Under two minutes was too short, they thought. In a study published in The Journal of Sexual Medicine in 2008, American and Canadian couples therapists estimated the ideal duration of sexual intercourse.Ĭonclusion: anywhere from seven to 15 minutes. “Premature ejaculation is probably a real problem for those who experience it,” says Træen. They did not ask how fast the men reached orgasm. In the new study, the researchers asked men whether they had experienced premature ejaculation during the past year, and over a period of three months. Træen was also one of the researchers behind the 2009 study in which many Norwegian men reported problems with premature ejaculation. “So it’s pretty common for people to worry about this, even when objectively they have normal intercourse duration,” he says.īente Træen and her colleagues – in a new study that they haven’t yet analysed the data from – surveyed people on the last time they had intercourse. But only one to two percent of men report that intercourse usually takes about one minute or less,” says Jern. “It’s usually the case that about 30 percent of men who are asked worry about not being able to control their ejaculation well enough. “According to the statistics then, any intercourse that lasts between one and 15 minutes would be considered ‘normal’”, the Finnish researcher says.
If you look at the average length for intercourse in Europe, it’s about eight minutes, but that varies dramatically, says Jern.Īnd statistically, it is normal to deviate up to seven minutes from the average. Patrick Jern does research on premature ejaculation.