The simple route to a sexier love life is rather mundane.
We know that sharing household chores and child-rearing helps relationships; preventing resentment build-up and improving the perception of mutual support and fairness. Presumably, it also provides a moment's downtime to feel connected with your partner.
As much as 62 per cent of adults said that sharing household chores is very important to marital success.
It can also do wonders for your sex life, according to research presented at the American Sociological Association annual meeting at the weekend.
Using data from 900 couples, the researchers from Georgia State University found that when women do the bulk of looking after the kids and the housework, the couples reported the lowest quality relationship and sex life.
When dads help out however, and the split was between 40 and 60 per cent, couples' self-reported sex life satisfaction shot up.
"Results indicate that increases in men's performance of childcare are generally associated with higher quality relationships, more satisfaction with the division of childcare, and higher quality sexual relationships for men and women," the researchers said.
"What we find is that there's generally little to no downside to men being largely responsible for child care," sociologist and lead author Daniel L. Carlson added.
"Being an engaged father is very important to men. If it weren't, we wouldn't see such a high level of satisfaction. It suggests that father engagement and sharing child care with one's partner is important to both sexes."
Unfortunately it's not happening for most families.
On weekdays children may spend as little as half an hour alone with their fathers, according to the Australian Institute of Family Studies (AIFS).
Even on weekends, many children spend as little as an hour or less alone with their dads.
As far as chore division goes, men and women have very similar workloads.
We all spend about 77 to 79 hours per week in paid and unpaid work. But men undertake the bulk of paid work while women undertake the bulk of unpaid work.
Somehow, in spite of this discrepancy between the research and the reality, couples are generally reporting feeling satisfied in their relationships and sex lives.
"Emotionally, 86 per cent of men and 84 per cent of women reported their regular relationships were satisfying, with 88 per cent of men and 76 per cent of women saying the sex in the relationship was very or extremely physically pleasurable," the University of NSW said in a statement following the latest Sex In Australia survey of more than 20,000 Australians.
The lead author of Sex In Australia, Professor Juliet Richters, says they didn't look at household chore division in their survey but there could be a number of explanations for the discrepancy.
"Sexual satisfaction is a pretty vague and general measure, and it seems that some women are satisfied if they're keeping their man happy (sounds 1950s, but true)," Richters says."Couples are having sex less often than 10 years ago, and the same drop in frequency has been seen in British research. Is this because we're all too busy, and taking our laptops to bed? We don't know. But it's surprising how few dual-income couples in Australia have a cleaner.
"And you have to consider the possibility that couples who are having better sex are reporting more equal division of chores - even if there's no difference. Earlier sociological research into housework found that both men and women tended to over-report men's contribution, to make it sound more egalitarian, which they all believed in (in theory)."
A separate paper exploring the relationship between happy couples and housework, by researchers from The University of Melbourne, suggested that clashes over chore division were most likely symptomatic of deeper dissatisfaction.
"Actual inequity (in a relationship) may be problematic but unacknowledged until other dissatisfactions have also surfaced," the authors said.
How sharing of tasks influences perception so much is still the subject of ongoing research.
"We are trying to understand what is it about sharing that couples view so positively," Carlson said.
For the sake of sex and happiness, though a little helping hand never hurt and sharing is caring.
