Women are not lacking in lust, they just want to be asked

Bravo to a group of Canadian psychologists for demonstrating that the female libido is not, after all, missing in action, as we’re so often led to believe.

Researchers in Toronto and Western Ontario quizzed couples who had been an item for an average of six years, falling between the ages of 18 to 68. They discovered that men in relationships routinely underestimate their partners’ sexual enthusiasm, and are reluctant to initiate intercourse for fear of being rejected.

Despite all the old chestnuts about women feigning headaches, not getting enough would appear to be caused by male, rather than female, neurosis.

Their womenfolk, meanwhile, may well have been up for it, without actually going so far as to initiate such activity. As Homer Simpson might have put it: “Doh!”

The obvious question here is: why aren’t these idiots communicating?

However, I am rather of the mind of the therapist Esther Perel, author of Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence, whose two TED talks have clocked up an impressive 14 million viewers between them.

In Perel’s experience, “the cultural pressures that shape domesticated sex” result in “many bored couples”. And the secret to keeping the flame alive is to retain one’s distance from one’s loved one, inculcating mystery, and leaving them in the state of hotly yearning confusion familiar from the beginning of a relationship.

Forget pair bonding or, worse, suffering night after night of bedroom befuddlement as you politely try to mind-read your partner’s current lust levels. Provoke them out of their inertia with your absence.

Your ardour will be all the more feverish next time around.