 minutes, for the 31–50-year-olds it was 5.4 minutes, and in the 51+ age group, it was 4.3 minutes.
Note that these timings didn’t include foreplay. Short, aren’t they? But I don’t find them surprising at all, because they match my experience.
Delayed ejaculation
The longest any guy took to come was just over 44 minutes, and less than 20% of men ever lasted longer than 13 minutes. Many of these men, especially the ones lasting longer than 15 minutes, will have been wishing that they had come sooner, because they will almost certainly be suffering from ‘inhibited ejaculation’, otherwise known as delayed orgasm.
According to the third National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles in Britain, about 10% of men suffer from it and although it sounds like a woman’s dream, it can lead to endless sessions of not very satisfying sex with an increasingly frustrated guy who is desperate to come, but can’t.
There is no 100% agreed definition of what delayed ejaculation is, but the best one is that if a guy takes longer than 15 minutes to come 75% of the times he has sex, and he can’t bring his orgasm forward, then he has delayed ejaculation.
The percentage of men who have delayed ejaculation is constant across every age group, and it is sometimes known as Male Orgasmic Disorder. Although some illnesses can cause it — for example, depression — a lot of delayed ejaculation occurs in men who suffer from sexual guilt, run the macho script, or are insufficiently sexually aroused. The latter is quite a problem, girls.
What do therapists think?
In 2008, the 500 couple study was backed up by a survey of Canadian and American sex therapists who were asked about how long they thought that sex should last from penetration to the man’s orgasm. The group was fairly evenly split between men and women, and they were well qualified, with 85% having PhDs or MDs. They all came up with similar numbers, regarding anything less than two minutes as too short, 3–7 minutes as adequate, 7–13 minutes as desirable, and 10–30 minutes as too long.
One of the most interesting results of the therapist study was their level of agreement about what constituted too short, adequate, and desirable lengths of time for penetrative sex. There was much less consensus about what constituted ‘too long’, but that may have been because the researchers didn’t record their reasons for creating the category.
The therapists’ estimates overlapped quite well with the 500 couple timings — but the most striking thing was that the therapists’ interquartile ranges (the ‘middle fifty’ beloved of my statisticians) for ‘adequate’ and ‘desirable’ duration of penetrative sex showed hardly any overlap. In other words, even the sex therapists’ ideas of how long sex should be going on were longer than how long it was actually going on, although they did agree that somewhere between 3 and 13 minutes was OK.
The therapists had a high level of agreement that sex that lasted only one or two minutes was too short. In practice, most guys I have had sex with for the first time have fallen into that bracket due to sheer inability to stop themselves coming, so I am onside with the idea of ‘too short’, but it pays to be philosophical. One guy came the first time we had sex simply because I took my bra off, and since he never did it again, I wrote it off to experience in the ‘too excited’ category.
The 500 couples study put in that six-month limit for a very good reason, but all the same, it flagged up about 150 couples where the man came by the 200-second mark. More of this in a moment, because I can’t believe that 200 of the 500 guys had never seen a bra being unhooked.
Too long and too short
‘Too long’ was the category that generated most disagreement among the therapists and their spread of estimates for the category was 4–45 minutes. The idea of four minutes being too long for penetrative sex sounds crazy — until you look at the 500 couples study. One of the most interesting points to emerge from it was that 130 Turkish men in the study came much earlier than any of the other nations, at a median of 3.7 minutes, and it is reasonable to suspect that they formed the bulk of the 150 couples mentioned above.
The 3.7-minute figure wasn’t down to higher rates of circumcision, because when circumcision was controlled out in the other groups, it had no effect on time to orgasm. The reason it would be great to see a study of Turkish women’s satisfaction with duration of sex is that if they too, turn out to be happy with a median of 3.7 minutes of penetration than it would throw a fascinating light on different cultural expectations of sex. Can any Turkish readers weigh in on this?
These numbers tell us a lot about sexual satisfaction, and it is worth bearing them in mind when you read anything on Sexography. For example, there is a growing body of evidence that guys who worry about how long they take to come actually have less good sex than ones who just go with the flow. In a nutshell, if a guy worries about coming too soon, then he can spoil his experience simply by being concerned about it.
Since stereotypes have far more influence than reality on our perceptions of what is normal, the careers of sex therapists look pretty secure to me right now. If a substantial proportion of them think that a minimum of 3 minutes of sex is long enough, then maybe the rest of us ought to be winding our expectations back a little to match the numbers we are actually achieving.
My experience backs these figures up. As far as first-time sex with men goes, in addition to the bra unhooking incident, I have had a guy who did not have premature ejaculation actually come in his pants, and a couple of others who lasted less than a minute after penetration. All of them subsequently turned in quite acceptable performances once they had got used to the idea that I would undress for them. Did I think any less of them? No. Did I tell all my girlfriends? Definitely not. And before you ask, I enjoyed the sex with both the guys who came in less than a minute, but the other ones weren’t quite as good for me. In both cases, I rescued their pride by giving them an extremely personalized cleanup job which both later told me was the sweetest thing any lover had ever done for them. Lesson? Even the worst disaster can be turned into a success by a forgiving and encouraging woman with a discerning tongue.
In summary, it has consistently been the case that couples entering into sex therapy do so against a background of poor communication of their sexual likes, dislikes, and expectations. Now we can add duration of sex to the list.
Where do we pick up our ideas about how long sex should last?
Apart from sex ed at school, the major knowledge feeds are our families, friends, articles in magazines, books, TV, and the web — the elephant in the room being pornography. In many ways, mainstream porn has strayed so far away from the real world that it no longer reflects how real couples behave — but one of the surprising points of agreement is how long it takes for male actors to come after vaginal penetration compared to what the sex therapists believe to be the ideal.
Even I am surprised by this, but after reviewing as many movies as my patience would stand, I discovered that 10–13 minutes of penetrative sex was the average. The dumbfounding conclusion is that most porn studs don’t even last as long as regular guys worry that they should — which was 19 minutes, you will recall. Stop the front page: Industry in Crisis as Porn Actors Obsess Over Coming too Soon.
That was a lot less than I was expecting, but even more interesting were the outliers — the studs who took longer to come than 13 minutes. There weren’t very many of them, and, knowing the industry, their back teeth were probably awash with paroxetine, but none of them beat the outliers in the 500 couples study.
Bottom line here: even the most heroic acts of penetrative sex by pros on screen don’t match up with what a handful of amateurs can achieve with partners they have known for six months. I guess that kills the ‘sex is better with someone you only just met’ script?
It is only my opinion, but having watched the outlier videos, the sex was too boring to be arousing, so they all fell into the ‘too long’ group. Outlier sex was distinguished by being repetitive, and it almost always became so mechanical after 10 minutes or so that scrubbing through it was way more erotic than watching it. I got off out of relief that I didn’t have to stay awake all the way through.
I can hear you telling me that most porn movies are about half an hour-long, and that is correct. In the majority of movies I timed, at least half the runtime was taken up with oral sex, which is where foreplay begins and ends for the majority of the industry. This explains why, despite having state-of-the-art delaying tactics in place, the majority of male porn stars don’t need to make it beyond the 13-minute gate — the rest of the videos are filled with non-penetrative sex.
Is there a message here?
I believe so. The sex therapists’ 3–13-minute window is a decent yardstick for how long sex should last from penetration to the guy coming because it at least partially correlates with the 500 couples timings. In practice, though, the therapists are still setting up some couples to worry, because the 500 couples figures show that 13 minutes of penetrative sex is way longer than most guys can manage. Or even that it is logical for them to manage. After all, pleasure is not something that should be measured by the second.
How long do I think that penetrative sex should last? This is only one woman’s opinion, but a lot depends on the circumstances. A long slow comfortable bedding after a lovely day out, a nice meal and a romantic movie mean I am good for up to ten minutes of relaxed penetrative sex, during which I have no need for orgasm because I am surfing a wave of my own contentment. If I haven’t seen my partner for a month, then three minutes of explosive sex up against the wall would be perfect, as long as you kiss me all the way through, don’t forget my boobs and I can come at least twice.
My view on penetrative sex that lasts longer than ten minutes is that the gains for me aren’t that great and even really talented lovers tend to flag a little. I am also of the opinion that once guys have got over my breasts, they are more or less entirely in control of when they come — unless I am on top and really force the pace. The 19-minute aspirational figure for how long men think sex should last is clearly inappropriate because the science shows that the vast majority of them can’t resist coming in between a third and a half of that time. I am totally on side with that, because it is nice having an orgasm, so why delay it unnecessarily?
When it boils down to it, I am perfectly happy with whenever my man comes as long as he has gotten me mentally and physically aroused before I feel that gorgeous moment as he eases inside me. I do not care whether I come before, or after, or not at all. If I care enough for him and he cares enough for me, then I won’t be watching the clock, the sex will be fantastic, and I would rather it didn’t follow the same formula every time.
How long should sex last?
The data it would be great to see would be some ‘too short’, ‘adequate’, ‘desirable’, and ‘too long’ estimates for the duration of foreplay, but such studies do not exist. The nearest thing we have is one where 645 women reported their time to first orgasm, which was just over 13 minutes, the range being 7.67 minutes to 21 minutes.
Time to first female orgasm isn’t as strongly associated with foreplay as is generally believed, but having one is fairly good evidence that a woman is fully physically aroused, so for the time being, I would put forward 8 minutes as the ‘adequate’ length of time for foreplay, and twice that number of minutes as desirable, but rarely achievable during to male impatience. Eight minutes has the advantage of fitting with couples’ known expectations, as reported in one of the studies described above. It also fits in well with the time taken to get most women’s clitoral complexes fully online, which is why those first orgasms start clocking in near the eight-minute mark.
Putting it all together, an optimal quickie would take 4 + 3 = 7 minutes of foreplay and penetrative sex, the shortened foreplay being because I would already be fully mentally aroused, which cuts my physical arousal time right down. I have never come in less than three minutes but can easily do it in four with a skilled lover. Three minutes of sex means I could squeeze in one more major during penetrative sex, and I will probably get a few beats of a mini when you come inside me.
A weekday night romp would be 8 + 7 = 15 minutes of sex, which might incorporate an orgasm at the end of foreplay and a couple during penetrative sex, thank you very much.
A top spec ‘kiss me all over and ride me all the way to heaven’ would be 16 + 13 = 29 minutes. Few guys can bear the idea of a quarter of an hour of foreplay, but I can have several orgasms in that time, and boy, will I be repaying the favor during the next thirteen minutes. Your very much appreciated patience will be rewarded, and if I come again a couple of times and you make me feel as wonderful as I know I am, then you are in for some extra special treats.
In context, all three would work for me, as long as in every case you remembered to get me mentally aroused first by making me feel happy and self-confident, and reminding me how gorgeous you think I am on a regular basis. Plus, sharing the housework. Plus, cooking for me now and again. Plus, developing an eyeliner brush that does not extrude its bristles one at a time. Sigh.
These times will vary from woman to woman, with some of us taking much longer to arouse, both mentally and physically. Some of us are sexual extroverts, while others are made completely the opposite way, and in a few cases we can take a bit of enticing out from behind the barricades of our sexual scripts. There is no one-size-fits-all strategy, but it is worth appreciating that the quality of a relationship beats any measurable aspect of sex hands-down.
I am not suggesting that everyone reading this gets a stopwatch out, but these numbers might be a great help when it comes down to discussing what you both want from sex. Tabby’s view is that once you start chasing times, you have lost the plot, but it does help to know some baselines.
Tabby
Waldinger, et al. “A Multinational Population Survey of Intravaginal Ejaculation Latency Time.” The Journal of Sexual Medicine 2, no. 4 (2005): 492–97.
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