The idea here is that in fiction, broadly speaking, hardly anyone waits for more than a week before getting their sex on. Usually all it takes is realizing that they've met "the right person" for someone to decide to take the plunge. Every so often, of course, this turns out to have been an extremely stupid thing for them to do. However, being more abstinent is not typically considered a good response. Just "showing better judgment" becomes frustrating if they do the exact same thing two weeks later.

Men think women have nearly four times as much sex as they actually do, according to a survey looking at sexual misperceptions in the US and UK. In the survey, researchers asked men and women how often they thought people aged 18 to 29 had had sex within the last four weeks. Men guessed that women had sex 23 times, but the actual number was an average of 5 to 6 times.

Welcome to The Edit. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. Before I arrived to Stanford my freshman year, I had imagined the type of life I would have on campus. Movies about college made me think that hookups and one-night stands would be the norm.