That's men for you: Well, why do people have sex anyway? The answer might seem obvious - that it's for pleasure or procreation but it seems there's a lot more than that going on.
To be exact, there are 237 things going on. That's the number of motivations reported to researchers at the University of Texas when they asked thousands of people why they had sex.
According to their report in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, they questioned 400 men and women and 1,500 undergraduate students. It seems to me to be somewhat churlish of the researchers to make a distinction between undergraduate students on the one hand and men and women on the other.
Mind you, I'm wondering just how reliable undergraduate students are as a source of information about sex, even in this day and age.
That aside, the findings were fascinating and underline the tendency of humans to have reasons other than the obvious for so many things we do: we eat because we're anxious or for pleasure and not just because we're hungry; we drive to get a buzz and not just to travel from one place to another; we dress to impress or to differentiate ourselves from others and not just to keep warm and dry.
So it's hardly surprising that our reasons for having sex are varied as well.
An unusual motivation that arose was sex as a spiritual activity. One person even said that sex made him or or her feel closer to God. If that's your own motivation, you might be wise to keep it to yourself: your loved one may not welcome the idea of God trumping her in the bed. Much less would this work as a pick-up line: "Come back to my place and I'll make you feel closer to God."
Getting exercise was reported as another motivation for sex. Well, I don't believe them but whether they're telling the truth or not sex does, indeed, work as exercise. It has the same benefits as a mild exercise regime. A study of more than 2,000 men in Caerphilly, Wales, found that those who had sex most often halved their chances of a heart attack or stroke.
(There is, needless to say, a downside: British researchers report that 75 per cent of those who die during sex are having an extramarital affair - apparently the excitement is too much for them. Let that be a lesson to you.)
Some people said they have sex out of boredom. How would this play with your nearest and dearest? "Darling, I want to have sex with you because I'm bored." You know what she'lll say to that, don't you? "If you're bored I've lots of little jobs you can do, starting with stripping the wallpaper in the spare room, then you can paint the skirting board" . . . and so on.
Many people said they had sex because of peer pressure and I suspect this was particularly the case with young people.
According to the researchers, the reasons people have sex fall into four major categories.
First and most obvious is the physical: having sex for pleasure or to reduce stress or because their partner is sexy for instance.
A second category is the emotional motivation: in other words you have sex out of love. Under this heading, too, were people who had sex to express gratitude which is certainly a memorable way to say "thank you".
A third category concerns goals. Here people have sex to get pregnant, to get promoted or - I kid you not - to pass a sexually transmitted disease to someone they dislike. Having sex to break up someone else's relationship was mentioned more than once.
Fourthly, though not necessarily lastly for all we know, are those who are motivated by insecurity. They fear that they will lose their partner unless they have sex with him or her, they need the attention, they've been put under pressure by a partner and so on.
Kind of makes you yearn for the days before the Late Late Show when there was no sex in Ireland, doesn't it?
Padraig O'Morain is a counsellor and his blog is at www.justlikeaman.blogspot.com