Beyond Penetration: What Couples Are Willing to Try
What couples answer
When people answer quiz questions about the parts of a night that are not intercourse with their partner, the split looks like this:
| Answer | Share of partners |
|---|---|
| Love it | 47.7% |
| Gladly | 12.1% |
| Rather not | 22.5% |
| Not for me | 17.7% |
These questions share one trait: none of them is the main event. They are the additions, the detours, the things a couple does when the evening is not on a schedule. Categories like this tend to score in the comfortable middle, and the middle is where most of the honest conversation lives. Nobody is defending a position here, so a no costs less and a yes means more.
How to read these numbers
Couples are split close to the middle: 60 out of 100 partners answer positively. That makes the parts of a night that are not intercourse exactly the kind of topic where guessing your partner’s side is risky - roughly half the people reading this are wrong about it.
The gap between “love it” (47.7%) and “gladly” (12.1%) matters as well: the first group brings enthusiasm, the second brings openness. And remember these are individual answers, not couples - an interested partner does not automatically mean an interested pair. The only way to find out is to ask, or to let a game ask for you.
Do you know which side your partner is on?
In 36.5% of couples, one partner says yes and the other says no to something in this category, while in 53.6% both say yes to at least one of these questions. A mismatch is not a failure state. It is the normal condition of two different people, and it only turns into a problem when nobody says it out loud.
About this data
The numbers come from quiz data from more than 4,200 couples (over 13,800 individual answers) playing Privé, a private quiz game for two. We only count rounds where both partners finished, we exclude test accounts, and we only publish a statistic when at least 500 answers stand behind it. Individual answers are never visible to anyone - in the game itself, an answer is only ever revealed to a partner when both said yes to the same thing. Data read in September 2026.
A note on these numbers. They come from people who chose to play a game about intimacy, so as a group we lean more open than the general population. Read these percentages as a reference point for couples like you, not as a portrait of society.
And if any question puts you in the one percent, on either side, that is fine. Preferences are not a contest the majority wins. What matters is that you both agree and that nobody gets hurt.
See how the two of you compare
Averages are a conversation starter, not a verdict - the only split that matters is the one between the two of you. Play a free round of Privé: you each answer the same questions separately, and only the things you both said yes to are revealed.