Sex once a week? Where DO they find the time?
WHILE I was researching this I found myself studying a useful series of graphics called ‘sex positions for people with arthritis’, on a newspaper’s website.
I have a touch of sciatica so I studied the whole slideshow with rather more attention than the accompanying article, which was yet another new, unsexy sex survey, that sought to prove that modern marriage is in crisis as couples have stopped wanting to sleep with each other.
A third of British couples couldn’t remember the last time they’d had sex, it was that long ago, while ten per cent had crossed the bourn and entered the no man’s land from which we do not return, aka Total Bed Death.
It didn’t make me proud to be British, exactly, like the infographic for those with creaky joints did. For the bog-standard results were presented for consumption as if we were letting the side down and should buck up our ideas (the editorial line was ‘Brits seem to be struggling in the bedroom’).
AND I found this odd. Crisis, what crisis? After all, in many ways this was a good news story. It gave fresh hope to all sex-slackers, to all exhausted parents for whom sex is low priority, that they were not alone.
It seemed to set the bar so nice and low all round, and low is where we like the bar to be, most of the time.
Far from boasting or lying about how much we’re getting, among my ‘friendship group’ we sometimes play that special game, where you pretend to see who can limbo under this bar the lowest.
One friend sighs that her husband requires a monthly ‘servicing’ to de-grump him, while I’ve known others of both sexes to boast they have come back from a fortnight away without any ‘bedroom unpleasantness’ at all, as if they’ve cleverly managed to avoid gyppy tummy.
I also know this as I was, for a time, the sex columnist on a magazine called Easy Living (official slogan: For All The Women We Are, otherwise known as ‘FATWA’), which I partly gave up because my husband and children hated me writing it – to be honest it also partly gave me up because I was too coy. Anyway, for a time I wrote to order about: masturbation, sex toys, spanking (I even went to a class given by Coco de Mer and stood in bra and pants while a man in a kilt bullwhipped me – it was all very tame), chemical enhancements, lingerie, you name it...
But the topic I could have written about every month, without any problem, was the fact that many, many couples in long-term relationships had let that… side of things... slide. Speaking as an erstwhile expert in the subject, then, this aforementioned survey seemed to confirm my own anecdotal finding, which was that, after a while, it was quite hard to put the ‘I do’ back into ‘libido’ – but there we go, no harm done, we’re all busy people after all.
Then along came another survey, two in one week, and the headline on this one was: Happiest Couples Have Sex Only Once A Week.
I mentally rewrote this headline. Surely the dogged researchers, who tracked 30,000 mainly married heterosexual Americans and those in ‘established’ relationships over four decades, meant ‘as often as’ instead of only? For a start, who has the time? But no, the headline was right as far as the Americans were concerned – they regard sex as a contact sport, clearly.
The general point I take away from both these reports is that we slack Brits are nothing if not normal.
Just as an economist – I think it was Richard Layard – once established that above a certain yearly salary l evel (about £20,000, I recall) money doesn’t make you any happier, the Americans have tumbled to the fact that sex isn’t an athletic workout, and daily copulation doesn’t make you happier per se either.
IN FACT, when 32 out of 64 married couples in yet another US survey (this one from Carnegie Mellon University) were instructed to ratchet up their rate of sexual intercourse by 40 per cent they complained they had worse sex.
They felt clapped out after all this hurly-burly, and they preferred the deep deep calm of the status quo, thanks.
For some reason, like Boy George preferring a nice cup of tea, I found this cheering.
PS. If anyone wants it I have a spare copy of Mating In Captivity – about how to reclaim the tingle – and a Scentuelle patch (‘30 Days To A Sexier You’), slightly used, please enquire within.