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The sexual revolution that began in the Sixties resulted in one of the more liberated generations in history. Since then, the culture has steadily shed one taboo after another, leading to its present state of all sex, all the time. Mainstream TV shows and movies with explicit sex scenes, personal ads, dating services, nudity, a multibillion-dollar porn industry – the message is clear: If you aren't getting it regular, there is something wrong with you.
The pressure becomes even more intense if you're in a marriage – sex was why people used to get married in the first place, remember?
The persisting, pervading belief in that idea is perhaps what prevents so many people today from admitting, often even to themselves, that alack of physical intimacy with their spouse has become a fact of life.
“For us, it went from five nights a week before we were married, to once every five weeks afterwards, to once every five years after the kids arrived, to zero,” says Richard, a man in his mid-50s.
“It was like the story of the boiling frog. At first, you don't notice as the water gets warmer – as the sex gets less frequent. Time passes and then, without really seeing it coming, there you are: dead. You have no sex life and you can't even remember why it stopped.”
Because the subject is so painful, Richard did not want his real name used, and indeed no one interviewed for this article would go on the record with their story (all names have been changed).
In the culture at large, however, the sexless marriage has become a major topic, spawning a mini-industry of books, studies, therapies, online forums, advice columns – and the occasional tell-all.
One new book, just out in Britain, by a woman calling herself Carrie Jones, openly describes her sexless marriage, stating that she and her banker husband have been celibate for four years. In Cutting Up Playgirl: A Cheerful Memoir of Sexual Disappointment, Ms. Jones asserts that motherhood and sex are intrinsically incompatible.
She describes her book as a “Frigid Jones' Diary,” explaining to one newspaper that “I want to tell other women that they are not alone in not wanting to have sex with their long-term partners.”
She has also been clear about her long-range plan: to leave her husband in search of sexual fulfilment once the children are grown.
Who knows what Ms. Jones's real motivation is in writing a book in which she is blunt to the point of cruelty about her spouse?
But she may be doing a service by saying out loud what so many of us only allow ourselves think: The sexless marriage is rampant.
Dr. Phil, a reliable barometer of the zeitgeist if nothing else, says we're dealing with “an undeniable epidemic.”
A Google search of “sexless marriage” drew more than four million hits, while “fulfilling marriage” drew just over half a million.
Nor is anyone pretending it's anything new. According to a book blurb from The New Yorker for Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic, by Esther Perel, what we're looking at is “one of the most time-honoured institutions in human history: the sexless marriage.”
Ms. Perel, who is a Manhattan therapist, hit a nerve, and pay dirt, when her book came out and became a mini-phenomenon almost instantly.
She says her popularity at parties, and pretty well everywhere else, was never higher than when people found out that she was researching a book on sex and marriage. “People talk to me,” she writes. “Of course, that doesn't mean they tell me the truth. If there's one topic that invites concealment, it's this one.”
Now, 18 months later, her book is about to be published in 21 countries.
Ms. Perel certainly wasn't the first to notice that sex and marriage don't necessarily live in the same house. Cruise the relationship section in your local bookstore and you'll find titles such as He's Just Not Up for It Anymore : Why Men Stop Having Sex and What Women Are Doing About It (which estimates that 20 million marriages in the U.S. are sexless), The Sex Starved Marriage , After the Glass Slipper and Sexy Mamas.
