The Average Couple Has a Lot of Sex Before Finally Getting Pregnant

Sex is great fun, but it takes on a whole lot of added baggage for people who are trying to get pregnant. Are we doing it often enough? Are we doing it too often? How many times did Joan from across the street have to pork before getting knocked up, and are we doing better or worse than Joan? But conception varies wildly from person to person, couple to couple, and even day to day. Some people manage to “catch the egg” and get pregnant on the first try. Most people take longer than that. According to Fit Pregnancy, a new survey says that couples on average have sex 78 times before conceiving.

78 times is a lot of sex! So if it takes more than a month or two, there’s no reason to worry yet.

The survey came from Channel Mum, and 1,194 parents answered questions about what they did to conceive and how long it took.

On average, the parents surveyed said they had sex about 13 times a month while they were trying to conceive, and more than half the people said they had more sex than usual while trying to get pregnant.

Of course, averages are not always useful metrics for stuff like this. If my neighbor Joan gave a fidget spinner a five-star review on Amazon, and then I gave it a one-star review because I thought it was a vibrator, the fidget spinner would have a three-star rating on average, which does not reflect well at all on its efficacy as a fidget spinner.

Perhaps it’s more useful to describe the range of responses people had to certain questions, because in this case 78 might have been the average number of times a survey respondent had sex before conceiving, but there’s actually a huge range of potential answers to that question

Five percent of the people surveyed said they got pregnant after having sex just once, while about 20 percent of respondents took more than a year of trying. Basically, there’s no right number of times to have sex before getting pregnant. Sometimes it happens quickly, sometimes it takes a little longer. Sometimes medical assistance is called for, and sometimes a person gets pregnant after just one time. Forget about what Joan across the street is doing, because there’s no one-size-fits-all formula for getting pregnant.

(Image: iStockPhoto / grinvalds)