They are everywhere, flying like the sparks of a wildfire: Texts on social media, on websites, searches on search engines. And all this to answer the burning question: Are you having enough sex in your relationship or should you start to worry?

Internet “experts” have an answer for everything: Sex after three dates, cohabitation after a year, engagement after two and marriage after at least three. And then, the other: The romantic comedies with the big loves, freed from every realistic problem of everyday life, spending their days having sex and exchanging vows of eternal love. And after all this, depression is almost inevitable. Your reality is not like the one you read or see in the movies. Or maybe even like the one you hear from your friends.

And now I come to tell you something you probably already know: There are no rules in human relationships. Every person is different and together with another they create unique combinations, which cannot be identified with others and “lean” on general rules for relationships. There is no one, magical and absolute number that answers how much sex is normal in a relationship.

What does science say about it?

As the volume of available studies concerning human relations shows, this topic is one of the most favorite of sociologists. This means that we have at our disposal quite a lot of scientific evidence regarding the burning issue.

In particular, a study published in Social Psychological and Personality Science studied 30,000 couples over 40 years. The research found that having sex once a week was the ideal average for couples. Couples who had more sex were not happier or less happy, but couples who had less sex also reported lower sexual satisfaction.

Another study in Archives of Sexual Behavior found that the average adult prefers to have sex 54 times a year, which also equates to about once a week.

Finally, the Carnegie Mellon University study divided the couples into two groups: Group A maintained a normal sex life, while Group B had twice as much sex as usual. At the end of the study, group B reported that sex “wasn’t much fun” and that it started to feel like a chore. Surprising, but true.

Finally, what do we conclude?

The bottom line is simple: There is absolutely no point in having more sex than you really feel you want and enjoy having. The pseudo-rules of the internet are only there to stress you out and make you think you’re living a life that isn’t normal. There are many factors in everyday life that will reduce your appetite for sex. Anxiety lurks everywhere. This does not mean that something is going wrong with your relationship. Each couple must make their own rules and live within them, creating a framework from which they can derive satisfaction. After all, sex is not what will make a relationship happy, but the other way around: It will come as a result of a happy and fulfilling life together.