Author Rebecca Reid has coined the phrase "sexaggeration" to talk about why we typically think that other people are having more sex than we are. As Reid describes, you’re having a chat with a group of your close friends, and someone volunteers that they are having sex five or six times a week. "How about you?" they ask. What do you do?

Lots of us will be tempted to lie, "rounding up" the true figure and skipping over the times when we are not having much sex for one reason or another. This leads to what Reid calls the “inflation effect.” If you "round up" to five or six times, others will likely think they are having less sex than you are when the question comes up again. You can see where this is going—everyone is lying. And we all think we are failing sexually.

Ipsos, a global market research and public opinion organization, in 2016 studies on misperceptions, asked people in Britain and America to guess how often people in their country aged 18 to 29 years had sex. Here is what they found about what people thought about others' sex experiences.

Reid wonders, Why are we so bothered about what others think about our sex life? For her, how much sex she is having is like a health check on her marriage. She, like others, has internalized the idea that how much sex you have is a direct reflection of how happy you are with your marriage. Admitting to having a sexless week is terrifying.

Social comparison theory, introduced by Leon........

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