50 Lovely Facts About Sex, Love & Relationships

The lips and trousers' bulge on Victor Noir’s statue over his grave are noticeably shiny from women kissing and rubbing them. There is a myth that the grave enhances fertility, brings a blissful sex life, or brings a husband within the year. The grave was once fenced in but people protested.

2. Men also have a hormonal cycle in which varying levels of testosterone affect mood, sex drive, and behaviors whilst simultaneously being responsive to cues in a woman’s hormonal cycle, however, the outward signs displayed are not as evident as a woman’s monthly cycle.

3. Researchers were able to predict whether or not a couple will stay together with extreme accuracy based on one partner’s reaction to things that excited the other. For example, if a wife says “look at that beautiful bird” and the husband blows it off, that’s a strong indication they’ll divorce.

4. Newlywed couples who watched and discussed five movies about relationships over a period of a month reduced their 3-year divorce or separation rate from 24% to 11%. That makes it as effective in reducing divorce rates as a 20-hour therapist-led early marriage counseling program.

5. The “Star Gauge” is a legendary non-linear love poem (or perhaps more appropriately, poem-matrix) which famous Chinese poet Su Hui used to win her husband back during the Six Dynasties Period.

“Bundling” is a traditional practice of wrapping two people in a bed together, usually separated by a blanket, as part of courting behavior to allow intimacy without sexual intercourse. Participants were mostly adolescents, with a boy staying at the residence of the girl. They were given separate blankets by the girl’s parents and expected to talk to one another through the night. Occasionally a bundling board or bundling sack was placed between the boy and girl to discourage sexual conduct.

7. 10.4% of the world’s population is either in a marriage/relationship with their second cousin or closer relative or is the result of such a union.

8. Men wearing wedding rings was not common until World War 2, when soldiers would wear a ring to remind them of their love back home. After World War 2, it became mainstream for men to wear a wedding ring.

9. In psychoanalytic literature, a Madonna-whore complex is the inability to maintain sexual arousal within a committed, loving relationship. Such men can only have arousal with women they see as degraded.

10. An Intern at NASA once stole a safe full of moon rocks, sprinkled them on a hotel bed, and had sex with his girlfriend on top of them. He was sentenced to 8 years in prison.

Movies can hire an Intimacy Coordinator for sex scenes so that they could remain safe, follow rules, oversee the sex scenes to avoid potential issues, and teach Directors and Actors how to run a rehearsal without emulating sexual movement but instead “sculpting the physical actions using plain words.”

12. Fearful-Avoidant adults are torn between a desire for intimacy and a fear of sharing their emotions. They want close relationships, but have trouble trusting others

13. Male fertility is highly correlated with the length between the scrotum and anus aka the taint. The average size is 2 inches.

14. In France in the 1500s, women could charge their husbands with impotence. He would have to become erect and show he could ejaculate in a courtroom. If he failed, he could demand a Trial by Congress and attempt to have sex with his wife in front of the experts.

15. A study in 2014 found scams that target lonely individuals is the leading cause of Internet fraud. Women are far more likely to be targeted than men, making up almost 70 percent of all romance cons.

Frequent sex in a relationship isn’t associated with self-reported happiness in couples but is associated with an increase in an instinctive, positive emotion towards your partner.

17. Women and men who like the taste of beer are 60% more likely to have sex on the first date.

18. Men initiate sex more than 3x as often as women do in a long-term, heterosexual relationship. However, sex happens far more often when the woman takes the initiative, implying that it’s the woman who sets limits, and that frequency of sex depends on how enthusiastic a couple is about it.

19. There was a custom in ancient Babylon compelling all women at least once in their lives to go to the temple of Aphrodite and have sex with a stranger.

20. In 2004 at the Smithsonian, a rare female White-Naped Crane named Walnut fell in love with a zoologist named Chris Crowe, who was able to rear her eggs without Walnut hurting other males. White-Naped Cranes are monogamous and stress easily so Chris must stay until he, or Walnut, dies.

Despite millennials often being seen as a ‘promiscuous’ generation, they have fewer sexual partners than previous generations and have less overall sex than their own parents.

22. Sex toys are banned in some US states, such as Alabama. Flirting is banned in San Antonio, Texas. Oral sex is banned in Indiana and sleeping naked is illegal in Minnesota.

23. In 1985, a doctor in Lovell, Wyoming was convicted of sexually assaulting patients for over 25 years. One of the reasons he was able to get away with it for so long was that many of his victims were strict Mormons and didn’t know what a proper pelvic exam, or even sex, felt like.

24. When Olympic organizers found condoms on the roofs of housing for athletes in the Seoul Games in 1988, the Olympic Association outlawed outdoor sex in the Olympic village.

25. Ida Craddock was a 19th-century sex educator who wrote pamphlets that advised couples on the importance of foreplay, complications of having too big of a penis, and how to properly rupture the hymen. She later committed suicide after being sentenced to prison for breaking obscenity laws.