A Couple's Therapist on the Reality of What Men Think About Sex

From Samantha Rodman PhD, Dr. Psych Mom, writing at Huffington Post, this is an informative and entertaining article on what a couple's therapist has learned about male ideas about sex through talking to people in relationships.

In discussing the impact of porn on relationships, she mentions the film Don Jon, a movie recommended to me by a friend. At first it was just annoying its faux masculinity and objectification of women. But that is the point - the main character (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who wrote and directed the film) prefers porn to women, even when he hooks up with a "ten" (Scarlett Johansson). It's not a great film, but I think it presents a reality that many men are unwilling to speak about openly, so I recommend it.

What Men Think About Sex vs. Reality

By Samantha Rodman PhD, Dr. Psych Mom
Posted: 08/09/2014

As a couples therapist, I see quite a great deal of miscommunication about sex between partners. And this is in the rare scenario where there is any communication at all. Generally, each partner thinks that the way they think about sex is obvious to the other, and nothing could be further from the truth. Here I come, like a psychology-wielding superhero, to vanquish common misunderstandings about sex for once and for all. Really. Also, I create world peace. But seriously, this post may at least function as something to email to your husband to show him how normal you are, and/or to start an honest and open discussion about your sex life.

Here are the most common incorrect assumptions that men make about sex, with my rebuttals after each.

1. Frequent and strong sexual desire and thoughts should be natural and normal for all people in long-term relationships.

Frequent and strong sexual desire and sexual thoughts are natural for normal for SOME PEOPLE in long-term relationships. These people are usually either men, or they are women who feel close, relaxed and attractive, or who are in a new and exciting relationship. Note the lack of qualifiers after the subset "men." Note all the qualifiers after the subset "women." I am not saying women don't want to have sex. However, all the recent research shows that sex drive in women tanks in monogamous relationships (see What Do Women Want?), unlike what was previously thought, which was that men grow tired of women after a while but women never get sexually bored by their partners. So basically, it is entirely normal and natural for your wife NOT to want to have sex with you, unfortunately.

The facts of the matter are that if your wife is experiencing decreased sexual desire, it is entirely normal. She is likely hitting the trifecta of libido-killers for women: long-term monogamy, exhaustion and body image issues (the latter two particularly apply after having kids).

Furthermore, any resentful feelings she has about you or the relationship in general, or anything that makes her feel insecure, will also kill her sex drive. If any or many of these issues apply, she will have to apply some real effort to get into a sexual mood, and this is completely normal. See Mating in Captivity for a more in-depth discussion of why your wife is normal in not wanting to have sex more. (Sorry, buddy.)

2. Most married couples are having sex at least three times a week, if not more.

Check out this chart. Almost half of married couples with husbands aged 25-49 fall into the "a few times a month to once a week" category. And only 5.8% of married men in their 30's are having sex four or more times per week. And who knows about these guys, anyway, because this chart doesn't distinguish between how long couples have been married for, whether they have kids, whether their wives are pregnant or nursing or whether one or both suffers from depression, anxiety or any other condition that would dampen sexual desire. From my clinical experience and Moms Night Out confidences, married fathers of small children are having sex a bit less than once a week on average. Pretty much, they aim for one to two times a week and then life and small kids get in the way of that aspiration. (Co-sleep much?)

3. Women go into sex expecting and wanting the focus to be on their pleasure.

Au contraire, women generally do not want the primary focus of the sexual encounter to be on their pleasure. Instead, I hear female clients share frequent fantasies of being with men who are overpowered by lust and desire. If a woman feels like her partner has the sole goal of giving her an orgasm, it is quite a lot of pressure and can make her feel self-conscious and awkward. This does not mean that women do not want to enjoy sex; but, they have to feel that their partner is enjoying it at least primarily because he finds her so attractive sexually that he feels urgent desire for her. Women do not respond well to a man who is trying to use various "techniques" in order to be a better lover. This makes us feel like a sudoku puzzle you are trying to solve.

4. Men who focus on a woman's pleasure (read: enjoy giving oral sex) are few and far between, but I myself happen to be one of these rare ones (note how every male client I have met thinks this).

Dispelling this myth can be my great contribution to humanity. If I had a nickel for every time I heard a man say that "unlike most guys," he "really likes" to go down on women, I would have enough nickels to build a life size statue of a man going down on a woman. And then I would auction it off on eBay, because I have children, for God's sake. Anyway, men, listen up, I would wager from clinical experience that about 80% of you say that you really like to do this. You are not the minority.

Meanwhile, back on Earth, very, very few women in long-term monogamous relationships want frequent oral sex. Really. Even the hot girls you dated in college that were all about it. Do you know why they were all about it? A few reasons: a) they were young and hormonal. Women and men are fairly similar in terms of their sexual peak; it's a myth that men peak at 18 and women at 40. Doesn't this make evolutionary sense? (This myth got propagated probably because women are too shy when young to speak up about what they want in bed, but older women are more confident so may seem more sexual.) Then, b) you were new and exciting. As I said before, women's libido decreases greatly with monogamy. Even a few years of college dating is nothing like the monogamy that comes with living with you and your underwear on the floor.

Many women find oral sex to be overwhelming (too much physical sensation in one place), it may make them feel distant from you (physically and emotionally) and not to mention, you try it at the wrong time. Many women are likelier to want oral sex when they are already aroused; trying it too early in the encounter may physically hurt and make women feel self-conscious. When their inhibitions are lowered is a better time to try, but even then, many women do not enjoy it.

5. I must last as long as I can and be in full control of myself at all times.

In my clinical experience, women do not want a man to last forever. This is consistent with what I said before, that women like when men urgently desire them. If you last forever, how urgent is your desire? Not very. Of course, if premature ejaculation (within a minute or less) is an issue, this can be helped with sex therapy or techniques you can practice yourself.

6. Also, I should engage in a lot of foreplay, all the time, because women want this.

Some do, and others prefer to just start having sex pretty soon into the encounter. For many women, having sex is what gets them into the mood to have more sex. Additionally, if your wife thinks you'll be disrupted in the middle of sex (e.g. by young kids waking up, etc), often a long elaborate sexual episode can make her anxious. Moral of the story: Don't assume your wife wants a long, drawn out sexual experience every time. Ask her, or see how she responds to something more, say, to the point.

7. Women orgasm from intercourse alone pretty frequently.

About 75% of women don't orgasm from intercourse alone. If you didn't know this already, this statistic will change your worldview. So your wife is not weird or not in touch with her sexual side. She's just your run-of-the-mill non-intercourse-orgasming woman. Phew.

8. The women I dated in high school/college/my 20's who I had lots of crazy sex with are still doing that with the men they married.

I call BS on that one, friend. I just told you about the whole monogamy and age and babies leads to decreased libido in the majority of females. If you had married that hot young thing, she would be a less hot, less young thing who wants to sit around and watch TV at night too. You know it's true if you think about it rationally.

9. My wife makes up excuses not to have sex, and other women just go with the flow and are happy to feel desired.

See above.

10. After the baby, most women get their sex drive back reasonably quickly.

If by reasonably quickly, you mean, after the last baby is 5 years old and sleeps through the night. And also if by that point they've gotten back to working out, eating right, sleeping well and feeling good about who they are as a person and not just as a mommy. In that case, yes, pretty quickly.

11. Watching porn does nothing to hurt our sex life or relationship.

I beg to differ. Yes, it's normal to masturbate and so on and so forth, BUT people have only a limited amount of energy -- mental, physical and sexual. If you're giving the best of yourself to an Internet person, it's not going to your wife. I am further willing to bet that it makes your wife feel pretty crappy to know that you're looking at other naked women, many of whom are going to look more conventionally "hot" than she looks (or feels that she looks). And the more porn men watch, the less likely they are to be satisfied with the physical appearance and sexual appetites and behaviors of their real life partner. See #7 above -- did you ever see a porn movie where the woman didn't get off from intercourse? Of course not, yet this is how the majority of women function. Anyway, watching porn is the male equivalent of when your wife sees a movie like The Notebook and then she hates you for a couple of days.

On top of this, porn can be addictive. So try and limit it. For more on this topic, see the movie "Don Jon."

Now, I am in no way saying that women cannot work on being more open to sex and get more in touch with their sexuality within their marriage (and alone, for themselves). However, the purpose of this post was to discuss the vast differences between what many (not all!) men assume about sex, and the reality of what the majority of women think and feel about it. Discussing this post with your spouse is a great way to see whether you two are on the same or different pages about sex. If you'd like some more reading on this topic, try the excellent book Wanting Sex Again: How to Rediscover Your Desire and Heal a Sexless Marriage by Laurie Watson.

And don't worry, next I'll tackle all the ways many women are wrong about sex.

• For more, visit me at Dr. Psych Mom, on Facebook, or on Twitter @DrPsychMom.
• Follow Samantha Rodman PhD on Twitter: www.twitter.com/DrPsychMom

The Larger Your Penis, The More Likely Your Wife Will Cheat (in Kenya)

Irony, that. You can read the abstract for the study below this piece from the Huffington Post (the whole study is open access on PLoS ONE). The good news for American men is that this study involved women married to fishermen along Lake Victoria in Kisumu County, Kenya, so there is likely some cultural and values-based issues that Huffington Post chose not to mention in their provocative title.

See what the HP article does not mention until near the bottom is that penis size ranked third on the list of reasons they women had affairs - domestic violence and being denied a preferred sex position were one and two, respectively.

The Larger Your Penis, The More Likely Your Wife Will Cheat Says New Study

The Huffington Post | by Taryn Hillin
Posted: 04/23/2014

Men often view having a large member as a symbol of strength and sexual prowess. But it turns out, when it comes to keeping a woman satisfied, bigger may not be better.

Contrary to popular belief, a new study out of Kenya found that husbands with larger penises were more likely to be cheated on by their wives (shocking, we know).

For the study -- published this month in PLOS One -- researchers interviewed 545 married couples in Kenya in order to better understand their relationship habits and, more specifically, to identify factors which contributed to women having extramarital affairs.

Researchers asked both partners to self-report the male's erect penis size (they had a 15 inch ruler on hand for reference). Then, if there were differences between the estimates (which there were), they either took the average of the two or went with the estimate from the partner who was less likely to fib.

What they found was rather shocking:

"Every one inch longer penis increased the likelihood of women being involved in extra-marital partnership by almost one-and-half times," the researchers wrote. "Women associated large penises with pain and discomfort during sex which precludes the enjoyment and sexual satisfaction that women are supposed to feel."

In fact, one woman interviewed for the study told the researchers the following: "Some penis may be large yet my vagina is small, when he tries to insert it inside, it hurts so much that I will have to look for another man who has a smaller one [penis] and can do it in a way I can enjoy."

According to the study, 6.2 percent of the 545 females had affairs during the six-month study. Other factors that increased the likelihood of women straying outside the marriage included domestic violence, being denied sex or denied preferred sexual position, being under age of 25 and a lack of sexual satisfaction.

Researchers focused on female infidelity specifically because of the prevalence and spread of HIV among women in the region. Researchers felt if they could identify reasons for unprotected sex, they might better prevent it.

* * * * *

Here is the full abstract - follow the title link to see the whole article (open access).

Full Citation: 
Kwena Z, Mwanzo I, Shisanya C, Camlin C, Turan J, et al. (2014, Apr 18). Predictors of Extra-Marital Partnerships among Women Married to Fishermen along Lake Victoria in Kisumu County, Kenya. PLoS ONE; 9(4): e95298. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0095298

Predictors of Extra-Marital Partnerships among Women Married to Fishermen along Lake Victoria in Kisumu County, Kenya

Zachary Kwena, Isaac Mwanzo, Chris Shisanya, Carol Camlin, Janet Turan, Lilian Achiro, Elizabeth Bukusi

Abstract

Background

The vulnerability of women to HIV infection makes establishing predictors of women's involvement in extra-marital partnerships critical. We investigated the predictors of extra-marital partnerships among women married to fishermen.
 
Methods

The current analyses are part of a mixed methods cross-sectional survey of 1090 gender-matched interviews with 545 couples and 12 focus group discussions (FGDs) with 59 couples. Using a proportional to size simple random sample of fishermen as our index participants, we asked them to enrol in the study with their spouses. The consenting couples were interviewed simultaneously in separate private rooms. In addition to socio-economic and demographic data, we collected information on sexual behaviour including extra-marital sexual partnerships. We analysed these data using descriptive statistics and multivariate logistic regression. For FGDs, couples willing to participate were invited, consented and separated for simultaneous FGDs by gender-matched moderators. The resultant audiofiles were transcribed verbatim and translated into English for coding and thematic content analysis using NVivo 9.
 
Results

The prevalence of extra-marital partnerships among women was 6.2% within a reference time of six months. Factors that were independently associated with increased likelihood of extra-marital partnerships were domestic violence (aOR, 1.45; 95% CI 1.09–1.92), women reporting being denied a preferred sex position (aOR, 3.34; 95% CI 1.26–8.84) and spouse longer erect penis (aOR, 1.34; 95% CI 1.00–1.78). Conversely, women's age – more than 24years (aOR, 0.33; 95% CI 0.14–0.78) and women's increased sexual satisfaction (aOR, 0.92; 95% CI 0.87–0.96) were associated with reduced likelihood of extra-marital partnerships.
 

Conclusion

Domestic violence, denial of a preferred sex positions, longer erect penis, younger age and increased sexual satisfaction were the main predictors of women's involvement in extra-marital partnerships. Integration of sex education, counselling and life skills training in couple HIV prevention programs might help in risk reduction.

If you go to Northwestern University, you can take a course called Marriage 101. Why isn't something similar available at every college and university in the country? Or even every high school?

The First Lesson of Marriage 101: There Are No Soul Mates

A course at Northwestern University teaches students about what makes a healthy relationship.

Christine Gross-Loh | Feb 12 2014

Ellen/Flickr

Research shows that practically every dimension of life happiness is influenced by the quality of one’s marriage, while divorce is the second most stressful life event one can ever experience.

Yet nearly half of all married couples are likely to divorce, and many couples report feeling unhappy in their relationships. Instructors of Northwestern University’s Marriage 101 class want to change that. The goal of their course is to help students have more fulfilling love relationships during their lives. In Marriage 101 popular books such as Mating in Captivity and For Better: The Science of a Good Marriage are interspersed with meaty academic studies. Students attend one lecture a week and then meet in smaller breakout groups to discuss the weekly topics, which range from infidelity to addiction, childrearing to sexuality in long-term relationships.

At first glance this class may seem a tad too frivolous for a major research university. But the instructors say it’s not an easy A and its reputation as a meaningful, relevant, and enlightening course has grown steadily over the 14 years it’s been offered. In fact, teachers are forced to turn away eager prospective students every year. This spring, the enrollment will be capped at 100. The class is kept to a manageable size so that students can grapple at a deeply personal level with the material during their discussion sessions.

The Marriage 101 professors believe college is the perfect time for students to learn about relationships. “Developmentally, this is what the college years are all about: Students are thinking about who they are as people, how they love, who they love, and who they want as a partner,” says Alexandra Solomon, a professor and family therapist who will be teaching the course along with a team of four other faculty, all affiliated with Northwestern University’s Family Institute, and 11 teaching assistants. “We’re all really passionate about talking about what makes a healthy relationship.” The professors see the course—which requires journaling exercises, interviews with married couples, and several term papers—as a kind of inoculation against potential life trauma.

Historians tell us that marriage education in America began as a way to keep women’s sexuality in check. “Marriage education has been for hundreds of years aimed at women. It was considered their responsibility to keep the marriage going,” Stephanie Coontz, co-chairwoman of the Council on Contemporary Families and author of Marriage: A History, tells me. During the 1920s and 1930s, Coontz explains in her book, fears about sexual liberation and the future of marriage led eugenics proponents like Paul Popenoe to become enthusiastic about marriage counseling. “If we were going to promote a sound population, we would not have to get the right kind of people married, but we would have to keep them married,” Popenoe wrote. One of our more beloved cultural myths about marriage is that it should be easy.

College-level marriage courses became even more popular during the post-World War II period, when marriage rates were at an all-time high and women were encouraged to embrace a new role as happy homemakers. Marriage education during that time, Coontz explains, was similarly driven by a strong emphasis on stereotypical gender, race, and class ideas about how a marriage should ideally be conducted. “The received wisdom of the day was that the only way to have a happy marriage was for the woman to give up any aspirations that might threaten the man’s sense of superiority, to make his interests hers, and to never ask for help around the house.” In one case, cited in Rebecca Davis’s book More Perfect Unions, a young wife became convinced, after a series of sessions at Ohio State University’s marriage clinic, that her husband’s straying was a result of her failing to do her duty by taking care of her looks and keeping a proper home. And New York University’s College of Engineering presented “Good Wife Awards” to women who put their spouses first, providing the domestic support that allowed their husbands to concentrate on their studies.

There was another resurgence of interest in marriage education a decade ago when the George W. Bush administration undertook an initiative, with bipartisan Congressional support, to promote marriage. The Healthy Marriage Initiative was met with mixed reception; criticism was leveled at the lack of evidence that the proposed marriage-promotion strategies even worked, as well as the possibility that low-income women would feel pressured to remain in abusive or dysfunctional marriages. “We did not know if the existing scientific literature on predicting successful marriages would apply to poor families because it was mostly conducted on middle-class families,” Matthew Johnson, Director of the Marriage and Family Studies Laboratory at SUNY Buffalo, told Forbes in an interview. “Some in the scientific community were trying to point out that we did not know whether investing [large amounts of money] in marriage education for poor couples would work, but our voices were drowned out by those who felt that it was worth the gamble.”

Nowadays, when colleges and universities offer courses on the topic of marriage, rather than explicitly offering practical marriage advice, they often survey the institution of marriage from a historical point of view or look at larger sociological trends.

Today’s marriage education classes are most often aimed at high-school students, usually as part of a home economics or health class, where teens are taught how family structure affects child well-being, learn basic relationship and communication skills, or are required to carry around a sack filled with flour for a week so they can learn what is entailed in being responsible for a baby 24 hours a day. Other courses are taught at specifically religious colleges, or are meant for engaged couples, like Pre-Cana, a marriage prep course required of all couples desiring to marry in a Catholic church.

Northwestern’s Marriage 101 is unique among liberal arts universities in offering a course that is comprehensively and directly focused on the experiential, on self-exploration: on walking students through the actual practice of learning to love well.

While popular culture often depicts love as a matter of luck and meeting the right person, after which everything effortlessly falls into place, learning how to love another person well, Solomon explains, is anything but intuitive. Among the larger lessons students learn in this class are:

Self-understanding is the first step to having a good relationship

“The foundation of our course is based on correcting a misconception: that to make a marriage work, you have to find the right person. The fact is, you have to be the right person,” Solomon declares. “Our message is countercultural: Our focus is on whether you are the right person. Given that we’re dealing with 19-, 20-, 21-year olds, we think the best thing to do at this stage in the game, rather than look for the right partner, is do the work they need to understand who they are, where they are, where they came from, so they can then invite in a compatible suitable partner.”

To that end, students keep a journal, interview friends about their own weaknesses, and discuss what triggers their own reactions and behaviors in order to understand their own issues, hot buttons, and values. “Being blind to these causes people to experience problems as due to someone else—not to themselves,” Solomon explains. “We all have triggers, blind spots, growing edges, vulnerabilities. The best thing we can do is be aware of them, take responsibility for them, and learn how to work with them effectively.”

You can’t avoid marital conflict, but you can learn how to handle it better

The instructors teach that self-discovery is impossible without knowing where you came from. “Understanding your past and the family you grew up in helps you to understand who you are now and what you value,” Solomon says. To help students recognize what has shaped their views on love, she and her colleagues have students extensively interview their own parents about their own relationship. Many find this to be the most demanding and yet the most rewarding assignment of the course. Maddy Bloch, who took the course two years ago along with her boyfriend at the time, learned a lot when she interviewed her own parents about their own marriage, despite the fact that they are divorced. “I learned that in an intimate relationship each person holds a tremendous amount of power that you can easily turn on someone,” she says. “This is why relationships require a lot of mutual trust and vulnerability.” It seems a little unromantic to talk about skill building and communication skills. But it’s important.

Once you have a sound, objective sense of why you behave the way you do, you are better equipped to deal with conflicts—inevitable in any long-term relationship—with the appropriate tincture of self-awareness so that you avoid behaving in ways that make your partner defensive. The class instructors teach their students that blaming, oversimplifying, and seeing themselves as victims are all common traits of unhappy couples and failed marriages. They aim to teach students that rather than viewing conflicts from a zero-sum position, where one wins and one loses, they would benefit from a paradigm shift that allows them to see a couple as “two people standing shoulder to shoulder looking together at the problem.”

Thus, one of many concrete conflict-resolution skills that they teach is to frame statements as “X, Y, Z” statements, rather than finger pointing: When you did X, in situation Y, I felt Z. In other words, calmly telling my husband that when he left his clothes on the bathroom floor in the morning because he was late for a meeting, I felt resentful because I felt he didn’t notice that I was busy too, would lead to a better outcome than if I were to reactively lash out and accuse him of being a messy and careless slob. “‘You’ statements,” Solomon explains, “invite the other partner’s defensiveness, inviting them to put their walls up.” So too do words (tempting though they may sound in the moment) such as “always” or “never.”

A good marriage takes skill

There’s no doubt that the largest takeaway from the course is that fostering good relationships takes skills. “We’re a very romantic culture,” Solomon says, “and it seems a little unromantic to talk about skill building and communication skills. But it’s important.” One of our more beloved cultural myths about marriage is that it should be easy. The reality is that most of us don’t have adequate communication skills going into marriage. That’s why Marriage 101 students are required to interview another couple in addition to their own parents: a mentor couple (typically a local couple who has been married anywhere from several years to several decades). The professors hand out a list of more than 80 suggested questions and tell their students to think of the interview as a sort of lab experiment, a chance to observe the theoretical concepts they’ve been learning in a real-life context. During a 90-minute interview, a pair of students asks each couple questions such as what most attracted them to the other at the start of their relationship, which moments stand out as the best ones of their marriage, how they’ve weathered severe stresses, whether they ever thought about divorce, and what their sex life has been like over time. They watch the couple interact and engage in good couple skills: bringing a spouse a glass of water, for instance, as an unspoken gesture of caretaking. The interview is itself also a chance to observe a couple doing something that research shows is good for marriage: reminisce together as they look back on their relationship.

You and your partner need a similar worldview

Yet, despite how often we hear about the importance of good communication, even the best communication skills won’t help a couple that sees the world completely differently. One of the texts used in the course, Will Our Love Last? by Sam R. Hamburg, argues that people can be incredibly proficient communicators, yet never see eye to eye because they simply can’t understand how their partner can hold a position they see as untenable. “For people to be happy in their marriage they must be able to understand not just what their partner is saying, but the experience behind the words,” writes Hamburg. If partners are unable to do that, “they cannot understand what it’s like to be their partner—to understand their partner empathically—and the best communication in the world won’t help.”

The instructors teach students that once they learn to identify what is important to them, what values they hold, what they like to do on a daily basis, and what their sexual preferences are—in other words, once they know who they are—they will then be in a much stronger position to be able to recognize when they are with a partner who is compatible and shares their worldview.

Ben Eisenberg, who majored in learning and organizational change at Northwestern, took the course last year as a senior, right after the breakup of a long-term relationship. He found it enlightening as he looked back at his past and towards his future. “Pairing up with a partner is one of the biggest decisions you’ll make in life, more important than some of the other things you’ll learn in college,” he mused. Among other things, he learned to recognize that the more aligned you are on certain crucial dimensions—such as day-to-day compatibility, or whether you are on the same wavelength about larger issues—the better off you’ll be as a couple. He learned that all the communication skills in the world won’t help if you haven’t learned how to recognize and invite in a compatible partner. “How similarly you spend your day, your money, how you view the world, greatly affects that day-to-day happiness with your partner, more than whether you have initial attraction.”

The greatest lesson Eisenberg learned from Marriage 101? “I learned that the modern idea about love at first sight is a myth. Love is a lot of work, but it’s worth it if you put the work in.”

In an Attempt to Be Gender-Neutral, We May Have Become Gender-Neutered

From The New York Times Magazine, this is an interesting article on the issue of gender roles and sexual expression. The more gender neutral relationships are in terms of division of labor, the less sexually satisfied the couple (especially the woman). It seems we "need" more traditional gender roles in relationships to maintain the sexual tension (need might be the wrong word).

This is a long article, but it's worth a read, especially if you are in or desiring a more egalitarian relationship.

Does a More Equal Marriage Mean Less Sex?

By LORI GOTTLIEB | FEB. 6, 2014


Photo illustration by Craig Cutler for The New York Times

Not long ago, I was at a dinner party with several couples in their 40s, all married except for my boyfriend and me. The mood was jovial until, over dessert, one guest made an offhand joke about Internet porn.

His wife took issue, and during a tense back-and-forth between them, the rest of us sensed that we were about to learn way too much about their personal lives. Fortunately, another husband deftly maneuvered to a safe topic for middle-aged parents (kids and screen time!), and after a lively discussion about iPads, we made our excuses to leave.

In the car, I turned to my boyfriend and said, “I bet there won’t be any sex happening in their bedroom tonight.”

He smiled and shook his head. He predicted that the hosts would be the least likely to have sex that night. 

I thought he was kidding. This couple were my “model marrieds,” true equals who share the housework and child care, communicate openly and prioritize each other’s careers. The best friends of happy-couple cliché. Earlier in the evening, I watched them work together in the kitchen, cheerfully cooking and cleaning: She bringing out the hors d’oeuvres, and he chopping and dicing. When their 6-year-old woke up with a nightmare, they wordlessly agreed that he would be the one to soothe her. It was the kind of marriage many people wish for. 

“Exactly,” my boyfriend said. “Least likely.”

Marriage is hardly known for being an aphrodisiac, of course, but my boyfriend was referring to a particularly modern state of marital affairs. Today, according to census data, in 64 percent of U.S. marriages with children under 18, both husband and wife work. There’s more gender-fluidity when it comes to who brings in the money, who does the laundry and dishes, who drives the car pool and braids the kids’ hair, even who owns the home. A vast majority of adults under 30 in this country say that this is a good thing, according to a Pew Research Center survey: They aspire to what’s known in the social sciences as an egalitarian marriage, meaning that both spouses work and take care of the house and that the relationship is built on equal power, shared interests and friendship. But the very qualities that lead to greater emotional satisfaction in peer marriages, as one sociologist calls them, may be having an unexpectedly negative impact on these couples’ sex lives.

A study called “Egalitarianism, Housework and Sexual Frequency in Marriage,” which appeared in The American Sociological Review last year, surprised many, precisely because it went against the logical assumption that as marriages improve by becoming more equal, the sex in these marriages will improve, too. Instead, it found that when men did certain kinds of chores around the house, couples had less sex. Specifically, if men did all of what the researchers characterized as feminine chores like folding laundry, cooking or vacuuming — the kinds of things many women say they want their husbands to do — then couples had sex 1.5 fewer times per month than those with husbands who did what were considered masculine chores, like taking out the trash or fixing the car. It wasn’t just the frequency that was affected, either — at least for the wives. The more traditional the division of labor, meaning the greater the husband’s share of masculine chores compared with feminine ones, the greater his wife’s reported sexual satisfaction.

Granted, some might view a study like this with skepticism. Correlations don’t establish causation, and especially when it comes to sex, there’s always a risk of reporting bias and selective sampling, not to mention the mood of a subject at the time of the survey. (Was she answering the questions while standing next to a big pile of garbage that hadn’t been taken out?) What’s more, while this study used the most recent nationally representative data that included measures of sexual frequency and a couple’s division of labor, it was drawn from information collected in the 1990s. (Julie Brines, an author of the chores study, explained, however, that many studies on housework since then show that not much has changed in terms of division of labor.) But as a psychotherapist who works with couples, I’ve noticed something similar to the findings. That is, it’s true that being stuck with all the chores rarely tends to make wives desire their husbands. Yet having their partner, say, load the dishwasher — a popular type of marital intervention suggested by self-help books, women’s magazines and therapists alike — doesn’t seem to have much of an effect on their libido, either. Many of my colleagues have observed the same thing: No matter how much sink-scrubbing and grocery-shopping the husband does, no matter how well husband and wife communicate with each other, no matter how sensitive they are to each other’s emotions and work schedules, the wife does not find her husband more sexually exciting, even if she feels both closer to and happier with him.

I first noticed this while doing a yearlong training in marriage therapy. I was seeing a couple who had been married for five years and wanted to work out some common kinks related to balancing their respective jobs, incomes and household responsibilities in, as the wife put it, “an equal way.” Over the course of treatment, the couple reported more connection, less friction and increased happiness. One day, though, when their issues seemed largely resolved and I suggested discussing an end to their therapy, the husband brought up a new concern: His wife now seemed less interested in having sex with him. He turned to her and asked why. Was she still attracted to him? After all, he wondered, why did she appear less interested now that their relationship seemed stronger in all the ways she wanted?

“I’m very attracted to you,” she said earnestly. “You know when I really crave you? It’s when you’re just back from the gym and you’re all sweaty and you take off your clothes to get in the shower and I see your muscles.”

Her husband countered by saying that this very situation had occurred that morning but that his wife became irritated when he tossed his clothes on the floor, which led to a conversation about his not vacuuming the day before, when she worked late. He had worked late, too, which accounted for the lack of vacuuming, but still — she hated waking up to a messy room, and it was his turn to vacuum.

“Right,” she agreed. “I wasn’t focused on sex, because I wanted you to get out the vacuum.”

“So if I got out the vacuum, then you’d be turned on?”
His wife thought about it for a minute. “Actually, probably not,” she said slowly, as if hearing the contradiction even as she was speaking it. “The vacuuming would have killed the weight-lifting vibe.”

Brines believes the quandary many couples find themselves in comes down to this: “The less gender differentiation, the less sexual desire.” In other words, in an attempt to be gender-neutral, we may have become gender-neutered. It’s interesting to note that when I asked Justin Garcia, a research scientist at the Kinsey Institute, whether lack of gender differentiation affects the sex lives of gay couples, he said that male couples, who have more sex than lesbian couples, tend to differentiate by choosing partners sexually unlike themselves — who, say, want to be in the more submissive sexual position — and that lesbians don’t follow as much of a pattern of seeking their sexual opposites. I posed the same question to Pepper Schwartz, a sociology professor at the University of Washington who coined the term “lesbian bed death,” and she pointed out that gay male couples differentiate from each other in other ways, too. For gay men, she said, “the initial filter is erotic, so they’re more likely to end up with somebody who’s very different in terms of education or social class.” But, she continued, “a gay woman thinks like the heterosexual woman who asks: ‘Do we share common goals? Do we like to do things together? Is he smart?’ ” She believes that lesbian and heterosexual couples share sexual challenges because both relationships involve women who tend to seek similar mates. As she put it, most men, regardless of sexual orientation, prioritize the erotic, but “heterosexual men have to deal with heterosexual women.”

This isn’t to say that egalitarian heterosexual couples aren’t happy. Lynn Prince Cooke, a professor of social policy at the University of Bath in England, found that American couples who share breadwinning and household duties are less likely to divorce. And Stephanie Coontz, author of “Marriage, a History,” told me that having a partner who does housework and child care has become a bigger factor in women’s marital satisfaction than many other factors that used to predict marital happiness, like a man’s level of income or shared religious beliefs.

The chores study seems to show that women do want their husbands to help out — just in gender-specific ways. Couples in which the husband did plenty of traditionally male chores reported a 17.5 percent higher frequency of sexual intercourse than those in which the husband did none. These findings, Brines says, “might have something to do with the fact that the traditional behaviors that men and women enact feed into associations that people have about masculinity and femininity.” She calls these associations and behaviors sexual scripts. Men and women, she said, are continuously sending out cues that signal attractiveness to a potential partner, and often these cues involve “an ongoing reminder of difference and the sense of mystery and excitement that comes with the knowledge that the other person isn’t you.” When I asked Esther Perel, a couples therapist whose book, “Mating in Captivity,” addresses the issue of desire in marriage, about the role sexual scripts play in egalitarian partnerships, she explained it like this: “Egalitarian marriage takes the values of a good social system — consensus-building and consent — and assumes you can bring these rules into the bedroom. But the values that make for good social relationships are not necessarily the same ones that drive lust.” In fact, she continued, “most of us get turned on at night by the very things that we’ll demonstrate against during the day.”

Power — and the act of balancing it — is a common topic with the couples I see in therapy. They’re eager to talk about leveling the domestic playing field but tend to feel awkward about bringing the concept of power into conversations about sex, mostly because it can feel so confusing.

One woman in her late 30s, for instance, who has been in a peer marriage for 10 years, said during couples therapy that when she asked her husband to be more forceful, “rougher,” in bed, the result was comical.

“He was trying to do what I wanted,” she explained, “but he was so . . . careful. I don’t want him to ask, ‘Are you O.K.?’ I want him not to care if I’m O.K., to just, you know, not be the good husband and take charge.” And yet, she said, his caring and his concern that she’s O.K. with what he’s doing are what she loves so much about him in every other area of their marriage, ranging from which brand of toilet paper to buy to what to feed their children to where their money is spent and which nights each of them can stay late at work. “I don’t want him to take charge like that with anything else!” she said.

I mentioned this situation to Dan Savage, the sex columnist, who told me that he sees similar themes in the letters he receives and the questions he fields at personal appearances. At a recent talk, for instance, one woman asked him if a certain sex act was “loving or degrading?”

“My reply was, ‘Yes,’ ” he told me. “Why can’t it be both?” He continued: “People have to learn to compartmentalize. We all want to be objectified by the person we love at times. We all want to be with somebody who can flip the switch and see you as an object for an hour. Sometimes sex is an expression of anger or a struggle for power and dominance. They work in concert. People need to learn how to harness those impulses playfully in ways that are acceptable in equal relationships.”


“I know what a 50-50 marriage should be like. But what is 50-50 sex supposed to be like?” Photo Illustration by Craig Cutler for The New York Times

A desire for equality, and the lack of desire that equality can create, may make scientific sense, even as it challenges conventional wisdom. As Daniel Bergner has written in his book “What Do Women Want?” and in this magazine, many studies show that women often report fantasies, like those involving submission, that tend to be inconsistent with our notion of progressive relationships.

But Pepper Schwartz says that while women may have always had these types of fantasies, now they have permission to give voice to them because of how much power they have in real life. “The more powerful you are in your marriage, and the more responsibility you have in other areas of your life, the more submission becomes sexy,” Schwartz says. “It’s like: ‘Let me lose all that responsibility for an hour. I’ve got plenty of it.’ It’s what you can afford once you don’t live a life of submission.” Married women, she adds, may have had a very different relationship to their fantasies back in the ‘50s, but even so, “this mixture of changing gender roles and sexual negotiation is tricky.”

So tricky, in fact, that when I was speaking about relationships at a conference and mentioned that I was writing about this topic, a large group of women who had just waxed poetic about “Fifty Shades of Grey” suddenly seemed outraged. Was I saying people can’t have good sex in egalitarian marriages? (No, I wasn’t.) Isn’t marriage better over all when partners have equal power? (In my opinion, yes.) Then why write about this kind of thing? (Because when a roomful of women who just raved about “Fifty Shades of Grey” don’t want me to write about “this kind of thing,” that tells me it should be talked about.)

Men, of course, can feel just as uneasy with overt expressions of power in marriages that are otherwise based on equality. During a couples session, one woman in her early 40s said that it wasn’t until she came across some porn scenes her husband had viewed online that she felt comfortable telling him about her fantasies, which happened to be very similar to what she found. She thought he’d be thrilled, but although he enacted the scenes with her, she was surprised by his lack of enthusiasm.

“I felt like he was just doing it because I asked him to, not because he wanted to,” she said. I wondered if she was putting her husband in a double-bind, analogous to, “He bought me flowers on Valentine’s Day because he knows he’s supposed to — not because he really wants to.”

No, she said. It was something else: It bothered her that her husband acknowledged being turned on by watching the fantasy online but not by doing it in real life with her. “I felt so rejected,” she said. “I told him, ‘I want you to want to dominate me,’ but he said he just doesn’t see me that way, that he doesn’t see us that way.”

For this couple, the experiment felt so awkward that they quickly reverted to their routine: sex in the usual roles and positions during a window between 10:30 and 11 p.m. when they were both tired but not yet asleep. When I turned to her husband for his perspective, he seemed relieved that he could express his puzzlement.

“It’s nice,” he said about the sex they have. “It’s not superhot all the time, but it’s really nice. I’m attracted to her, and I like being with her, and I’m very happy with our sex life. I don’t know what she expects. If I don’t clean up the bathroom, if I don’t give her equal time with her work, if I make a decision without consulting her, she wouldn’t want that. I’m so used to interacting with her as an equal — and I also want that — but I like what we have, and occasionally I like getting the other stuff on the Internet. Isn’t being a good husband and father and wanting to have semirespectful sex with my wife enough? Before we got married, we always said we’d have a 50-50 marriage, and you’d think that would be great for our sex life, but instead it’s the one area where we’re having trouble. Everything else is great. It’s the sex we don’t agree on.”

He took a deep breath before adding: “I know what a 50-50 marriage should be like. But what is 50-50 sex supposed to be like?”
Sex in any marriage is idiosyncratic and complex — and if it’s consensual and enjoyable, it’s nobody’s business, frankly. But the idea that married sex should be steamy is reflected in our culture. Take the fascination with MILFs — consistently one of the most-searched porn categories and a staple in mainstream media — in which mothers are depicted as alluring and sexually lively. In the past, a fantasy woman may have been the young, single secretary; now she’s the middle-aged mother of three with a graduate degree. In a way, this might seem like an encouraging shift for married moms. Instead of becoming invisible, we’re wanted and capable of doing it all: work, play dates and having hot sex lives. But these sorts of portrayals also create a false sense of reality.

“The passionate marriage used to be a contradiction in terms,” Esther Perel, the couples expert, told me. The quality of sex in marriage — and not just the frequency — is a relatively new conversation that has come about with more egalitarian marriages. In today’s marriages, she said, “we don’t just want sex; it has to be intimate sex. It has to be transcendent and self-actualizing.”

Which brings me back to the dinner party where that husband made a joke about Internet porn. The conversation started innocuously enough, with the husband making the observation that with men and women both balancing the responsibilities of work and household, even sex needs to be outsourced sometimes. By day’s end, he said, men feel so worn out that they, too, “get headaches” because they don’t necessarily have the energy to make sex happen or, more specifically, to make it happen in the way their wives want it to. The modern marital tableau, he quipped, is two overwhelmed people trying to relax before bed: he on Pornhub, she on Pinterest. Then they kiss and go to sleep.

The men at the dinner party laughed; the women smiled uneasily. His wife seemed perplexed. If men found release on Pornhub, what about women’s sexual needs? That’s when things got dicey. Without missing a beat, the husband deadpanned, “Vibrators do for modern men what dishwashers did for modern women.” His wife became upset, calling the comment “selfish.” He defended himself by saying that he gives his wife frequent back rubs, while she has given him a massage “maybe 10 times in our entire marriage.” (Every man at the table nodded in recognition.) As we averted our gazes, I’m guessing we were all thinking the same thing: How impossible it often feels for two exhausted equals to meet each other’s sexual needs.

Porn, of course, doesn’t tend to be about reciprocity. “Here’s the essence of porn,” Terry Real, a couples expert in Boston, told me. “What will you never see in a porn video? ‘Honey, I don’t like that, could you stop doing that, could you take a shower first?’ The archetype of the porn queen is that she’s a woman who derives sexual pleasure by giving the man pleasure, and — here’s the key — everything he does is absolutely perfect! What you don’t see in porn is anything that needs to be negotiated, the woman having needs of her own or the roles being reversed.”

In other words, it’s the antithesis of peer marriage. In “Marriage: A History,” Coontz writes that one recent marital development “is that husbands have to respond positively to their wives’ requests for change.” Yet no matter how many requests wives make and how hard their husbands try to accommodate them, the women may still end up disappointed. After all, women are now coming into marriage with sexual histories and experiences on par with men’s, leading to expectations that are difficult to replicate in any marriage, especially now that people live longer and will be having sex, presumably with the same person, for decades more.

Similarly, older c​ouples who can now wait and marry for love have less time together during their sexual primes and, if kids are in the plan, they may even miss that year or two of newlywed abandon. (Ask a 40-year-old couple trying and failing to conceive how much fun the sex is.) Pepper Schwartz, who serves as AARP’s relationships expert, observes that 50-year-olds of the past were often grandparents without great expectations about their sex lives. Now those same 50-year-olds might have a 10-year-old, placing them in a life stage formerly occupied by people in their 30s and subjecting them to pressure to maintain the culture’s view of “youthful sexuality” in marriage, especially with the ubiquity of Viagra and Estrace.

One day I was talking about these expectations with a friend, a 41-year-old married father. He and his wife, who have two young children, are in a minority in their Los Angeles social circle: She takes care of the house and kids, and he provides all of the income. He said that he and his wife consider their sex life to be good.

“We use X number of positions and various forms of oral and manual stimulation, and we’re happy as clams,” he said. “But a lot of people think it’s supposed to be more exciting than this.”


The risk of divorce is lowest when the husband does 40 percent of the housework and the wife earns 40 percent of the income. Photo Illustration by Craig Cutler for The New York Times

He believes that we have to accept that we’re not going to get everything we want in our marriages and our sex lives, instead of constantly complaining about it or wondering if we might not be compatible with our spouse. “How much are you going to let the 10 percent of your differences dictate your future?” he asked. “Is anal sex more important than your marriage?”

I shared my friend’s observation with Helen Fisher, a senior research fellow at the Kinsey Institute who studies sexual attraction. She noted that even people who are satisfied with their sex lives often crave more nowadays. She told me about a study she conducted that asked participants who had had affairs why they did so. Fifty-six percent of her male subjects and 34 percent of her female subjects said they were “happy” or “very happy” in their partnerships but cheated anyway.

While past research has shown that men have higher rates of infidelity than women, those rates are becoming increasingly similar, particularly in younger people in developed countries, where recent studies have found no gender differences in extramarital sex among men and women under 40. This may be because younger women are more likely to be in peer marriages — and conditions in peer marriages make female infidelity more probable than in traditional ones. A large national study in the late 1990s found that women who were more educated than their husbands were more likely to engage in sexual infidelity than if they were less educated than their husbands. Studies also find that people who work outside the home and whose partners remain in the home cheat more — and the traditional gender roles in this situation are now frequently reversed. As women increasingly work in professions that are not female-dominated, they have more sexual opportunities with peers than ever.

Helen Fisher told me that women’s expectations for sexual fulfillment are changing so much that when she conducted a survey last year asking, “Would you make a long-term commitment to someone who had everything you were looking for but to whom you did not feel sexually attracted?” the least likely group to say yes was women over 60. At any age, companionship, it seems, is no longer enough of a draw on its own.

There’s a phrase I often use in therapy with couples: “competing needs.” What do partners do when they have needs that directly conflict with those of their spouses? What if both have to work on the same weekend or be out of town at the same time? Who goes to the school play or compromises without feeling resentful? It used to be that husbands and wives operated largely in their own spheres with so little overlap that these questions rarely came up. But women now make up almost half of the U.S. labor force, and 23 percent of married mothers with children under 18 have a higher income than their husbands. In fact, total income is higher in families in which the woman is the primary breadwinner. When a 2010 study of business-school graduates asked, “What is success to you?” surprisingly, it was more women than men who chose “career goals,” while more men than women picked “personal growth.”

As Sheryl Sandberg encourages women to “lean in” — by which she means that they should make a determined effort to push forward in their careers — it may seem as if women are truly becoming, as Gloria Steinem put it, “the men we want to marry.” But these professional shifts seem to influence marital stability. A study put out last year by the National Bureau of Economic Research shows that if a wife earns more than her husband, the couple are 15 percent less likely to report that their marriage is very happy; 32 percent more likely to report marital troubles in the past year; and 46 percent more likely to have discussed separating in the past year. Similarly, Lynn Prince Cooke found that though sharing breadwinning and household duties decreases the likelihood of divorce, that’s true only up to a point. If a wife earns more than her husband, the risk of divorce increases. Interestingly, Cooke’s study shows that the predicted risk of divorce is lowest when the husband does 40 percent of the housework and the wife earns 40 percent of the income.

Ian Kerner, a sexuality counselor and the author of “She Comes First,” sees couples struggle to find a ratio that works. “I work a lot with stay-at-home dads and men who work from home,” he said, “and one thing I hear a lot is that in theory they’re really happy balancing flexible work with stay-at-home responsibilities, while their wives are out working full-time in corporate jobs. But at the same time, a common complaint is that Mom comes home and feels guilty for being away all day, and so much time has to be made up connecting with the children, who take first priority, that these dads feel lost in the mix.” In many couples, Kerner says, the wives start to feel disgruntled because their husbands get to see more of the kids, and the husbands, whose wives are controlling more of the spending, start to feel “financially emasculated.” Sometimes, he says, a vicious cycle begins: The husband feels marginalized and less self-confident, which causes the wife to lose respect for and desexualize him. Under these circumstances, neither is particularly interested in sex with the other.

A writer who works from home in New York told me that was exactly what happened when he reduced his work hours and took on child-care responsibilities so that his wife could rise to partner at her company. According to him, she said, “When we met, you said this was going to be a two-income family.” And he said: “It is! Your income is bigger because I take care of the kid.” They would talk about it — given his flexibility, they both agreed it made more sense for him to do more at home — but the tension would resurface, and ultimately they stopped having sex.

Now that they are divorcing, he’s still confounded. “For all the men from the days of ‘Mad Men’ who felt like the woman’s place was in the home, all the sexist troglodytes who might have thought that way, or even the enlightened men who cared deeply about their partners’ happiness,” he said, “you could round up a thousand of them, and not one would say the woman should watch the kids, clean the house, do the cooking and at the same time make the same amount of money as the guy. So when my wife had those expectations, it seemed a bit unrealistic. She’d say, ‘I work 10 hours a day.’ I’d say, ‘I work 16, and half of those I don’t get paid for.’ ”
Certainly, there are couples who have no problem with, and even genuinely enjoy, these types of arrangements. But frequently I hear from husbands and wives who say they want progressive marriages, in which women have the option to do anything their husbands do and vice versa, then start to feel uncomfortable when that reality is in place. And that discomfort, more often than not, leads to less sexual desire — on both sides.

Recently, a male therapy client who came to me because he began feeling depressed said that he had tremendous empathy for what women have been voicing all these years. “I have to hold down a job, I have to juggle the kids’ schedules, I have to get dinner on the table three nights a week, I have to volunteer at school, I have to get the bills sent in each month and on top of this I have to be the fun dad and the sensitive husband and then be ready to romance my wife if I want sex before bed — usually after listening to the rundown of her day and going over the list of what needs to happen the next day,” he said. “I rarely even have time to get to the gym, which is the one thing that relieves my stress.” As he tries to balance work and parenthood and his marriage and household responsibilities, he’s going “a bit mad — and I mean that in both senses of the word.”

I asked how interested he was in having sex with his wife, and he looked at me and laughed.

I met my boyfriend online, and like many marriage-minded people clicking on search criteria, I was seeking a partner similar in intellect, background and interests. I shared this with Betsey Stevenson, a well-known economist who studies relationships and whose egalitarian partnership was profiled in The New York Times two years ago, and asked how she feels about so much similarity. In her view, she said, going through life with a peer is a positive development.

“It used to be,” she explained, “that you lived your life in one way, and he lived his in another. With equal partners, there’s more of a sense of people who are kindred spirits. Now you have people who have similar interests and lifestyles.”

On an emotional level, “kindred spirits” sounds lovely. But when it comes to sexual desire, biology seems to prefer difference. Helen Fisher, for one, pointed me to the famous “sweaty T-shirt” experiment, conducted in 1995 by the Swiss researcher Claus Wedekind. He had women sniff the unwashed T-shirts of various men and asked them which scent they were most attracted to. Most women selected the T-shirts of men with genes markedly different from their own in a certain part of the immune system. Other studies confirmed these findings. Presumably this attraction to genetic variation is an evolutionary adaptation to prevent incest in our ancestral environments and improve the survival prospects of offspring. Interestingly, a later experiment found that women partnered with men who had genes similar to their own in this part of the immune system were more likely to be unfaithful; and the more of these genes a woman shared with her partner, the more she was attracted to other men.

There’s an important exception, though. These findings didn’t apply when women were on the birth-control pill: They responded differently to the T-shirt test by selecting partners who had similar immunity and were less “other.” One study even suggested that when “a woman chooses her partner while she is on the pill and then comes off it to have a child, her hormone-driven preferences change, and she may find she is married to the wrong kind of man.”

Of course, we are not driven by biology alone. There were certainly some cultural factors that caused us to choose difference in the past. Until recently, Stephanie Coontz said, “the idea was that you’re only half a person and you can’t be complete unless you get the opposite half. Both men and women were trained to find attractive somebody who did things and had things and were things that they were not.” But now that women do and have and are many of the things that they used to seek in their partners, Pepper Schwartz says that a result can be something more sibling-like than erotic. Her research likewise suggests that too much similarity in egalitarian marriages leads to boredom and decreased sexual frequency. “When you’re best friends with your partner, there’s less frisson,” Schwartz says. “Introducing more distance or difference, rather than connection and similarity, helps to resurrect passion in long-term, stable relationships.” She also found that in lesbian couples in which there’s a high degree of intimate conversation, there’s less sex.

And yet a married friend who described his wife as his “best friend” said he was happy to take a high degree of simpatico over a high degree of sexual pull. “I can walk down the street and be attracted to 10 people and want to have sex with them,” he said, “but it doesn’t mean they’re going to make me happy. It doesn’t mean I’d want to live the day-to-day with them. There are always going to be trade-offs.”

Is the trade-off of egalitarian marriage necessarily less sexual heat? It’s possible that the sexual scripts we currently follow will evolve along with our marital arrangements so that sameness becomes sexy. Regardless, more people marrying today are choosing egalitarian setups for the many other benefits they offer. If every sexual era is unhappy in its own way, it may be that we will begin to think of the challenges of egalitarian marriages less as drawbacks and more like, well, life, with its inherent limitations on how exciting any particular aspect can be.

“It’s the first time in history we are trying this experiment of a sexuality that’s rooted in equality and that lasts for decades,” Esther Perel said. “It’s a tall order for one person to be your partner in Management Inc., your best friend and passionate lover. There’s a certain part of you that with this partner will not be fulfilled. You deal with that loss. It’s a paradox to be lived with, not solved.”

* * * * *  

Correction: February 7, 2014 An earlier version of this article used an incorrect term for an experiment in which women sniff the unwashed T-shirts of men. Selecting the T-shirts of men with genes markedly different from their own is not a form of assortative mating, which is the choosing of similar genes, not different ones.

Lori Gottlieb is a psychotherapist in Los Angeles. She is the author of “Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough” and a contributing editor for The Atlantic.

Laura Beck - Men Are Not Constantly Thinking About Humping You

This article from Jezebel, a blog ostensibly for women, posted this piece by Laura Beck (an editor at Jezebel) back in February that attempts to dispel the pervasive myth that men do nothing bu think about sex and that men in relationships are always wanting more sex than their partners.

She cites a recent study of married couples revealing that 80 percent of men reported being very happy or happy with their sex lives, as opposed to only 61 percent of women. It seems men are okay with their married sex lives (contrary to all of the sitcom jokes about sex stopping at the marriage night).

In fact, thirty-nine percent of men report having sex out of obligation at least sometimes. Who woulda thunk?

This is a good piece - worth a few minutes of your time - and it would be good to share this with the female in your life.

Men Are Not Constantly Thinking About Humping You

FEB 12, 2013

 Laura Beck

According to a new survey of married couples, more men than women are happy with their sex lives. Specifically, 80 percent of men reported being very happy or happy with their sex lives, as opposed to 61 percent of women. If that's the case, why are many women's magazines so busy telling ladies how to do sex better? When such a high percentage of men are pleased with the bedroom action, is it necessary to teach women how to fuck backwards and upside down between subway cars just to keep their man satisfied?

It goes hand in hand with the lie that women don't want sex often (or athletically) enough for most men. As sure as Trina brags in Frikitonia, "I'm a lady in the streets and a freak in the sheets," many women believe that the ideal girlfriend or wife is always up for some xxx-rated between-the-sheets shenanigans.

It's not surprising women accept this as gospel. Who hasn't heard the lie that men think about sex every seven seconds? Combine that persistent rumor with the constant confrontation from a multitude of media that aims to make ladies as insecure as possible, and it's not hard to see why men are viewed as sex machines from the fuck factory.

Fortunately for everyone, this isn't reality. In fact, in the same iVillage survey, thirty-nine percent of men report having sex out of obligation at least sometimes. Imagine that! And according to the Kinsey Institute, the men and sex thinking numbers are significantly less terrifying — "54% of men think about sex everyday or several times a day, 43% a few times per month or a few times per week, and 4% less than once a month."

Interestingly, in one study, men's fantasies mentioned a partner's sexual desire and pleasure more frequently than did women's fantasies (Zurbriggen & Yost, 2004). For the amount of information that's out there telling women how to appeal to men's horizontal proclivities, it's fascinating that men might be more interested in their partner's desire and pleasure.

So why do women readily believe that men have an insatiable desire for sexy sex that must be tended to? Maybe it's because sex sells, and it's paramount that woman accept they need to keep their man sexually fascinated or he'll cheat with a limber nympho that's half her age and body weight. Feeding these insecurities sells more than just magazines, it keeps entire industries afloat. It's not hard to believe that cosmetics, plastic surgery, weight loss clinics and pills, waxing and other "self care", and many more would take a hit if women weren't so concerned with how their appearance affects men.

The reality that men are greater than the sum of their dick and balls isn't quite as, well, sexy to businesses built on the back of ladies self-doubt. But the truth is, men in communicative relationships built on trust and respect are often happy with their sex life, and that probably includes plenty of weeks where you only do it once. In missionary. With hairy legs (both of you). Or whatever's normal in your couple. If you've made it to the altar, you probably have a pretty good idea of what that is.

Just like how (most) women don't want to engage in seven hours or foreplay before allowing another to penetrate That Which Is Most Sacred, men don't need to dip their dick into every vagina all the time to feel happiness. Perhaps most married men are happy sexually because they're in loving relationships with the right amount of physical intimacy (read: boning, et al) for them and their partner?

Now we just have to work on improving the percentage of married women who are happy with their sex.

[iVillage]

Scientific American - Why Men Like Petraeus Risk It All to Cheat

The idea that men cheat because of an evolutionary drive to reproduce is a pile of shite created to avoid dealing with the real issues - self-absorption, lust, lack of empathy, relationship issues, lack of integrity, loneliness, and on and on. But it is NOT about reproduction.

Why Men Like Petraeus Risk It All to Cheat

The risk of destroying a career is nothing compared with the evolutionary drive to reproduce

By Stephanie Pappas and LiveScience

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Image: U.S. Army

An admitted affair has crumbled the career of CIA Director David Petraeus, prompting the evergreen question: Why do people with so much to lose risk it all for sex?

In the last few years alone, several public figures, from former Rep. Anthony Weiner to action star and former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, have admitted to straying from their marital vows. In Petraeus' case, a miscalculation of risk may have contributed to the decision to cheat, psychologists say.

"People tend to underestimate how quickly small risks mount up" because of repeated exposure to those risks, said Baruch Fischhoff, a professor of social and decision science at Carnegie Mellon University. "You do something once and you get away with it — certain things you're probably going to get away with — but you keep doing them often enough, eventually the risk gets pretty high."

Even so, men can become blind to risk at the sight of an attractive woman, and from an evolutionary perspective, cheating can be a positive mechanism for ensuring gene survival, regardless of risk, scientists say.
 
Military affairs
Petraeus, a retired four-star general, resigned his post as CIA Director on Friday (Nov. 9), admitting to an affair with Paula Broadwell, his biographer. Twenty years the general's junior, Broadwell had close access to Petraeus for several years, but their affair reportedly did not start until after he left the military in 2011.

A West Point graduate, Broadwell is a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserves. She reportedly bonded with Petraeus over physical activity, going on runs with him and remaining a close confidant after Petraeus' military career ended.

That time together likely contributed to the intimacy between Petraeus and Broadwell, said Frank Farley, a Temple University psychologist, just as many people begin affairs after getting close in the workplace.

Petraeus is not the first high-ranking military man to have an affair, said Farley, who is also a past president of the American Psychological Association. Famously gruff World War II general George Patton had an affair with his wife's step-niece. General Douglas MacArthur had a mistress named Isabel Rosario Cooper, whom he met in the Philippines.

And General Dwight D. Eisenhower, later president, may have had an affair with his World War II chauffer, Kay Summersby, according to the woman's memoirs and some suggestive letters left behind after both parties died.

"The nation should not be surprised at Petraeus having an affair," Farley told LiveScience.

Leaders like Petraeus tend to be bold risk-takers, Farley said, a personality trait that is very helpful when leading soldiers into battle. The same trait may make these leaders more likely to take risks in their personal lives, as well. [10 Easy Paths to Self Destruction]

Broadwell may have some of the same risk-taking traits as the former director. In a January interview with The Charlotte Observer, Broadwell, who is also married, called herself and her husband "adventure junkies."
 
Risk versus reward
Still, Petraeus' 38-year marriage and his career were at stake in his decision to pursue an affair. Extramarital liaisons are especially risky for CIA employees with access to classified information, because an affair can leave the person open to blackmail.

There are also concerns that Broadwell could have gotten classified information from Petraeus. For example, in a speech in Denver in October, Broadwell brought up details about the U.S. Consulate attack in Benghazi that may not have been public knowledge, according to The Daily Beast.

With risks like that on the line, could an extramarital affair be worth it? As it turns out, men may become blind to risk when an attractive woman enters the picture. One 2008 study found that men who played blackjack after seeing beautiful female faces took more risks than men who played the game after seeing unattractive faces.

This was true if the men were highly motivated in seeking new sexual partners. The blackjack risks seemed calculated to impress potential mates, study researcher Michael Baker, now a professor at Eastern Carolina University, told LiveScience. [The Sex Quiz: Myths, Taboos & Bizarre Facts]

More germane to high-profile affairs, Baker said, the risk of losing one's career or reputation is nothing compared with the evolutionary drive to reproduce. In that sense, while embarking on an affair may seem dumb, it actually shows something called "mating intelligence."

"These individuals have these very high-status, high-power positions, and the whole idea behind why people might be motivated to get these positions is because it gives them better access to resources that could be used to increase their reproductive success and attract more mates," Baker said.

Until the last few decades, extramarital affairs wouldn't have put a crimp in the careers of high-profile men, Baker said. It's only recently that men have been subject to the consequences of infidelity. And, of course, monogamy is often a lofty ideal.

"The human race has had thousands of years of problems with monogamy," Farley said. "The problems have not been resolved."

Copyright 2012 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

 

With the recent "cheating scandal" involving CIA Director David Petraeus in constant rotation on nearly every mainstream news source, the question arises (once again), Why do men cheat?

Why Do Men Cheat: 26 Reasons Guys Cheat, According To Men

Posted: 11/15/2012 

The cheating scandal surrounding Gen. David Petraeus has nearly everyone trying to pinpoint why exactly men cheat -- including us.
 
But apparently, famed television evangelist Pat Robertson has it all figured out. On Monday's episode of "The 700 Club," Robertson gave the four-star general a free pass for the extramarital affair he had with biographer Paula Broadwell.

"The man's off in a foreign land and he's lonely and here's a good looking lady throwing herself at him," Robertson said. "I mean, he's a man."

Robertson's eyebrow-raising explanation got us wondering what other rationales people might offer up for why men cheat, so we went straight to the source and asked our our male followers on Facebook and Twitter. Click through the slideshow to find out what they had to say, then weigh in with your thoughts in the comments.

Here are a couple of the answers men gave on Twitter and Facebook (to protect these guys, I did not include their identities). You can see all 26 answers at the Huffington Post site. By the way, none of the answers I saw can justify cheating . . . just sayin'.

• It's either entitlement/insecurity @HuffPostDivorce Some feel owed, been there, some feel they will never get laid again, so they cash in
• @HuffPostDivorce I read somewhere men can only stay attracted to the same partner for three years. Aren't most primates non monogamous?
• @HuffPostDivorce bc it's just sex
• @HuffPostDivorce Because every man is biologically programmed to sleep with as many women as possible. Some control it, others don't.
• @HuffPostDivorce Not that I would do it. but probably because there's something missing but not enough to warrant a new relationship