I am not qualified to speak as an authority on any subject, and this disclaimer goes double for the topic of marital sex. I am not in a position where I would be comfortable sharing my personal experiences, and my reluctance is in part from the fact that marriage involves two people and only one of us has any interest in sharing. I am reluctant to share too many of my thoughts on this subject, because my thoughts are clues to what is going on in my life. I want the world to be as clueless as I am.
I had a session with my shrink where she said that having a sex life is part of being a normal healthy human, and that got me to wondering and reading about the subject pair bonding sex.
Questions floated to the top of my consciousness like an oil slick on the sea of memory.
• What is normal sexual frequencies?
• How does sexual frequency change as one ages?
• What factors increase sexual frequency?
• What are some of the causes for decreased frequency?
• Is it important to have an active sex life? If so, why?
• How does one’s sex life change as they age?
I started reading up on the subject, and came across a lot of interesting statistics. What I am doing here is sharing my research. I am not sharing my life, I am not disclosing, I am not confessing, all I am doing is sharing my research. Maybe what I’ve read will be interesting to others. Here are some of the things I have learned through reading:
First, I learned that statistics are often misleading. [Gasp!] This is not a new lesson for me, but it is a lesson I continue to relearn. For example, most couples claim to have sex 68.5 times a year, or more than once a week, according to the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. The problem is that when asked about one’s sex life people are just not very candid. People are not forthcoming because while most people today can talk about sexual topics, they become uncomfortable and embarrassed when asked about what is going on in their own bedrooms. When pressed, people tend to have a default number. People will say they have sex once a week, even if they are not having sex that frequently.
Where does the default number come from? This once a week frequency of married sex was a figure reported in the 1953 Kinsey Report. Today many experts in the field feel that the Kinsey Report was flawed. The problem with the 1953 Kinsey Report is that they got all of their figures from questioning volunteers. It is thought now that 1953 couples willing to share their sex life with a clipboard holding stranger were not like average couples. Sexually revved up people might have a tendency to brag.
Remember, in the 1950’s, married couples depicted on TV slept in twin beds. On TV the word pregnant was rarely used. There was a baby boom going on in the 50s, so obviously, people were having sex, but there was also a lot of cultural prudery. The Kinsey Report failed to gather data from shy and reserved couples, so Kinsey never really found out how frequently regular married couples we “making the beast with two backs.”
Is it important to have an active sex life? In my reading, I found studies indicating that married couples live longer than their bachelor /bachelorette counterparts do. Does this mean that sex is the key to a longer life? Not necessarily. The longer life could be the strong mutual support that marriage brings, but it could also be from the frequency of sex. Anyone who has ever been involved in pair bonding and regular sexual congress knows that sex is a wonderful stress reducer.
My research indicates that sexual activity within a committed relationship improves self-esteem, cultivates a closer emotional bond, somehow it lowers incidences of illness, it keeps you young (or feeling young), and it even enhances our physical fitness. I didn’t read this, but this would seem to imply that little or no sexual activity would do the opposite.
No sex life would result in a decrease in self-esteem, brittle emotional bonds, an increase in illness, a feeling old, having little joy in life, and a decrease in one’s physical fitness.
In an AARP article I found some statistics about human sexuality among older couples.
• Couples between the ages of 45- through 59 years of age have sex at least once a week, but among couples between the ages of 60 and 74 years of age, the frequency of sex drops to 30 percent for men and 24 percent for women.
• older couples may not have sex as frequently as young people but more than 70 percent of surveyed men and women who have regular partners are still healthy enough and interested enough to have intercourse at least once or twice a month.
• People age 60 and older say that better health would do more to enhance their sexual pleasure than any other life change. On the other hand, 50 percent of the men and 85 percent of women say that their sex lives are unimpaired by illness and the AARP survey indicates that this is true even among people age 75 and older.
Now we come to the most startling information I gathered in my research.
Couples who don’t have much sex also don’t argue about not having sex. In fact, the less sex people have the less they talk about it. No sex may be an 800 pound gorilla in the room, but it is a beast they both ignore. Of course some couples do argue about sexual frequency, and a lack of frequency is often used as an excuses for affairs, and a justification of divorce, but among sexless couples that stay together, well, often, it is just not talked about. Once a couple has gotten use to not having sex they don’t argue about not having sex. The longer a couple goes not talking about this issue, the less likely it is that they will ever talk about it.
Among couples who’ve grown accustomed to their sexless marriage you just don’t hear things like:
• “Honey, remember that thing we used to do when we were naked?”
• “Do you remember why we stopped having sex?
• “Do you remember the last time we had sex?”
• “Why don’t you want to have sex with me?”
Often a long marriage is admired, and perhaps it should be, however, having a long marriage is not the same thing as having a wonderful marriage. Rarely having an argument, not having disagreements, may means that one party is just blindly following the other, or always acquiescing. Perhaps an occasional disagreement is the sign of a healthy relationship, and the get along, go along marriage is the one that is troubled. If a couple never argues about anything then they also are not communicating, each party in the relationship is self-censoring themselves. One party in the pair bond may dominate and that would mean that the other party is being suppressed, pressured, intimidated, and cowed down. A long marriage may also be a long relationship filled with false harmony. Under the surface one may be building monuments to resentment.
Can a sexless marriage be a good marriage? I’m going to say yes. It is possible. A marriage my become sexless due to ill health. Marriage is a relationship based on love and love is not sex. Sex is sometimes called making love, but we have lots of loving relationships that have nothing to do with sex. We love our children, we love our grandparents, we love our closest friends, and sex has no part in those relationships. Marriage and sex are linked in the minds of most of us, but married people are not having sex all the time, yet they can be in love with each other all the time. This implies to me that you can love your partner even without having sex.
A sexless marriage can still be a lasting and loving marriage. It is possible to be married and with sex having no role in the relationship, but possible is not the same thing as natural, or normal, or recommended. It is a little like keeping a lion as a house pet. It can be done, and you may go all your life without a problem, but you need to know that this is not the natural normal way lions and people get along. People who keep a lion as a pet run the risk of having their hearts ripped out and eaten before their fading sight.
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