Sex-life? Work-life balance? It’s complicated

Stay-at-home mums are in decline, and libidos too – but is it any wonder as women’s roles change?

According to the latest from the Office for National Statistics, just nine per cent of women of working age are currently full-time “stay-at-home mums” (emetic phrase) – down by a third in 20 years.

It’s a stat complemented by a drop (for the third successive year) in the number of “house husbands” (yup, equally emetic), with just 232,000 chaps currently defining themselves thus – though I’ve never met one, have you?

Type the phrase “stay at home mum” into Google and up comes a website claiming to be “the ultimate guide for real mums”. Woooah, let’s stop right there! Having given birth to two boys without the benefit of pain relief (“Real Mum” medal lost in the post, presumably), I’d invite this lot outside for a quick bake-off, if I wasn’t too busy earning a living. Then there’s www. mothersathomematter.co.uk (“Our work is about love, parenting, family time, relationships and connections”) which, while not offering the previous site’s “15 gorgeous photos of twins to make your ovaries ache” (yes, really), is no less strident – what about fathers, eh? – even as it “recognises that not all mothers want to be at home and some find fulfilment in their careers”.

That these websites make me want to punch walls is, I think, a reflection of their galumphing unsophistication as much as their smug tone. Fact is, we are living in increasingly non-binary times. Just as being asked to vote Remain or Leave didn’t take account of anyone who fancied a bit of both, or defining ourselves as male or female is now considered amusingly non-fluid by a younger generation of genderswervers, so hackneyed descriptions such as “stay-at-home mum” versus “working mum” can’t accurately reflect modern life’s myriad domestic subtleties.

As a freelance, for example, I define myself as a “stay-at-home-working mother”, a description guaranteed to stuff-up the statistics but accurate, nonetheless. Aside from the day job, I’m currently a part-time student (two days a week), run a holiday let, sit on two charity boards and do pretty much any other (paid, preferably) work that comes along. This often amounts to a six-day “working” week, much of which can be achieved without leaving the house.

Loads of “gig economists” are living like this; some of them are even men. Few indeed are the squeezed middleclass families who can still survive on one salary – and even those that can often don’t want to.

And if all this means that there’s very little downtime, then this seems to be the case currently for virtually everyone I know – of either gender – whether they “work”, or not. The pace of all our lives is increasingly demanding, frenetic and fractured. Another tired phrase worth dumping is the egregious “work-life balance”. If I’m cooking supper while keeping an eye out for an incoming email, being interrupted by a news alert from the BBC at the same time as the 11-year-old announces that he needs to skateboard to the shops in the rain with the dog… well, I defy anyone to define which bit of all that is the “work” and which is the “life”. While “balance” isn’t a word that springs to mind in relation to either.

Which brings me neatly to the other big stat of the week courtesy of the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles: namely, that women’s interest in sex deteriorates one year into a relationship, while men’s doesn’t. In my age group (45-54), 37.9 per cent of the women surveyed had lost interest in sex for three months or longer, and experts are saying this is because middle-aged women are under more stress than other groups, what with all the competing pressures of family life, and work.

As a middle-aged woman in a relationship, I can tell you that I have plenty of opinions on this. However, I can’t tell you what they are because I’ve got to rush off to a meeting in 10 minutes and my son has just texted to ask whether I can buy him some more data for his phone.

Joking aside, I think we need to keep things in perspective. I’d love it if life were only a series of dichotomies. But modern life is now far more complex than a column of statistics can ever convey. Meanwhile, if their busy Instagram feeds and Facebook statuses are anything to go by, most of the “stay-at-home mums” I know are anything but.

Still, at least theoretically, they also have the time to hold their marriages together, so presumably they’re also the ones still having sex with their partners after all these years? In which case, well done, ladies — nice work.