Sex and Marriage

Waking up last night, wife in pyjamas asleep at my side. Night quiet interspersed with night noises, swishing of cars on wet roads outside, domestic machinery clicking.

Dreamy thoughts, turning to women I have known. Their sexual personalities. Each one with her sexual frequencies, her likes and dislikes. Some taking the lead, others passive. Most of them, life-enhancing. Others, better off without.

Yet, which of them would I like to have here in the bed tonight instead of my wife? None of them, really. Many of them, fine for erotic fantasies, their memory a sharp masturbatory aid. But actually staying with me, tonight, every night, no, I don’t think so.

Maybe it’s because those relationships have run their course. Possibly. More like, it’s the intensity that’s impossible to live with. That’s the trouble with sex, it burns everything in its path.

In the newspaper yesterday, some doctor dispensing advice, telling the world, as the years go by in your marriage, your relationship matures, friendship deepens, sexual fires cool. A valid summary, and widely accepted in lazy popular wisdom. Yet not going nearly far enough.

A better formulation, as the years go by it emerges that marriage is an inappropriate structure for sex. First you know one another too well, and sex is nothing if not the surprise and excitement of the new – a species defense against inbreeding. Second, the grind of the practical drives sex out.

So what do you do if your sex drive survives your marriage’s ability to accommodate it. Get into bad-tempered shouting matches with your spouse, maybe, see if you can breathe a glow into dead ashes. Try another marriage, maybe, then another after that. Become a seething cauldron of hormonal resentment, maybe.

Or, just jump to the endgame, separate the marriage from the sex.