preview.tinyurl.com/69wcub -> www.nytimes.com/2008/06/08/fashion/08nights.html
Published: June 8, 2008 LET'S say you and your spouse haven't had sex in so long that you can't remember the last time you did. Or would you turn to your mate and say, "Honey, you know, I've been thinking.
Enlarge This Image Stephen Collector for The New York Times FRESH START Doug and Annie Brown. That's more or less what happened to Charla and Brad Muller. And in another example of an erotic adventure supplanting married ennui, a second couple, Annie and Douglas Brown, embarked on a similar, if abbreviated journey: 101 straight days of post-nuptial sex. Both couples document their exploits in books published this month, the latest entries in what is almost a mini-genre of books offering advice about the "sex-starved marriage." The Mullers are Bible-studying steak-eating Republicans from Charlotte, NC The Browns are backpacking multigrain northerners who moved to Boulder, Colo. The Mullers' book, "365 Nights," is rather modest and circumspect in its details. The Browns' book, "Just Do It," almost makes the reader feel part of a threesome, sharing everything they used to stimulate sexual desire (it's hard to visualize and even harder to explain). To many spouses, "married sex" may sound like an oxymoron. And "married-with-children sex" may sound like that elusive antimatter. Indeed, reigniting a couple's desire for each other has fueled an entire therapeutic industry -- from Kinsey to Dr.
University of Chicago, married couples have intercourse about 66 times a year. But that number is skewed by young marrieds, as young as 18, who couple, on average, 84 times a year. Either way, those statistics put the Mullers and Browns in Olympic-record territory. That they thought a sex marathon would reinvigorate their marriages might say as much about the American penchant for exercise and goal-setting as it does about the state of romance. "There's a strong relationship between rating your marriage as happy and frequency of intercourse," said Tom W Smith, who conducted the "American Sexual Behavior" study. "What we can't tell you is what the causal relationship is between the two. We don't know whether people who are happy in their marriage have sex more, or whether people who have sex more become happy in their marriages, or a combination of those two." Did sex every single night make them happier in their marriages and in life? Charla apparently had no intention of writing about "the gift," as she euphemistically refers to it. She was simply a homemaker and marketing consultant, who in 2006 wanted to give her husband a special 40th birthday present. "This is something no one else would give him," she said in an interview. Brad was less than fully enthusiastic, mostly because, he says, his wife often has big ideas and poor follow-through. After all, she hadn't been especially generous in that department since they'd had their two children. He paid closer attention when he realized that she was serious. Charla had lunch with a friend, Betsy Thorpe, a former book editor and her eventual collaborator, who had relocated to Charlotte. She saw the stuff of literature in the couple's nightly trysts (the women met three-quarters of the way through the Mullers' annus mirabilis). While "365 Nights" was written from the women's perspective, "Just Do It" was written by the guy, Douglas Brown, a 42-year-old reporter at The Denver Post. Yet the change in gender doesn't seem to affect the point of view, perhaps because Doug comes across as a sensitive male, and because the sexual marathon in 2006 was his wife's idea, a way to banish suburban boredom after they moved to Boulder two years earlier from the East Coast. "I thought we don't have anything else going on," Annie said in an interview.
Tips To find reference information about the words used in this article, double-click on any word, phrase or name. A new window will open with a dictionary definition or encyclopedia entry.
|
http://csua.com/feed/