Is sex the answer to your relationship woes?

Amelia Hill in The Guardian







How does it make you feel when your partner is cold and distant? Or when they’re critical and prickly? Does it make you want to rip their clothes off, order in a vat of whipped cream and install a chandelier to swing from?

No? Well there’s your problem – according, at least, to Michele Weiner-Davis, the marriage-guidance counsellor whose Ted talk explaining her unconventional advice to warring couples has been viewed almost 3.5 million times online.

Her advice couldn’t be simpler: shag. Do it even if you don’t want to, do it especially if you don’t want to and, most important of all, do it frequently whether you want to or not. To make it even clearer, she’s borrowed one of the most famous advertising slogans of recent times: Just Do It. “Your partner will be grateful, happier and therefore nicer, too,” she explains from her clinic in Colorado. “It’s a win-win situation for both of you!”

Weiner-Davis’s self-confessed “zealotry” for marriage has its roots in the moment her mother blew her teenage world apart by announcing that her seemingly perfect marriage had been a sham for its 23-year duration. She was 16 at the time, and says she wasn’t the only one who didn’t recover from the bombshell: her mother never remarried and her two sons rarely speak to her.


If couples put the work in, they can fall back in love

The experience, says Weiner-Davis – who states that her greatest achievement is her own 40-year marriage – was transformative. She became a staunch believer in the fact that most divorces can be prevented; that the relief of a post-divorce life is temporary but the pain of divorce is permanent; and that if couples put enough work into staying together, they can fall back in love and live happily ever after.

Over the years, Weiner-Davis has honed her message. She’s now stripped it back to what she believes is the essence of a successful marriage. Gone is any therapeutic consideration of a couple’s history; of their emotional travails; of cause and consequence. Now she is entirely one-track minded: no matter how appalling the state of a marriage, she believes that kind, generous and frequent sex can bring it back from the teetering edge of collapse.
Her realisation was hard-won. “For decades, I was in the trenches with warring couples,” she says. “But there were times when I was not too effective. I realised that there was a pattern to the times I’d failed. There was always one spouse desperately hoping for more touch and because that was not happening, they were not investing themselves in the relationship in other ways.”

Weiner-Davis stopped focussing on the couples’ difficulties from an emotional angle and addressed them exclusively as sexual problems. that when the so-called “low-desire” partner – who is, she is at pains to emphasise, just as likely to be a man or a woman – was encouraged to have sex they didn’t particularly want, not only did they end up enjoying themselves but the high-desire partner became a much nicer person to be around.


There is always one spouse desperately hoping for more touch


“I heard the same story from my clients so often that I did some research,” she said, “and found several different sex researchers who confirmed what I was finding: that for millions of people, they have to be physically stimulated before they feel desire.”

Armed with this new theory, Weiner-Davis began encouraging her low-desire clients to be receptive to the sexual advances of their high-desire spouse, even if they weren’t feeling up for it. “I found that unless there was something a lot more complicated going on,” she insists, “there were usually substantial relationship benefits to making love with your high-desire partner.”

She rejects any suggestion that she’s advocating a sexually subservient, anti-feminist, “lie back and think of England” approach. , she says this is the embodiment of female empowerment.

“It’s not just telling women to spread their legs,” she insists. “This is not just about sex. For a high-desire spouse, sex isn’t usually about the orgasm: it’s about someone wanting to feel that their partner desires and wants them. I’m hoping that women will feel empowered that they are getting their own needs met through understanding their partner.”

No still means no, she says. “But it helps to not just say no. Instead, explain why you don’t want to make love, suggest a later date and ask whether there’s something you can do for your spouse right now instead. “But here’s the deal,” she adds: “There had better be a whole more Yes’s or Later’s than No’s because if the No’s win, it leads to the problems I have been talking about.”

Weiner-Davis points out that while it’s commonly accepted that couples should make all their important family decisions together, when it comes to sex, who ever has the lower sex drive makes a unilateral choice for them both. And, just to rub salt in the wound, she adds, the disenfranchised, high-desire one is expected to stay monogamous. No wonder, she says, they get cross.

I mention Weiner-Davis’s theory to some female friends of mine. The overriding response is: “Oh God, not another thing for my To Do list!” Weiner-Davis is quick to condemn this response. “Imagine if, when a woman said she wanted to have more intimate conversations or a date night, her husband said: “It’s just one more thing on my To Do list!” For a high-desire spouse who experiences love through touch instead of quality time, it’s exactly the same impact. I’ve had grown men crying in my office, crying about the sense of rejection they feel from their low-desire wives.”

I then regale her with the experience of a friend whose husband had started his own business which quickly went catastrophically wrong. The family finances were in peril and he couldn’t cope. His wife stepped in. Alongside her own job and while juggling the childcare, she worked late into the night for weeks to stabilise their security. During this time, she was scrupulous in not blaming her husband, either explicitly or implicitly.

With crisis narrowly averted, the stressed and sleep-deprived wife realised her husband was being snippy and sulky. When she asked what was wrong, he exclaimed: “We haven’t had sex for weeks!” Surely, I ask Weiner-Davis, this shows that not all demands for sex should be met with her Just Do It ethos.

Not at all, she says. “This woman knew his ego needed to be protected and tried to do that by not blaming him for his mistakes. But it sounds like the bigger statement for him was: ‘Am I still a man and do you still desire me?’”

But it’s the selfish, uncontrolled behaviour of a spoilt child, I insist. Weiner-Davis doesn’t disagree. “Women often say that they feel they have three children instead of two children and a husband,” she admits. “But the fact that this husband was telling his wife what he was feeling sad about is a really good sign: some people throw in the towel.

Is the deal explicit, I ask, does the low-desire one say: “OK, we’ll make love more often, but then you have to turn your iPhone off every once in a while so we can actually talk”?

Yes and no, Weiner-Davis says. “This isn’t about keeping score. Relationships are not 50:50. They’re 100:100. We have to take responsibility for doing everything that it takes to put the relationship on track – even if you’re not getting the response you want initially. That’s really hard.

“It’s about asking yourself,” she says, “when he or she speaks and acts badly, whether it’s because you have not had sex for four weeks. Is their anger actually about feeling hurt and rejected? If it is, the low-desire spouse needs to be more sexy – even though they will not want to do this. And the other one needs to ask themselves when the last time the couple spent quality time together.”

On the other hand, Weiner-Davis admits there is a limit. “I’d say that after several weeks, if nothing has changed in terms of reciprocity, then the couple do need to sit down and identify what’s missing in their relationship for each of them and what they would like to have.”

Michele Weiner-Davis’s cure for a sex-starved marriage

If you have a low sex drive try to adopt the Nike philosophy – and ‘Just Do It!’, even if you feel neutral towards having sex at that moment.

If you’re the one with a high sex drive, try to discover the way your partner wants to receive love. It’s typically through quality time, words of affirmation, thoughtful, practical acts of caring and material gifts.


If you don’t want sex at a particular moment, explain why and suggest another specific time - and ask whether you can do something else physical at that moment for your partner instead.

If you have a higher sex drive than your partner, try to empathise with them and accept they might never want wild or creative sex, but see the increased level of intercourse as a gift showing their love.


Remember there’s no daily or weekly minimum to ensure a healthy sex life. As a couple you need to work out together what works for you.

How to have sex with the same person for the rest of your life

The Guardian

 

‘Spending too much time with your partner may be the problem.’ Photograph: Microzoa/Getty Images


1 Accept that having sex with the same person for the rest of your life – unless it’s yourself (see later) – is hard and, at times, boring. But not impossible. The problem – actually, there are several and also lots of contradictions – is that the received wisdom has always been to spend more time with your partner to build something called “intimacy”, which will lead to The Sex. Actually, this may be wrong.

2 Spending too much time with your partner may be the problem. Do romantic weekends make you feel really unromantic and panicked? Seeing someone all the time is not sexy after the first few months. It leads to something called habituation, which must be avoided at all costs if you want to continue having sex with your partner. Habituation is when you stop really seeing someone/thing because you see them all the time, ie taking someone for granted, which leads to hating their guts. In one survey, a common answer to the question “When do you feel most attracted to your partner?” was “When they weren’t there.” This is because anticipation is a powerful aphrodisiac and distance lets erotic imagination back in, which leads to fantasy. Unfortunately, it’s often cruelly crushed when your partner comes back into view.

3 The major stumbling block to sex in a long-term relationship is that you’re after two opposing things: security, reliability – lovely anchoring things like that which make you feel safe – but you also want fire, passion, risk, danger, newness. The two camps are opposed. If you have one, you can’t have the other.

4 The answer is to try to get pockets of distance. Make sure you stay true to yourself. Do things for yourself and by yourself; socialise on your own sometimes. In another survey, respondents said that they found their partners sexiest when the partners were in their element: the life and soul of the party, doing a job really well. Being “other” to the person they knew as reliable and as their partner. Having sex at your partner’s place of work may be something to consider if you can avoid CCTV. You don’t want to watch yourself having sex with the same person over and over again on YouTube because you have become a meme.

5 All this said, you do need to spend some quality time together to keep the bonds going. Sharing good experiences is better than spending your money on stuff for each other. This is because memories of experiences shared become more golden with the passing of time, unlike mere things you get used to (see habituation). Also you can only throw things at each other in an argument that leads to sex if you are in a film starring Sophia Loren. In real life, it leads to hate and mess.

6 Masturbation is basically having sex with the same person for all of your life, yet no one gets sick of that. Why? Because you are safe to go into your own private head-place, and the chances are that there is a real dissonance between the erotic you and the you in the real world. The erotic you has no place in your every day life, the erotic you may not be very responsible (responsibility kills sex drive). The erotic you only has one goal. Orgasm. It isn’t the point, they always tell you that in sex columns, but it’s nice – otherwise, come on, what is the point of all that effort? It’s this distance that’s at the heart of keeping an erotic charge between you and your partner. Consider separate bedrooms.

7 Learn the difference between wanting someone and neediness. The first is sexy, the latter isn’t. Looking after someone because you want to is different from one person being cast in the parenting role to the other, which isn’t sexy at all and will lead to a lack of sex with your partner and, possibly, lots of sex with someone else who doesn’t need looking after.

8 Don’t expect your partner to be everything to you. There’s an oft quoted phrase in relationship circles: “don’t expect your partner to do the job a whole village once did.” Also be realistic: two centuries ago you’d probably be dead by the age of 50, now marriages can last longer.

9 But! Take solace in the fact that older people do have more sex. Last year, a study found that if you’ve been married to the same person for 65 years, you have more sex than you did at your 50th wedding anniversary.

10 The secret of sex with the same person for ever, says Esther Perel, the author of Mating in Captivity, is letting go of “the myth of spontaneity. Committed sex is willful, premeditated, focused and present”. She also suggests good tools for talking with your partner (or to find out things about yourself), for example, start conversations with: “I shut myself off when …” and “I turn myself on when …”

How does a polyamorous relationship between four people work?

BBC News 19 Aug 2013

Imagine one house, with four people, but five couples. How does it work, asks Jo Fidgen.

Charlie is talking excitedly about a first date she went on the night before.

Next to her on the sofa is her husband of six years, Tom. And on the other side of him is Sarah, who's been in a relationship with Tom for the last five years. Sarah's fiance, Chris, is in the kitchen making a cup of tea.

The two women are also in a full-blown relationship, while the two men are just good friends. Together, they make a polyamorous family and share a house in Sheffield.

"We're planning to grow old together," says Charlie.

Polyamory is the practice of having simultaneous intimate relationships with more than one person at a time, with the knowledge and consent of all partners. The term entered the Oxford English Dictionary only in 2006, and such relationships are rare enough that Tom finds himself having to account for his personal situation time and time again.

"The number of conversations I've had with peers where I've started to explain it and they've got as far as, 'so, you all cheat on each other' and not been able to get past that. I've said no, everybody's cool with it, everybody knows what's happening, no one's deceiving each other."

If any of the four want to get involved with someone else, they have to run it by the others - all of whom have a veto.

"We can't use a veto for something as silly as, say, personal taste," says Sarah. "If you were dating somebody and I could not understand why you found them attractive, that would not be sufficient reason for me to say, no, you can't see this person."

What counts as infidelity, then?

"Lying," they chorus.

"For example," explains Charlie, "before I went on this first date yesterday, I sat down with each of my three partners and checked with them individually that I was okay to go on this date. Cheating would have been me sneaking off and saying I was meeting Friend X and not say that it was a potential romantic partner."

The rules and boundaries of their relationships are carefully negotiated.

When they had been a couple for just two weeks, Tom suggested to Charlie that they be non-monogamous.

"It was a light bulb moment for me," she says. 'I had been scared of commitment because I had never met anyone I felt I could fall completely and exclusively in love with. The idea of this not being a monogamous relationship allowed me to fall as deeply in love with Tom as I wanted to without fear that I would break his heart by falling in love with somebody else as well."

But how did she feel when, a year into their marriage, Tom fell in love with another woman?

"Well, Sarah's lovely," says Charlie. "I was just so happy that Tom was happy with her."

Sarah's partner, Chris, was less comfortable with the situation at first. They had agreed that they could have other sexual partners, but forming an emotional attachment with someone else was a different matter.

So when Sarah fell for Tom, she agonised over how to tell Chris.

"We sat down and talked about what it meant to be in love with more than one person, and did that mean I loved him less. Well, of course it didn't.

"It's not like there's only so much love I have to give and I have to give all of it to one person. I can love as many people as I can fit in my heart and it turns out that's quite a few."

Chris and Tom bonded over video games and became firm friends. Before long, Chris had fallen in love with Tom's wife, Charlie.

"It had never crossed Chris's mind not to be monogamous - now he says he could never go back," says Sarah.

This quandary over how to manage relationships is something that couples counsellor, Esther Perel, sees people struggling with all the time.

"You can live in a monogamous institution and you can negotiate monotony, or you can live in a non-monogamous choice and negotiate jealousy. Pick your evil.

"If you are opening it up you have to contend with the fact that you're not the only one, and if you are not opening it up then you have to contend with the fact that your partner is the only one."

So how do Charlie, Sarah and Tom handle jealousy?

Not a problem, they insist, and point to a word invented in polyamorous circles to indicate the opposite feeling.

"Compersion," explains Tom, "is the little warm glow that you get when you see somebody you really care about loving somebody else and being loved."

"There's always a small amount of insecurity," reflects Sarah, recalling how she felt when her fiance fell in love with Charlie. "But compare my small amount of discomfort with the huge amount of love that I could see in both of them, and honestly, I'd feel like a really mean person if I said my discomfort was more important than their happiness."

Jealousy has to be handled differently in a polyamorous relationship, adds Charlie.

"In a two-person, monogamous relationship, it's not necessary but it is possible to say, we just need to cut out all of the people who are causing jealousy and then everything will be fine.

"Whereas when you are committed to a multi-partner relationship, you can't just take that shortcut. You have to look at the reasons behind the jealousy."

If an issue does arise, the four may stay up all night talking it over.

"We do so much more talking than sex," laughs Charlie.

But some argue that it is natural for people to bond in pairs.

Our desire for monogamy has deep roots, says Marian O'Connor, a psychosexual therapist at the Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships in London.

"As children we need someone who loves us best of all in order to thrive. There's normally one main care giver, usually the mother, who will look after the infant.

"The thing about a monogamous relationship, it can give you some sense of certainty and surety, somewhere you can feel safe and at home."

Sarah, Tom and Charlie agree that a safe base is important, but see no reason why only monogamy can provide one.

"I feel safe and secure, with the ability to trust and grow, with Tom, Sarah and Chris," says Charlie. "It is from the base and security of the three of them that I face the world and the challenges the day brings."

"The way I see it, it's only a problem if I feel like one of my partners is spending more time with all their other partners than with me," says Sarah. "It just leads to people feeling hurt."

A shared Google calendar is the answer.

"We mostly use it for keeping track of date nights," says Charlie. "The couple who is on a date gets first pick of what film goes on the TV and it helps keep track of who's in what bedroom."

Sarah chips in. "So, for example, I have a weekly date night with Charlie. It's us snuggling up, us with the TV, us going to bed together and all that kind of business."

Perel sees polyamory as "the next frontier" - a way of avoiding having to choose between monotony and jealousy.

"We have a generation of people coming up who are saying, we also want stability and committed relationships and safety and security, but we also want individual fulfilment. Let us see if we can negotiate monogamy or non-monogamy in a consensual way that prevents a lot of the destructions and pains of infidelity."

But it's not an easy option.

"We get funny looks in the street," says Sarah.

"And every time you out yourself, you risk losing a friend," adds Charlie. "I'm preparing for 30 years of being made fun of."

Tom is cautiously optimistic that polyamory will become "average and everyday".

"Anyone who is expecting some massive social change overnight is terribly mistaken, but it will happen."

In the meantime, the four of them are planning an unofficial ceremony to mark their commitment to each other.

"Sometimes people just write the relationship off as a lazy way of getting more sex than you normally would. There are easier ways," says Tom wryly.

They all agree managing a multi-partner relationship can be exhausting.

"But we don't have a choice. We're in love with each other," they chime.

Women and sex: the myth-buster

Zoe Williams talks to Daniel Bergner, the American author of What Do Women Want?, an explosive new book about female desire

• 
• • Zoe Williams
  • The Guardian, Friday 5 July 2013 22.34 BST

Men are the promiscuous, predatory, up-for-it sex, right? Wrong. Photograph: Daniel Seung Lee. Art director: Dawn Kim

I was on the Victoria line with my boyfriend, telling him about a new book by the American author Daniel Bergner, called What Do Women Want? Its headline, traffic-stopping message is that women, routinely portrayed as the monogamous sex, are actually not very well-suited to monogamy. In fact, far from being more faithful than men, we may actually be more naturally promiscuous – more bored by habituation, more voracious, more predatory, more likely to objectify a mate. The expectation upon us not to feel, still less exhibit, any of these traits causes us to bury them, Bergner argues, giving rise to two phenomena.

1. What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire
2. by Daniel Bergner
3. 

1. Tell us what you think: Star-rate and review this book

First, women experience a loss of interest in sex within a marriage – commonly ascribed to low libido, but actually more a thwarted libido. Bergner interviewed a number of women in long-term relationships, many of whom elaborated on this waning desire. One woman said of her husband, "We did have sex maybe once a week, but it didn't reach me. My body would respond, but the pleasure was like the pleasure of returning library books. And the thing about being repulsed by him was, I felt my body was a room that I didn't want to mess up. Unlike that openness at the beginning, when my body was a room and I didn't mind if he came in with his shoes on."

The second, and perhaps more surprising phenomenon, is that all this thwarted sexual energy, like anything suppressed, has its power redoubled, to become something violent and alarming, if for any reason the brakes come off.

I thought I'd illustrate this to my boyfriend using two of Bergner's stories about monkeys. The first tells us that, in scientific tests, women become aroused when they watch a film of two copulating bonobos (men don't, by the way), and that they strongly deny this arousal when asked. The explanation, proffered tentatively by Bergner, is that female sexuality is as raw and bestial as male sexuality. But, unlike men, our animal urges are stoutly denied, by society and by ourselves, so that when they surface, it is not as a manageable stream, but as a rushing torrent that will sweep up everything it passes, even a pair of shagging primates. Bergner goes on to quote a 42-year-old woman named Rebecca, who had a threesome after her husband left her, and who makes an observation about the nature of female desire that is both poetic and precise. "The phrase that keeps coming into my head is that it's like a pregnancy of wanting. Pregnancy's not a good word – because it means pregnancy. It's that it's always there. Or always ready. And so much can set it off. Things you actually want and things you don't. Pregnant. Full. The pregnancy of women's desire. That's the best I can do."

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Also read

What men don't get about women

Infidelity : 'Being unfaithful keeps me happy'

Coming soon: invasion of the marauding nymphomaniacs

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You need only look at Fifty Shades Of Grey: at 5.3m copies, it is the biggest-selling book since UK records began. More than one in five British women owns a copy. On the basis that people lend things, let's say 10 million women have read it, or almost half Britain's adult female population.

People make arch remarks about how they wouldn't mind all the sex, if only it weren't so atrociously written. In fact, it's not badly written (the sequels are awful), but that's not the point. The story here is not the book, but the number of women who bought the book. For a period of time, when you got on a train, the carriage would be a third full of people reading erotica at 8.45 in the morning. Here were Bergner's raging waters of female sexuality that, once unstaunched, would tear everything up by the roots and sweep it along, from S&M to rape fantasies to love eggs. (Which, incidentally, nobody has got into because of the unsettling realisation – well documented on Mumsnet – that you can't tell they're there. "Is it me? Or the love egg? Should I have spent more than £7.99? Or is the problem my pelvic floor?" And so on.)

When people critique the book on literary grounds, or on the basis that it legitimises domestic abuse, they are wilfully stopping their ears to 10.6 million women's indomitable horniness. It makes them feel uncomfortable, squeamish. They could say, "Female sexuality makes me uncomfortable" but they don't. Instead, there is a snotty remark, a raised eyebrow. And this denial brings home the striking truth of Bergner's thesis: the shame that still attaches itself to female sexuality. These two hand grenades of his – that female sexuality is rigorously denied whenever it crops up; and that female sexual urges might be even more potent than men's – will not land lightly on this terrain.

To get back to Bergner's monkeys, he writes about the rhesus community at the Emory University primate observatory, studied by psychologist Kim Wallen. Bergner, a New York Times writer who has spent much of the past decade interviewing sex researchers and evaluating their work, discovered some surprising developments in the primate world. When I spoke to him, he explained how traditional theories of female passivity have been turned on their head: "With primatology, science has refused to see that females are the aggressors, the rulers, the initiators of sex. For so long, almost to a humorous extent, we have looked right past the truth; which is that the females are leaving their young, they're objectifying their mates, they're the agents of desire." He paused for a second, then added, almost exuberantly, "The psychologist had to keep getting rid of his male monkeys because the females got bored with them!"

By now we had pulled out of Stockwell station. My boyfriend was silent until we reached the next stop. "So, this piece about you wanting to have sex with a monkey – when's it running? Is it on our actual wedding day?"

"No. It is seven days before our wedding day."

A woman of 43, who has been married 10 years, told me, "Just before I married, I was reading an advice column in GQ. A guy had written in, saying, 'I'm about to get married. How do I face a lifetime of sex with the same person?' and the answer was, you'll get into panda/rabbit cycles. Sometimes you won't shag at all. Sometimes you'll shag all the time. I found the analogy depressing, as if getting married was like checking yourself into a zoo. Leaving the wilds, and choosing captivity."

I don't see marriage like that, but that's because I'm doing it in a different order. We've been together nine years and we have two children (five and three); they're the lock-in clause. I'm aware, nevertheless, of the asymmetry of expectation within a marriage, that husbands are meant to chafe at the bit, while wives are supposed not to notice it. It seems so obvious that this convention has built up to soothe male anxiety, I'm amazed by how surprised men are to find that it might not be true.

"Just a few days ago," Bergner tells me, "I had a male radio interviewer yelling at me on air. And when I finally had a finished manuscript, I gave it to a couple of married male friends, one of whom said, 'This is a cause for deep concern' and the other said, 'This scares the bejesus out of me.'" Well, yes; it is a little confronting, the idea that fidelity has no natural defender. "The level of self-delusion that we are capable of, here, especially men, is astonishing," the author laughs. I imagine it's like meeting your wife at 4am in the saloon bar of life. If you're here, who's minding the farm?

Bergner admits laconically, "There have been moments when I've looked over at my long-term girlfriend and thought, 'For how much longer am I going to be the recipient of your desire?'" Later, he paints a Woody Allenish picture of domestic neurosis. "Sure, we have conversations about it, as you can imagine. How can you not have this conversation, this exploration, constantly, with the person who's across from you at dinner and next to you in bed? But, no, I don't think she thinks of it as a threat. I think she laughs at me, because maybe she takes just a slight glimmer of pleasure in how threatened I feel."

We arrived at Pimlico and Yvette Cooper, the MP, got on and sat opposite us. We both looked at her intently, as she looked determinedly down. If you get any three women in conversation about the comprehensive spending review, they will, inevitably, arrive at the topic of whether or not they would do her husband, Ed Balls. So I was thinking the male equivalent of that line, "Behind every beautiful woman, there's a man who's bored with sleeping with her", wondering whether that's true of Cooper. Except, of course, that saying has no male equivalent. In the world in which such sayings are forged, women never get bored; only men get bored. Ergo, men have affairs and women simply lose that appetite. One of the questions Bergner poses is whether or not the search for female Viagra is really a quest for a medical solution to monogamy. Which is an amusing thought: we invent statins to counteract our fat-fuelled, sedentary lifestyles, and then aphrodisiacs to counteract our relationship choices, which, it turns out, we actually don't find very sexy.

There are obvious reasons for these choices, however: as Bergner points out, we are attached to monogamy as a way to hold families together, and women have become the main defenders of this social contract. "We are invested in women as mothers, and we value them as the backbone of our social structure. The maternal ideal is this indomitable force of stability that we can lean on. You know, it's the New York mayoral race at the moment. Anthony Weiner, who was busy a year or so ago texting naked pictures of himself to women, had his career destroyed and is now back as the true challenger. We're not threatened by his anarchic, out-of-control sexuality. We can still conceive of him as a leader. But it's hard to imagine a woman having gone through that being able to make a comeback so quickly. The comparable woman we can't be happy with, because of that idea of woman as backbone, woman as someone to lean on and, finally, woman as mother."

Women have collaborated with, even driven, this narrative. Speaking personally, femininity has never held any interest for me; I have never wanted to be restrained, or discerning, or sober, or conciliatory, or mysterious, or small. But if anyone assumed that I would put my sexual gratification before my children, that I would do any of those things that men do – leave my family and start a new one – I would be mortified. Furious.

It is not easy to take apart or let go of that central maternal idea, in which women subordinate themselves entirely to their children; you can't just fit into this picture a sexual appetite as potent and heedless and devil-may-care as a man's. You have to rip up the whole picture and start again.

The funny thing is, in every conversation I've had with friends about sex, every woman I know has said, not proudly but quizzically, "I think I'm more like a man" or some variation of this. I don't think any of them would buy for a second the idea that women need more emotional connection to have sex, or that women don't objectify people's bodies, or that women wouldn't want a one-night stand. But, on some level, we have been conditioned to believe that the "try anything once" gene – the urge to sleep with everyone, just to see what happens – doesn't exist for women. This idea of women as innately discriminating, not necessarily averse to sex with strangers, but surely too picky to choose a stranger purely for his or her unfamiliarity, this idea of the female as the gender that doesn't think about sex every seven minutes, has permeated the cultural groundwater completely. It's plainly rubbish, but it's tenacious, because women who don't conform to expectations of womanly choosiness, who are rapacious, assume they have some male trait they weren't supposed to have. It blows my mind a little bit that we never said, "Hang on, if you're like a man, and I'm like a man, is it possible that we're all just like men?"

We got off the train at King's Cross. He (my boyfriend) said, "You couldn't run it six weeks after the wedding?"

"Not really. But it's nice that you think only the wedding is jeopardised by me wanting to have sex with a monkey, and not the marriage itself."

He shrugged. "Where are you going to meet a monkey?" •

Scientists find 'fidelity' hormone which keeps men from straying

The chemical oxytocin helped men in romantic relationships keep their distance from strangers they might find attractive.

They stayed about four to six inches further away when approaching or being approached by good-looking women than those given a dummy drug.

Dubbed the 'cuddle drug', oxytocin is naturally made in the body and is involved in sex, sexual attraction, trust and confidence.

It is released into the blood during labour - triggering the production of breast milk - and floods the brain during breastfeeding, helping mother and baby bond.

Researchers said their findings published in The Journal of Neuroscience suggest oxytocin could promote fidelity. In contrast oxytocin had no effect on single men. 

Dr René Hurle­mann, of Bonn University in Germany, said: "Previous animal research in prairie voles identified oxytocin as major key for monogamous fidelity in animals.

"Here we provide the first evidence that oxytocin may have a similar role for humans."

In the study his team administered oxytocin or a placebo via a nasal spray to fifty-seven healthy and heterosexual men, about half of whom were in monogamous relationships.

Forty-five minutes later the participants were introduced to a female experimenter they later described as "attractive".

As the woman moved towards or away from the volunteers the men were asked to indicate when she was at an "ideal distance" as well as when she moved to a place that felt "slightly uncomfortable."

Dr Hurlemann said: "Because oxytocin is known to increase trust in people we expected men under the influence of the hormone to allow the female experimenter to come even closer - but the direct opposite happened."

The effect of oxytocin on the monogamous men was the same regardless of whether the beauty maintained eye contact or averted her gaze - or if the men were the ones approaching or withdrawing from her.

Oxytocin also had no effect on the men's attitude towards the woman - both those who received the hormone and the placebo rated her as being equally attractive.

In a separate experiment the researchers found oxytocin had no effect on the distance men kept between themselves and a male experimenter.

They said future studies are needed to determine exactly how oxytocin might act on the brain to affect behaviour.

Psychiatrist Professor Larry Young, of Emory University in Atlanta who was not involved in the study, said the hormone could be nature's way of encouraging fathers not to stray.

He said: "In monogamous prairie voles we know oxytocin plays an important role in the formation of the pair bond.

"This study suggests the general role of oxytocin in promoting monogamous behaviour is conserved from rodents to man."

The secret to an enduring sex life - cups of tea

Making love with a long-term partner is less about sex toys and snatched passion and more about sharing time, intimate moments – and cups of tea, says the marital therapist Andrew G Marshall. He explains how couples can keep the spark alive

Celia Dodd in The Independent

Tuesday, 24 January 2012

Sex life a bit lacking? Take heart: the answer lies not in scary-sounding toys or tantric techniques, but a nice cup of tea. That's the comforting view of leading marital therapist Andrew G Marshall. He explains how it works: "If you stop in the middle of love-making to have tea and talk to each other, it shows how desire comes and goes – that sex isn't just a race to the end. It allows you time to be intimate with each other. Sex which used to last 15 minutes suddenly lasts an hour and a half. Sex doesn't have to involve going out of your comfort zone – although challenging yourself is good."

Marshall is on a mission to reclaim monogamous sex for couples who are puzzling out how to feel sexy with the partner who shares the frankly unsexy business of domestic life and bringing up children. As a marital therapist with practices in London and Sussex, Marshall has enjoyed a rare insight into the love lives of ordinary people over the past 25 years. His latest book is, How to Make Love Like a Prairie Vole: Six Steps to Passionate, Plentiful and Monogamous Sex (Bloomsbury, £12.99), published both as a book and an app.

In his view, too many couples resign themselves to little or no sex after the first few years and pretend they don't mind while secretly yearning for better sex – or resorting to an affair. "Too often people leave a relationship at just the point when sex has the potential to get much better," Marshall says.

"One myth I particularly want to challenge is that after the first few years it's downhill all the way and once you get past 40 that's about it – you've got one last chance and you'd better grab it quickly. That encourages all sorts of stupid affairs.

"However, if couples make love rarely it leaves the relationship pretty vulnerable, because we don't lose our need for sex. It's a wonderful way of feeding a relationship. It's not just about orgasms: what's particularly restorative is that afterglow, where you hold each other and feel cared for. But if you don't feed your relationship it dies, or someone else comes along and feeds your partner. I don't think people get divorced because they have a bad sex life, but I certainly think it's a contributing factor."

Marshall encourages couples to reinvent their sex lives every few years. It's not about spicing things up superficially with new techniques and toys but about building confidence and openness. If couples can pull this off – in the face of undeniable pressures like kids and careers – sex gets better and better. Yet the very glue that binds long-term relationships can hamper progress, because individuals are naturally wary of suggesting changes for fear of rocking the emotional boat and as time goes on there's so much more at stake. And while it's all very well for sexperts to bang on about the importance of communication, most couples haven't got a clue where to begin.

Too often sex has become the elephant in the room; a subject far too scary to bring up because it feels like criticism. So much easier to bite your tongue and put up with things the way they are.

Marshall's advice is to avoid bringing up problems, which will make your partner feel defensive. Instead start by talking about what you like about your sex life and remembering what was wonderful in the past. That should to break the ice for further discussions about how to bring more good stuff into the relationship now.

Marshall is also keen to bust the myths about sex which hold couples back: that it has to be spontaneous and that both partners have to be equally turned on at the same time. "That puts people under extreme pressure," he says. "What's needed is a bit of give and take and accepting that sometimes one person is in the spotlight, sometimes the other. If you wait until you both feel in the mood you'd probably only have sex once a year, on holiday. That's not to say you can't have spontaneous sex, just that you can't rely on it. The rest of the time you need to plan."

And he urges couples to treat sex as a priority, rather than the last thing on the minds of two exhausted individuals. Parents, whether their children are teenagers or toddlers, should take note: "If anything is causing problems in our sex lives, it's the sense that we have to be super-parents who are available to our children 24/7," he says.

"I can't tell you how difficult it is to persuade couples to put a lock on their bedroom door, although they wouldn't dream of barging into their kids' bedrooms! If your kids hear you making love, Hurrah! It says you are sexual creatures and I think that's incredibly reassuring because it gives children the message that their parents love each other – and that is a wonderful bedrock for them to have."

SEXUAL HEALING

* Take the pressure off by having a break from sex for a few weeks. Focus on touching instead.
* Develop habits that give you a head start, such as going to bed at the same time as your partner and keeping distractions such as computers and phones away from the bedroom.
* Simple communication also helps: if you're going to bed, then make a point of telling your partner, so they know you haven't just gone for a bath or whatever.
* If you've got children, put a lock on your bedroom door. If you're worred about being overheard, play music.
* Don't wait to be in the mood. Sex doesn't always have to be spontaneous. Plan sex.
* Communicate. Bringing up the subject of sex can easily be taken as a criticism. Don't focus on problems but talk about what's good about your sex life and what you enjoyed in the past.

Not Every Adulterer is a Villain

Terence Blacker: Not every adulterer is a villain

A Pinter-Bakewell affair would have not the slightest chance of remaining private

Tuesday, 14 June 2011

There are signs that, as in so many areas of modern life, standards of infidelity are in decline. An American congressman called Anthony Weiner has admitted having taken photographs of his crotch and sent them to a number of women he had never met. Here it has been reported that a famous footballer had an affair with his sister-in-law which had resulted in an abortion.

No wonder that audiences are flocking to the Comedy Theatre to see Betrayal, Harold Pinter's famous play from the golden age of adultery, the 1960s, based on his equally famous affair with Joan Bakewell. For the seven years during which they were seeing each other – in the biblical sense – both were glamorous public figures, yet they managed to keep their love out of the public gaze. When, eventually, some of their friends realised what was going on, they took a grown-up approach and kept a discreet silence.

"There was something different about life then," Bakewell wrote this weekend. "People had a sense of the right to privacy... It was assumed that affairs arose from the dynamic of human relations – the unavoidable attraction of more than one person in one's life – and were viewed benignly until people began to get hurt."

Since those days, infidelity has rather gone off the rails. It may be that, away from priapic footballers and weinering politicians, some honourable affairs, passionate and sad, are taking place, but Bakewell is right: the attitude which surrounds the love life of others has changed. The sense of sympathy, the awareness that, even in the best-ordered lives, people can fall in love with the wrong person at the wrong time, has faded. The modern view is prim and unforgiving. We are fascinated by the sex lives of others but, even as we ogle, we tend to take a position of bogus moral superiority.

A man who messes up his marriage by falling in love with another woman is, it is unquestioningly assumed, a rat of misbehaviour who should forever be distrusted. The career of Robin Cook never quite recovered from the way his marriage ended, and that of Chris Huhne may be heading in the same direction.

The betrayed wife is offered an unattractive choice. Either she can make a career out of her victimhood, writing about the awfulness of men in public life every time a new scandal appears in the press. On the other hand, if she fails to rage and vow revenge in a satisfactory manner, she is likely to be treated with particular contempt. She is a doormat, that undignified and old-fashioned thing, the Stand-By-Your-Man wife.

Even when public marriages come to an end in an apparently civilized fashion, as in the recent case of Trevor Nunn and Imogen Stubbs, the public view of them is sceptical, faintly incredulous.

Some might argue that we have become more sensitive in recent decades, that we understand the pain and hurt which betrayal can cause, and are no longer prepared to stand by and accept it. If we did, we would somehow be complicit in the act of infidelity.

With this new moral vigilantism, a Pinter-Bakewell affair would have not the slightest chance of remaining private. A conscientious friend would feel obliged to have a quiet word with a journalist whose paper, again with the most elevated motives, would run a campaign of disapproving revelation.

These are the morals of a Victorian novelette. Any kind of human muddle involving the competing demands of love, desire, loyalty, fear and daring is reduced to the level of villain or victim, bad or good.

Yet what a shallow, priggish view of love, of men and women, these assumptions represent. How absurd – and how dreary – it is to believe that to be decent and honourable, a person should always live and love according to the same unbending precepts.

As Pinter, like all great writers, knew, there is often something true, tragic and noble in betrayal.

Is Monogamy Obsolete? New Books Challenge Our Ideas of Fidelity

by Jessica Bennett
June 9, 2011 | 12:59am

Anthony Weiner may insist his marriage isn't over, but we've seen this situation play out before. Wives leave husbands, the public condemns the cheating—and, inevitably, six months later, we learn about another scandal. Jessica Bennett on why we need to rethink our notions of fidelity.

As the urban legend goes, the woman is so desperate for a proposal that she cuts out magazine ads of diamond rings and wears them on her finger. In another tale, a girl marks up her calendar with “DID NOT PROPOSE” for each day her boyfriend puts off the looming question. If you judge by the number of Bridezilla shows on television—as well as the thousands of women who’ve made Lori Gottlieb’s Marry Him! a bestseller—it’s easy to assume that Americans are just dying to say "I Do."

The reality, of course, is that "I Do" is often followed by "I cheated." And it requires little more than the flip of the remote to find out all the gory details. Call girls. Prostitution. Sexting. A love child. Inevitably, we see wives leave husbands, and public condemnation—and watch it happen all over again six months later. The stories have become so common we could argue doing away with marriage altogether—and many have. "Is it obsolete?" wondered The Atlantic. "It's unnecessary," proclaimed Newsweek. Now new Census data reveal that, for the first time, married couples are no longer the majority. As one sociologist told me recently, speaking at a conference on polyamory: "The system simply isn't working."

But Pamela Haag, the author of Marriage Confidential, isn't so quick to call the whole thing off. Marriage is changing, she contends. But rather than giving up on it, why not simply redefine it in a way that works for each of us? Haag cites research showing that 65 percent of women—and a whopping 80 percent of men—say they’d cheat if they knew they wouldn’t get caught. She spends time with couples whose relationships she deems “Oreo marriages”—traditional on the outside, but secretly transgressive on the inside. She describes “parenting marriages,” centered around the kids; the “life partner," who is perhaps more like a best friend than a romantic partner. And, most interestingly, she talks to couples who are working infidelity into their unions, instead of struggling to keep it out. Marriage, she says, isn't dying—it's just changing. "It’s just getting revised for this century," she says.

Many of these couples are what Haag calls the “new monogamists.” She interviews women who hack into their husbands’ emails, those who stray emotionally with online partners they may never meet, as well as those who are OK with it all, employing codes like “the 50-mile rule” (affairs allowed beyond 50 miles of the home) or marriage “sabbaticals” for those who really want a break. Like Weiner, many learn of their partners' indiscretions online. Others employ “don’t ask don’t tell” rules. Still others find out, and simply don't care. “The big romantic standard has always been one strike and you’re out,” says Haag. “But I really think that’s opening up."

Photos: A History of Multi-Partner Relationships

Article - More Ways Than Two GAL LAUNCH

It all sounds terribly transgressive—or unromantic. Except that these families aren’t freaks or outcasts, they’re starting to become the norm. (See: Is Polyamory America’s Next Sexual Revolution?) Haag notes that as many as 4 million married Americans consider themselves swingers—and the number of swing clubs in this country has doubled over the past 10 years. Over the past three years, books like Open by journalist Jenny Block, Opening Up by sex columnist Tristan Taormino, and support from the likes of celebs like Tilda Swinton and Warren Buffett have put open marriage on the map. (When asked, in 2009, how he made his open marriage work, Buffett replied cooly, “you have to be secure.”)

“Humans aren’t monogamous, we need to get over that,” says Ken Haslam, a retired anesthesiologist who curates a library at the Kinsey Institute. “We fool around. We do! And if you don’t fool around, you want to fool around.”

There are now online forums for acting polyamorists, a magazine called Loving More that has 15,000 subscribers, perhaps and somewhat surprisingly, the results of a 14,000-person Oprah.com survey—in which 21 percent of people said they have an open marriage. All of that got Haag thinking: Should we stop calling infidelity a problem, and think of it as the future? "Marital nonmonogamy may be to the 21st century what premarital sex was to the 20th," she writes—"a behavior that shifts gradually from proscribed and limited, to tolerated and increasingly common."

She wouldn’t be the first to suggest it: Researchers have long wondered whether monogamy is outdated. (Helen Fisher, who studies the nature of love, believes humans aren’t meant to be together forever—but in short-term, monogamous relationships of three or four years.) Even as far back as the 1950s, Kinsey was noting that 26 percent of married women admitted to having an affair by age 40, and an additional 20 percent had engaged in petting without intercourse, despite the assumption being that it’s men who most often cheat. More surprisingly, 71 percent of the women in this group reported no difficulties with their marriage—even though half said their husbands either knew or suspected there was something going on. "Humans aren't monogamous, we need to get over that," says Ken Haslam, a retired anesthesiologist who curates a library at the Kinsey Institute. "We fool around. We do! And if you don't fool around, you want to fool around."

And yet monogamy is still the deeply ingrained—or delusional—rule to living happily ever after, and our views toward infidelity are comically naïve. "We cheat—and we also roundly disapprove of cheating," Haag writes—to the extent that we find the action more reprehensible than human cloning (really). It's the ultimate hypocrisy—lodged into every corner of our social existence, leading to the downfall of politicians, executives, religious clerics, athletes… the list goes on. It depends on what survey you examine, but more than half of Americans cheat, and yet 70 to 85 percent of adults think cheating is wrong. "We are fooling ourselves if we think people are as against cheating as they say they are,” says Jenny Block. “Jude Law cheated on Sienna Miller, for God's sake. JFK cheated on Jackie. Have we learned nothing from these scandals?”

Surely everyone in a relationship wrestles at some point with an eternal question: Can one person really satisfy every need? What we’ve learned, it turns out, is that the answer may be no. But if you believe Haag, that doesn’t mean the end of marriage—it simply means a revision of our norms. “Giving ourselves the license and permission to evolve marriage is perhaps the unique challenge of our time,” she writes. In other words: Weiner may indeed be an ass. But, as Haag puts it, perhaps we can have our cake and eat it, too. Let's just be honest about our marital motives.