Go forth and multiply? Hmm...

Few young Singaporeans have such a noble procreational mission when they are having sex.

Many just want to enjoy it - motivated more by that craven desire called lust than by love.

In an AsiaOne poll of 1,024 people this week, 374 people said their roll in the hay is motivated more by physical pleasure than by sublime stirrings of the heart.

This finding gels with that made by researchers in the University of Texas recently under a study called, "Why Humans Have Sex."

They found that the majority of both college-aged men and women get intimate because they lust after each other.

"I want her body" just about sums up this revelation. Or, "It's fun!"

In Singapore, although lust tops the list, there were also 346 people who said their moments of intimacy would be motivated by feelings of love.

Only a dismal 48 people said they would have sex because they wanted to make babies.

In Texas, clinical psychology professor Cindy Meston, the study's co-author, says of the American finding: "It's refuted a lot of gender stereotypes...that men only want sex for the physical pleasure and women want love."

She said the more the team studied the findings, they more it found similarities in both genders.

She added women were also more likely to have sex because they felt they needed to please their partners.

The study drew up a comprehensive list of 237 reasons why people have sex, and Dr Meston said she was surprised that after her study was published, more people came out with more reasons.

"Originally, I thought that we exhaustively compiled the list, but now I find that there should be some more added," she said.

She said that 20 of the top 25 reasons given for having sex were the same for young men and women but she expects the reasons to be different when older groups are studied.