News

They're called Smug Marrieds for a reason.

According to findings from dozens of countries that belie the urgent message of supermarket self-help magazines, married people are actually having the most sex.

Researchers in Britain who tabulated the reports of people in 59 countries found that those who were married were getting consistently more action than their single peers. In every country included in an article published yesterday in The Lancet medical journal, wedded people were more likely to report sex in the previous month, with the ratio between the groups in some countries as high as 9 to 1.

These gaps were evident in industrialized countries and the developing world.

So what drives sales of magazines offering to help put passion back into relationships? And why did viewers of the television show Cheers find lovable a character such as Norm Peterson, who could rarely be bothered to have sex with his wife Vera and once opined: "Women. Can't live with 'em, pass the beer nuts."

Where do all the stereotypes of sexless marriages come from?

A Canadian researcher and therapist said yesterday that many Westerners have little idea how much sex is an appropriate amount, making them vulnerable to concern about their own frequency.

"If somebody's having it once or twice a week, I try to tell them that that's just normal," said Dr. David McKenzie, who did his dissertation on human sexuality. "Sure, when you first meet you might be having sex five or six times a week, but that fades away."

The lessening frequency of sex is normal, Dr. McKenzie added in an interview from his Vancouver office, but it can cause worry if coupled with embellished recollections of the sex that was supposedly happening before marriage. Some people begin to fear that others are having more fun than they are.

"There's a great myth out there about single life, that they're out there getting it and they're having it every night. It's just not true," Dr. McKenzie said. "It could be part of a myth that, when men get married, they look back and think they could have had more partners."

On the topic of myths, he also noted that studies based on the self-disclosure of sexual habits invariably carry the risk of error. It was a point also raised by the authors of The Lancet's article.

"Sexual behaviour surveys . . . are especially prone to a social desirability bias -- the tendency for participants to respond according to social expectations of what is right," the authors accede.

In one possible example, they note that in all age groups of South Americans, men were more likely than women to report having one or more recent sexual partners. This was particularly prevalent among Brazilians.

"These findings beg the question of who the men are having sex with," the authors write. ". . . The Latin macho culture might encourage men to overreport, and women to underreport, sexual activity."

But while acknowledging that there were "few opportunities" to assess the consistency of data culled from numerous studies and reviews published throughout the last decade, they note that most of the data were collected through "large surveys done by experienced teams."

The results show that in the four industrialized countries studied -- Australia, Britain, France and the United States -- more than 80 per cent of married people said they'd recently had sex. The rate amoung single people was markedly lower, in the range of 50 or 60 per cent.

In developing countries, the incidence of sex was considerably lower in both groups. And in a few countries almost no single people admitted having had sex in the previous month, most notably in Rwanda, the Philippines and the former Soviet country of Georgia.