Published April 15, 2026, Three Evenings a Week by journalist Pauline Verduzier revives a question that goes beyond private life. How did the average number of sexual encounters in a couple become a social norm? In April, the book’s media attention refocused the debate. It centered on its concrete effects: guilt, performance, the reduction of sexuality to penetration and, sometimes, blurred consent.
The Average Number Of Sexual Encounters In A Couple Is Not A Rule
The starting point is editorial. In her essay published by Grasset, Pauline Verduzier attacks a formula deeply rooted in the romantic imagination. According to this idea, a healthy couple should have sex two or three times a week. The back cover presents this cadence as an implicitly widely internalized frequency. It also promises to trace its sources, uses and political as well as intimate effects.
The book’s media coverage in mid-April immediately brought visibility to this thesis. In HuffPost, Pauline Verduzier describes a diffuse pressure coming less from partners themselves than from the outside. According to her, this idea is absorbed over the years until sexual regularity becomes a supposed sign of a well-functioning marriage. Doctissimo follows the same line, emphasizing how an apparently banal number can turn into an implicit standard.
The core problem is here: an average is not a rule. It describes diverse situations at a given moment, but it says nothing about what should suit all couples. By repeating it as a goal, public debate shifts a vague indicator into a moral register: to love would be to “keep the pace.” The couple then becomes a space of constant evaluation rather than a place of intimate negotiation. This logic also intersects with broader debates about toxic masculinity. It also joins performance scripts that still weigh on emotional life.
From Statistic To Moral Norm, A Slow And Very Media-Driven Construction
According to the book’s description and interviews given by the author, this cadence does not come from a stabilized scientific truth. It is part of a long history. Nineteenth-century doctors, for example, could advocate regular sexuality within marriage as a factor of balance and health. This genealogy is taken up in several articles published around the book’s release. At this stage, the complete chain of historical sources behind the number remains difficult to reconstruct in detail.
What can be established more solidly, however, is the sedimentation mechanism. An order of magnitude circulates. It is picked up in practical articles, relationship columns, sex-coaching content, then in pop culture. With each reprise, the number loses context and gains authority. It is no longer presented as a debatable average but as a desirable horizon. This is how an indicator becomes an emotional benchmark and, for some, a verdict.
Recent data from the Sexual Contexts in France survey, published by Inserm in 2024, point in a much more nuanced direction. The study shows a decline in sexual activity with a partner since 2006. It also notes a decrease in the frequency of encounters over the last four weeks, including among cohabiting couples. It finally shows that sexual life does not disappear for that reason. It continues into older ages and follows very different trajectories depending on age, gender and marital situation. In other words, reality is multiple, not calibrated.
Inserm’s survey adds a decisive point: the sexual repertoire has diversified. Masturbation, oral sex and other practices are reported more than before. That further undermines the idea that one can read a couple’s health from counting only one type of encounter.
The Real Blind Spot: Penetration Remains The Implicit Unit Of Measurement
This is one of the clearest contributions of the debate relaunched by Pauline Verduzier. When the public sphere talks about sexual frequency, it very often, without saying so, means penetration. In HuffPost, the author explains that this norm was long thought within a heterosexual-marital framework. Vaginal penetration served as the measuring stick. Doctissimo makes the same critique: behind the number, the definition of “sexual intercourse” remains narrow.
Inserm’s results go in this direction. The institute itself emphasizes that the notion of “sexual intercourse” still mainly refers to a scenario involving vaginal or anal penetration. Yet practices have broadened. This gap is central. It means part of intimacy remains invisible in measurements, then in media commentary that turns those measurements into prescriptions.
The problem is therefore not only quantitative. It is also symbolic. By making penetration the unit that matters, the norm hierarchizes gestures, desires and forms of closeness. Bed discussions, caresses and moments of tenderness are relegated to a blind spot. It also leaves little room for the idea that a couple could live without sexual intercourse. The relationship is then quickly judged deficient. It is precisely this narrowing that then makes it possible to present some couples as insufficient or failing.
When The Number Produces Guilt, Performance And Sometimes Coercion
An intimate norm is never neutral. By setting an imaginary rhythm, it pushes everyone to position themselves: are we “in the average,” behind, lacking? This logic of comparison is one of the most powerful engines of guilt. Periods without sex, mismatched desire, fatigue, illness and postpartum then cease to be ordinary realities. They become signals of romantic alarm.
Sexologist Gianpaolo Furgiuele, cited by Doctissimo, warns against turning pleasure into a numbered objective. As soon as a frequency becomes an expectation, desire risks being replaced by performance. The supposed benefit of a fulfilling sexual life then turns against partners: instead of easing shared life, the norm adds pressure.
This is also where the subject touches on the question of consent. Pauline Verduzier explains, in several media appearances, that the injunction to frequency can lead to unwanted encounters within the couple. Inserm’s survey provides a useful contextual element here. In this group, 43.7% of women say they have often or sometimes had sex to please their partner. They also say they did not really want it themselves. Among men, this share is 23.4%. These figures do not prove by themselves a mechanical link with the myth of “three times a week.” However, they show that a significant portion of conjugal sexuality remains crossed by adjustment, internalized coercion or desire mismatch. The subject thus echoes other public alerts about sexual violence. It also points to the difficulty of recognizing what plays out quietly in ordinary relationships.
Precision is therefore required. The current debate does not allow us to assert that a media number alone would be the cause of violence. However, it illuminates a normative climate where sexuality can become an obligatory proof rather than a shared experience. It is this shift, from desire to duty, that the book seeks to make visible.
What The Debate Says About Our Time: Less A Crisis Of The Couple Than A Crisis Of Measurement
the immediate success of this theme says something broader. In a universe saturated with advice, benchmarks and indicators, private life no longer escapes the logic of performance. The couple, too, is ordered to produce evidence: good communication, good libido, good frequency. The number has the advantage of simplicity, but that simplicity is deceptive. It reassures media formats, not necessarily the people involved.
In that sense, the strength of Pauline Verduzier’s book is not to provide a new, more flexible or more modern norm. It is to shift the question. The right question is not “how many times,” but “who benefits from this average becoming a test?” Read as an affective truth, this average sustains sexual pressure within the couple. It also fuels doubts, misunderstandings and unnecessary judgments.
The debate opened in April 2026 ultimately recalls an often-lost obviousness. A statistical average says neither the quality of a bond, nor the level of love, nor the justice of a relationship. When it turns into a norm, it stops illuminating reality and begins to weigh on it.