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The level of sexual satisfaction couples feel in relationships drops after just a year, a study has found.

Researchers at Munich's Ludwig Maximilian University set out to find how long couples are sexually fulfilled over the course of a relationship.

The team assessed data from the German Family Panel study involving 3,000 people, focusing on heterosexual people in committed relationships aged between 25 and 41.

Participants were asked to report how happy they were with their sex lives, The Telegraph reported.

The study, published in the 'Archives of Sexual Behavior' journal, found that sexual satisfaction rises in the first year of a relationship – but then declines from this point onwards.

However, the evidence did not suggest that marriage and cohabitation affect sexual satisfaction, which went against previous studies. Children also did not seem to have an effect, researchers found. 

Instead, arguments and domestic disagreements were the root cause, with a decline in sexual satisfaction showing links with a rise spats.

On top of this, lovers tended to stop learning about each other’s needs after the one-year mark.

"We did not find that having children played a major role in a couple’s sexual satisfaction, which is remarkable as research has shown that sexual frequency is heavily influenced by the existence and age of children," study author Claudia Schmiedeberg told The Telegraph.