For many women exhausted by today’s doing-it-all pace of life, a night on the sofa with a Sex and the City box set is a more tempting option than a night of passion with their partner. But saying yes to sex (whether or not you’re in the mood) will increase your desire – and do wonders for your relationship
Sarah is always full of good intentions when it comes to having sex with Paul, her husband of 12 years. It’s just that the 42-year-old mother of two never quite seems to get round to living up to them.
‘I’m acutely aware that we haven’t made love for several weeks now and each morning I wake up thinking ‘I’m going to make an effort tonight,’ she admits. ‘Then when the evening does come round I’m so exhausted from working and looking after the children that it’s as much as I can do to sit upright and watch a BBC drama, never mind find the energy to make love.’
It’s not an unfamiliar story, of course – so much so that the weary doing-it-all modern woman for whom sex is at the bottom of the to-do list has become something of a modern cliché. Certainly the statistics back it up: numerous studies have shown that women’s desire diminishes after a few years of sharing a bed. While 60 per cent of 30-year-old women wanted sex often at the beginning of a relationship, within four years this figure had fallen to 50 per cent and after 20 years it dropped to 20 per cent. Meanwhile, the proportion of men wanting regular sex stayed constant at between 60 and 80 per cent.
For sex therapist Bettina Arndt, the question of whether or not we should be moving physical intimacy closer to the top of that to-do list is increasingly pertinent in a society of spiralling divorce rates. Last year, the highly respected psychotherapist asked 98 couples – from 20-year-old students to those who’d been married for more than 40 years – to keep intimate sex diaries in which they recorded every detail of their behaviour in the bedroom.
The diary results were both poignant and compelling. While women wrote of their dismay and resentment at being ‘pestered’ for sex, most men, she discovered, forlornly documented the fact that they were continually refused sex by their wives, feeling trapped in a sexless marriage where physical intimacy was doled out, as Arndt puts it, ‘like meaty bites to a dog’.
‘Sex isn’t just about sex but about creating a physical bond, a closeness that is crucial in our hectic world’
Moreover, far from being the subject of bawdy bar-stool banter with their friends, the situation caused most of the men great anguish and bewilderment that they had, until then, found hard to articulate. ‘Every day I received page after page of eloquent, often immensely sad diary material, as men grasped the opportunity to talk about what emerged as being a mighty emotional issue for them,’ says Arndt. After reading numerous similar accounts, Arndt became convinced that a few more wifely ‘yeses’ in the bedroom could make all the difference to marital equilibrium.
The notion of doing it anyway to ‘please’ your man smacks anachronistically of lying back and thinking of England, but for Arndt this is missing the point. To paraphrase the Nike catchphrase, ‘just doing it’, she believes, is not about performing a marital duty, but a healthy and positive attitude which will, ultimately, benefit both partners. As she puts it: ‘It’s not about lying back and thinking of England – it’s about putting the canoe in the water and paddling and seeing what happens.’
The problem, of course, is that this rather contradicts our postfeminist sensibilities. Ever since New York sex therapist Helen Kaplan announced, in 1966, that female desire should be a prerequisite for sex, women have learnt to view their own sexual momentum as vital in a loving, consensual relationship. However, sex therapists argue that this fails to take into account the reality of female biology, which means that even if our minds are blocked off to sex at the outset, our desire can actually blossom once the act is taking place – that is to say that just doing it can become its own aphrodisiac.
Still, it all feels like a bit of a catch-22: while some women do retain a high sex drive well into the menopause and beyond, for many others even dragging the canoe to the shore can seem like a gargantuan exercise amid the litany of tasks cluttering their to-do lists. Juggling assorted domestic, professional and child-related issues – not to mention keeping up a degree of self-maintenance – all too often puts a barrier in the way of intimacy.
It certainly does for 47-year-old Louise, a dentist and mother of two teenage boys, who also speaks for many of her friends when she confesses that, while she still loves her husband, she continually brushes off his advances. ‘After a full day’s work there’s usually a million things I’d rather do instead, from reading a magazine to, well, sleeping. I do feel guilty, and it’s often on my mind, but I’m so tired from everything else I have to do that I can’t stoke the fires. I just want some time for me.’
Her friend Eleanor, meanwhile, likens sex within her own marriage to living close to a major tourist attraction. ‘For me it’s a bit like living near the Tower of London. You don’t go and visit it because you think there’ll always be another time to do it, so you just keep putting it off. The urgency has gone, particularly when there are other more immediate calls on your time. Then suddenly you’ve lived there for ten years and still not gone and now you’re moving and you realise it’s too late.’
For mothers of young children, meanwhile, the continual physical attention they get from and give to their toddlers can often become an unintended substitute for husbandly cuddles which pre-children, may then have morphed into sex.
Like Arndt, Susanna Abse, a clinical psychotherapist and director of the Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships, believes that it often comes down to establishing what’s important. ‘Most of the couples who come to me for counselling complain of feeling alienated from one another in some way. One of the most obvious ways that manifests itself is in no physical contact even if the issues lie elsewhere. But the bottom line is that you have to think about where your priorities lie. Are you prioritising your children and your work over your relationship?’ she asks.
Mary, 45, agrees. A successful businesswoman and mother of two girls aged ten and 12, she also thinks that many women engage in a degree of self-deception. ‘We tell ourselves we are tired out, but if we’re honest we still find time for other things. We have evenings out with girlfriends, we go to a yoga or a keep-fit class, we spend time on social networking sites or e-mailing friends in the evening. We do make choices about the way we spend our time, to some degree, even if it is something like watching two hours of TV in the evening. We just tell ourselves we’ve no time for sex, but actually what we’re doing is choosing TV over our husband.’
It’s not hard to understand why, however. For women, sex is tied in with a vast range of other complex emotional responses. Whether we like to admit it or not, we often use sex as a punishment or reward, while the myriad of responsibilities held by women compared to their husband can breed resentment. As 30-year-old Jane confides: ‘I’ve only been married for three years but already I find myself trying to get out of sex with my husband. I have all these petty irritations about the fact that I have to organise so much day-to-day stuff that it’s not really conducive to feeling like I want sex with him.’ It’s a common sentiment, all too recognisable to Arndt. ‘Women wrap up sex in all the rubbish of the day,’ she says. ‘They take all their daily irritations to bed.’
Professor Paula Nicolson, a psychologist and author of Having It All, also agrees that resentment plays a crucial part in women’s lack of desire. ‘It’s not always to do with sex itself, but with the politics of the relationship and the responsibilities they have. It’s about what’s happened to women’s lives, and the amount they have to juggle.’ That said, she also thinks women can be their own worst enemies. ‘It’s quite hard for women to stop thinking about whether the dishwasher’s been emptied, but often they’re hung up on the wrong thing,’ she says. ‘They’re worrying about whether the house is clean and tidy when in real terms no one is bothered by a bit of mess. But if they lose intimacy with their husbands, that can have serious consequences. Sex isn’t just about sex but about creating a physical bond, a closeness that is crucial in our hectic world.’
This, it seems, is just as valuable to men. ‘When my wife and I are going through a phase of having a reasonable amount of sex it makes everything else in the relationship easier to deal with,’ says Rory, a 44-year-old chartered surveyor. ‘We feel more connected, more of a team, and more able to deal with the flotsam and jetsam of day-to-day life. When we’re not having sex we are more spiky with each other, and
it can feel like we’re pulling in opposite directions.’
Moreover, his friends all feel the same way. ‘I think women have this idea that we’re all down the pub ogling the barmaid and fantasising about having sex with the young temp in the office. Some men are like that, but the reality is that most of us love our wives and just feel frustrated and sad at what can sometimes feel like a series of continual rejections or the notion that even when they’re doing it they’re doing us a favour. It’s not that we think they owe it to us, but that we both owe it to ourselves to keep the physical side alive.’
Sally, a 49-year-old stay-at-home mother of three, agrees with Rory’s assessment – although only after what she calls a ‘wake-up call’ two years ago. ‘My husband and I went out for dinner one night and spent the evening talking about the fact that his best mate had run off with a younger woman, partly because he simply didn’t get any sex at home any more,’ she recalls.
‘For me there was this giant elephant in the room throughout the conversation because we weren’t having a great deal of sex either. It was a reminder that I shouldn’t take my husband for granted, and as a result he got a lot of attention that weekend. The funny thing was that once we got down to it I enjoyed myself. It’s almost like I needed to be given a push.’ Sally now employs a ‘one in three rule’, making herself initiate sex around one in three times. ‘I know the fact that I’m effectively counting sounds clinical, but I know it makes an enormous difference to my husband if he feels I am coming on to him. Ultimately that makes a difference to me too because he’s happier, more relaxed, and that’s better for the marriage.’
For Susanna Abse, the sense of sex being another feature of an already lengthy to-do list is part of the problem. ‘We live in a world so full of shoulds that the last thing we need is another one in the form of “I should have sex with my husband,”’ she says. ‘There’s nothing more off-putting.’ Yet Prof Nicolson sees it differently, believing that, paradoxically, if you do make it one of the chores to do it can actually be beneficial. ‘Most women don’t regret sex once it’s happening,’ she points out. Or as 39-year-old secretary Glenda, who has three children under five, puts it: ‘It’s a bit like exercise. When you are thinking of shirking the gym you have to remind yourself that you never leave an exercise session feeling worse than when you went in. It’s the same with sex. If you can just hop over the mental barrier you’ll feel better for it, and so will your marriage.’
JUST DO IT!
- Don’t always expect or demand mutual pleasure. It’s ok to use sex as a gift — meaning the ‘quickie’ can be just fine.
- Accept that sometimes just ‘seeing what happens’ can lead to its own pleasure: accepting your partner’s advances even when you’re not in the mood can end up triggering your desire.
- Try to initiate sex more often, rather than it always being about ‘giving in’. Your relationship will be all the better for it.
- Disassociate sex from the petty resentments and issues of the day. If sex with your partner is usually lower on your list of priorities than emptying the dishwasher, then you just need to move it further up — at least sometimes.
- Learn to view sex as part of an extended conversation with your partner. All too often, communication in modern marriage comes down to barked orders and hurried exchanges in the hallway. Sex is a way to maintain your unique bond in a busy world.
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