The Wifely Duty - Sex Starved America? - 1/24/03

[Smartmarriages ®]

subject: The Wifely Duty - Sex Starved America? - 1/24/03

from: Smart Marriages®


- THE WIFELY DUTY: ATLANTIC MONTHLY

My goodness!  The day that the new book, Sex Starved Marriage, by Michele
Weiner-Davis was featured in USA Today on Wednesday (1/23
http://archives.his.com/smartmarriages/msg02240.html) it went to 22nd place
on amazon.com!!  This is before Michele has done any TV or radio. By the
way, she'll be on with Katie Couric on the Today Show Monday Jan 27th.  Set
your VCRs!!

This rating has to mean there is a great need for a book that, as this
article says, is "armed to the teeth with solutions."


> And so we turn our curious attention to the marital therapist Michele Weiner
> Davis, whose new book, The Sex-Starved Marriage, is so well timed and so
> aptly titled that it is primed to become a cultural sensation. Davis is not
> particularly interested in the cause of this strange turn of events, though
> she tosses around the expected observations about the exhaustion that dogs
> contemporary working parents and the reduction in lust that has always gone
> along with marriage. Hers is not a deep-thinking, reflective kind of book
> but, rather, a get-cracking-and-solve-the-problem kind of book. Solutions?
> She's armed to the teeth with them.

The Atlantic Monthly | January/February 2003

To read the article on-line w/ sidebar and links to similar articles, or to
subscribe to The Atlantic Monthly, click here:
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2003/01/flanagan.htm

Michele Weiner-Davis featured here, will present a keynote, training
institute and workshop at the Reno Smart Marriages conference. And, she'll
be happy to sign books. Buy Sex Starved Marriage on amazon for only $16.80
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0743227328/smartmarriages

Michele's keynote at Smart Marriages will be with Bill Doherty who will
present "Who Has Time for Marriage?" - which fits right in with this review
below that notes that in our time-crunched lives "Sleep is the new sex."

Order Doherty's Take Back Your Marriage for $15.37 at:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1572304596/smartmarriages

- diane 


BOOKS & CRITICS BOOKS

The Wifely Duty

Marriage used to provide access to sex. Now it provides access to celibacy


by Caitlin Flanagan

.....

During two strange days in New York last winter, three married people‹one
after another‹confessed to me either that they had stopped having sex or
that they knew a married person who had stopped having sex. Like a sensible
person, I booked an early flight home and chalked the whole thing up to the
magic and mystery that is New York. But no sooner had I put my coat on the
peg than it started up again. A number of the mothers in my set began making
sardonic comments along similar lines. The daytime talk shows to which I am
mildly and happily addicted worried the subject to death, revived it, and
worried it some more. Dr. Phil‹who, like his mentor Oprah Winfrey, has an
uncannily precise sense of what American women in the aggregate are thinking
about‹noted on his Web site that "sexless marriages are an undeniable
epidemic." Mass-circulation magazines aimed at married women rarely go to
press these days without an earnest review of some new sexual technique or
gadget, the information always presented in the context of how to relight a
long-doused fire. (And I must say that an article in Redbook that warns
desperate couples away from a product called Good Head Oral Delight Gel‹"the
consistency is like congealed turkey fat"‹deserves some kind of award for
service journalism.) Patricia Heaton, a star of Everybody Loves Raymond, has
published a memoir called Motherhood and Hollywood, in which she observes,
"Sex? Forget about it. I mean that literally." Books with titles such as
Okay, So I Don't Have a Headache and I'm Not in the Mood have become
immediate hits, and another popular book, For Women Only, lists various
techniques that married women use to avoid sex, from the age-old strategy of
feigning sleep to the quite modern practice of taking on household night-owl
projects. And Allison Pearson's much loved novel about a busy working
mother, I Don't Know How She Does It (which opens with the main character
engaged in just such a late-night project), features a woman so tired that
she's frantic to escape sex with her husband, prompting Margaret Carlson, of
Time magazine, to observe, "Sleep is the new sex." It has become impossible
not to suspect that a large number of relatively young and otherwise healthy
married people are forgoing sex for long periods of time and that many have
given it up altogether.

And so we turn our curious attention to the marital therapist Michele Weiner
Davis, whose new book, The Sex-Starved Marriage, is so well timed and so
aptly titled that it is primed to become a cultural sensation. Davis is not
particularly interested in the cause of this strange turn of events, though
she tosses around the expected observations about the exhaustion that dogs
contemporary working parents and the reduction in lust that has always gone
along with marriage. Hers is not a deep-thinking, reflective kind of book
but, rather, a get-cracking-and-solve-the-problem kind of book. Solutions?
She's armed to the teeth with them. She has created a "passion-building
toolkit" filled with "field-tested" techniques‹none of them bad. Although I
found Part IV ("Doing It Together") far more appealing than a scary
mini-chapter called "The Do-It-Yourself Solution," her notions about how to
jump-start the old hanky-panky seem eminently reasonable. Make "romantic
overtures," she counsels. A wife might buy some new lingerie; a husband
might wear flattering clothes. Most important, though, is a recommendation
based on exciting new "research" revealing that for many people, waiting for
the urge to strike is pointless; better to bash ahead and hope for the best.
Davis asks, "Have you ever noticed that although you might not have been
thinking sexual thoughts or feeling particularly sexy, if you push yourself
to 'get started' when your spouse approaches you, it feels good, and you
find yourself getting into it?" Many of her clients have received this
counsel with enthusiasm. "I really wasn't in the mood for sex at all,"
reports one of her advisees after just such a night, "but once we got
started, it was fun. I really enjoyed it."

What's odd here is not the suggestions themselves‹each seems quite sensible,
and I myself can vouch for more than one of them‹but, rather, the generation
that apparently needs them. American adults under the age of fifty tend to
know more about sex and its many delightful permutations than did
streetwalkers of an earlier century. When Davis describes the process of
arousal ("You notice a feeling of fullness in your pelvic area as your
genitals become engorged with blood"), you might think she was addressing a
seventh-grade health class rather than adults of the post-sexual-revolution
era. Yuppies, with that winsome arrogance that is all their own, proudly
describe the nature and frequency of their premarital couplings with a
specificity matched only by advanced seminars on animal husbandry. The
reason abortion rights hold such a sanctified position in American political
life is that they are a critical component of the yuppie program for maximum
personal sexual pleasure. But let these inebriates of nooky enter marriage,
a state in which ongoing sexuality often has as much to do with
old-fashioned notions of obligation and commitment as it does with the
immediate satisfaction of intense physical desire, and they grow as cool and
limp as yesterday's Cobb salad.

All of this makes me reflect that those repressed and much pitied 1950s
wives‹their sexless college years! their boorish husbands, who couldn't
locate the clitoris with a flashlight and a copy of Gray's Anatomy!‹were
apparently getting a lot more action than many of today's most liberated and
sexually experienced married women. In the old days, of course, there was
the wifely duty. A housewife understood that in addition to ironing her
husband's shirts and cooking the Sunday roast, she was‹with some
regularity‹going to have relations with the man of the house. Perhaps, as
some feminists would have us believe, these were grimly efficient interludes
during which the poor humped-upon wife stared at the ceiling and silently
composed the grocery list. Or perhaps not. Maybe, as Davis and her "new"
findings suggest, once you get the canoe out in the water, everybody starts
happily paddling. The notion that female sexuality was unleashed forty years
ago, after lying dormant lo these uncountable millennia, is silly; more
recent is the sexual shutdown that apparently takes place in many marriages
soon after they have been legalized.

Jane Greer, Redbook's online sex therapist, has a thriving midtown-Manhattan
practice. When I asked her about what I had been hearing, she told me that
she has seen many married couples who have gone without sex for periods of
time ranging from six months to six years. Why? "Marriage has changed," she
told me. "In the old days the husband was the breadwinner. The wife had the
expectation of raising the children and pleasing him. Now they're both
working and both taking care of the children, and they're too exhausted and
resentful to have sex." I asked Greer the obvious question: If a couple is
not having sex because of job pressures and one partner quits working, does
the couple have more sex? The answer was immediate and unequivocal:
"Absolutely!"

And this, of course, is the general plot of I Don't Know How She Does It,
which has the heroine, Kate Reddy, playing dead in the sack for a world of
nights until, at book's end, she resigns from her job and runs into her
husband's arms. (We have been pointedly instructed by the author not to
imagine that this character is based on her own husband, Anthony Lane, but
it's just about impossible not to do exactly that.) "The hug wasn't that dry
click of bones you get holding someone when the passion has drained away. It
was more like a shadow dance: I still wanted him and I think he wanted me,
but we hadn't touched in a very long time." Let us get one thing straight
from the outset: despite its rapturous reviews, the book is not artful or
literary or‹to borrow Time's thunderously wrong adjective‹"sparkling." It's
full of stock characters, including a wise minicab driver who is forever
making insightful remarks about the meaning of life. A pigeon family
constructs a nest outside Kate's office window and teaches her valuable
lessons about motherhood. "Phones may have become cordless," we are
lectured, "but mothers never will." When Kate and her husband reconnect in a
London coffee shop after a brief, miserable separation, "we both laugh, and
for a moment Starbucks is filled with the sound of Us." (Funny, I thought
that grating, deafening sound was the coffee grinder.) Still, though, the
book has struck a chord‹on an episode of Oprah devoted to the book Oprah
Winfrey introduced it as "the new bible for working mothers." In particular,
droves of readers report that the nature of Kate's marriage mirrors theirs
exactly.

The dominant feature of Kate's attitude toward her husband‹that is, before
they resume making the sound of Us‹is blistering contempt. Contempt for his
work: he is a quietly successful architect, given to building whimsical
little structures like Peace Pagodas, a pursuit that leaves him time to make
pesto and watch Disney videos with the kids while she strides off to her
high-paying, high-pressure job. Contempt for his inability to notice if the
family has run out of toilet paper or whether the children are properly
dressed for a birthday party. Contempt for his very existence in the
household: when he wonders whether it would be such a bad thing if their
uncooperative nanny quit, Kate tells him, "Frankly, it would be easier if
you left." That the man entertains even a single amorous notion about this
ball-breaker‹much given to kittenish, come-hither comments along the lines
of "Richard, I thought I asked you to tidy up?" and "Why the hell can't you
do something that needs doing?"‹is testament either to a libido of iron or
to an erotic sensibility that leans toward the deeply masochistic. If
best-selling novels succeed because they "tap into" something in the
culture, surely this woman's helpless anger at the man who she thought was
going to share her domestic burden accounts in part for the book's immense
popularity.

Pearson told an interviewer, "Until they program men to notice you're out of
toilet paper, a happy domestic life will always be up to women"‹a sentiment
almost unanimously held by the working mothers I know. What we've learned
during this thirty-year grand experiment is that men can be cajoled into
doing all sorts of household tasks, but they will not do them the way a
woman would. They will bathe the children, but they will not straighten the
bath mat and wring out the washcloths; they will drop a toddler off at
nursery school, but they won't spend ten minutes chatting with the teacher
and collecting the art projects. They will, in other words, do what men have
always done: reduce a job to its simplest essentials and utterly ignore the
fillips and niceties that women tend to regard as equally essential. And a
lot of women feel cheated and angry and even‹bless their hearts‹surprised
about this. In the old days, of course, men's inability to perform women's
work competently was a source of satisfaction and pride to countless
housewives. A reliable sitcom premise involved Father's staying home for a
day while Mother handled things at his office; chastened and newly admiring
of the other's abilities, each ran gratefully back to familiar terrain.
Nowadays, when a working mother arrives home after a late deposition, only
to find the living room strewn with Legos and a pizza box crammed into the
kitchen trash, she tends to get madder than a wet hen. Women are left with
two options: endlessly haranguing their husbands to be more womanly, or
silently fuming and (however wittingly) launching a sex strike of an
intensity and a duration that would have impressed Aristophanes. The men who
cave to the pressure to become more feminine‹putting little notes in the
lunch boxes, sweeping up after snack time, the whole bit‹may delight their
wives but they probably don't improve their sex lives much, owing to the
thorny old problem of la difference. I might be quietly thrilled if my
husband decided to forgo his weekly tennis game so that he could alphabetize
the spices and scrub the lazy Susan, but I would hardly consider it an
erotic gesture.

It turns out that the "traditional" marriage, which we've all been so happy
to annihilate, had some pretty good provisions for many of today's most
stubborn marital problems, such as how to combine work and parenthood, and
how to keep the springs of the marriage bed in good working order. What's
interesting about the sex advice given to married women of earlier
generations is that it proceeds from the assumption that in a marriage a
happy sex life depends upon orderly and successful housekeeping. Marabel
Morgan's notorious 1973 book, The Total Woman, has lingered in people's
minds because of the seduction techniques it recommends to unhappy
housewives. They ought to consider meeting their husbands at the front door
in sexy costumes (heels and lingerie, that kind of thing), calling them at
work and talking dirty to them, seducing them beneath the dining-room table.
(Morgan does not, however, recommend that women nurture a burning
intelligence. In a list of unconventional locations in which to make love,
she includes the hammock, counseling her readers, "He may say 'We don't have
a hammock.' You can reply 'Oh, darling, I forgot!'"). But long before she
describes any of these memorable techniques, Morgan gives a quite thorough
accounting of how a housewife ought to go about "redeeming the time" and the
energy so that she is physically and emotionally able to make love on a
regular basis. A housewife should run her household the way an executive
runs his business: with goals, schedules, and plans. She should make
dinner‹or at least do all the shopping and planning for it‹right after
breakfast, so that she isn't running around like a madwoman in the late
afternoon with no idea what to cook. She should take time to rest and relax
during the day so that she is not exhausted and depleted come whoopee hour.
With the right kind of planning, "you can have all your home duties finished
before noon." In a household run by an incompetent wife, however, "by the
time her husband enters the scene, she's had it," Morgan writes. "She's too
tired to be available to him." This seems a fairly accurate depiction of
many contemporary two-career marriages, in which dinner is a nightly crisis
(what to eat?) and an endless negotiation (who to cook it?) entered into by
two people who have been managing crises and negotiating agreements all day
long and who still have the children's homework and baths and bedtimes to
contend with.

A document in circulation on the Internet purports to be a list contained in
a 1950s home-economics book and announces that it is designed to offer
future wives "preparation for married life." I recently attended a dinner
party at which this list was read aloud by the hostess, to general hilarity,
and I know of at least two classrooms (one at a prep school, the other at a
graduate school) where it was read and received in similar sidesplitting
fashion. The book advises the housewife to prepare for her husband's arrival
at the end of the day: to have dinner ready, to minimize household noise and
clutter, to avoid assaulting her man with a list of domestic problems and
disappointments, and to inquire about his day. There was a sense back in
those innocent years that a day at the office was a tiring event that
required a bit of recuperation: a cold drink, a sympathetic companion, a
decent meal‹all of which, I suspect, functioned as a sexual tonic. The
modern professional workday, as we all know, is far more demanding than its
predecessors: it lasts much longer, and the various technologies that were
supposed to liberate workers from the office have in fact made the whole
world an office. (I recently sat on an otherwise deserted tropical beach, a
few minutes after a spectacular sunrise, and watched a middle-aged American
man march grimly through pellucid knee-high surf, barking commands on a cell
phone.) When a professional person crosses the threshold at the end of the
day, the commute hasn't provided a transition from work; it has been a
continuation of it, thanks to the array of pagers, phones, and even Internet
connections available to the modern driver. And‹here's the kicker‹there
isn't just one spouse who has had such a punishing day, there are two of
them. No one has spent even a moment planning a gentle re-entry into home
life, let alone plotting a thrilling seduction.

Adding to a modern wife's reluctance to seduce the old man on a regular
basis is the fact that her job outside the home has conferred on her a power
that housewives simply didn't possess. In The Total Woman there's a quite
frank acceptance of the fact that keeping a husband sexually happy is a
direct route to a measure of economic power for the wife. A couple of days
after Morgan's first night of giving her husband "super sex," he calls her
to make sure that she will be home at three o'clock: "I couldn't imagine
what was coming and I was stunned to see a truck pull up with a new
refrigerator-freezer ... Now, without being nagged, he was beginning to give
me what I yearned for." Later he lets her redecorate the family room. The
women with whom Morgan shares the secrets of super sex (which, in case you
are wondering, include not only making dinner early but also moaning a lot
during sex and keeping your hands moving on your husband's body throughout
intercourse) also get their share of perks. One delighted postcoital woman
breathlessly reports to her classmates in a Total Woman workshop, "He has
never brought me a gift before, but this past week he bought me two
nighties, two rose bushes, and a can opener!" (Ah, would that Dr. Freud were
still with us to contemplate that can opener.)

Although I have an amused tolerance for books like The Total Woman, I am not
entirely incapable of good, old-fashioned feminist rage. The notion that
even educated middle-class American women had to put out in order to get a
damn refrigerator‹even that they might "yearn" for one‹just steams me.
However, I would not advise against using sex for more subtle marital
adjustments, of a type described in The Sex-Starved Marriage. Davis reminds
women that one of the more effective ways to get a husband to be more
considerate and helpful is to seduce him. She counsels a group of female
clients who complain of angry, critical husbands to "pay more attention to
their physical relationships with their husbands," to "be sexier, more
affectionate, attentive, responsive, and passionate." Darned if the old bag
of tricks doesn't work like a charm‹the ladies arrive at the next therapy
session giggling and thrilled with their new powers. To many contemporary
women, however, the notion that sex might have any function other than
personal fulfillment (and the occasional bit of carefully scheduled baby
making) is a violation of the very tenets of the sexual revolution that so
deeply shaped their attitudes on such matters. Under these conditions, pity
the poor married man hoping to get a bit of comfort from the wife at day's
end. He must somehow seduce a woman who is economically independent of him,
bone tired, philosophically disinclined to have sex unless she is jolly well
in the mood, numbingly familiar with his every sexual maneuver, and still
doing a slow burn over his failure to wipe down the countertops and fold the
dish towel after cooking the kids' dinner. He can hardly be blamed for
opting instead to check his e-mail, catch a few minutes of SportsCenter, and
call it a night.

A final, less quantifiable development has served to snuff out marital
sexuality, and it has to do with the way middle- and upper-middle-class
adults think about family life and their role in it. There are many
indications of this, but let us simply glance at the Disney catalogue. Not
surprisingly, in addition to toys and figurines the catalogue features
Disney-themed clothing: bathrobes with Winnie the Pooh appliqués, stretch
knit pants with a small Mickey Mouse at the hem, quilted "Magic Winter
Jackets" featuring a choice of Eeyore, Mickey, or Pooh. Here's the problem:
all these items are for adults. In fact, I was horrified to discover that it
would have been possible for my husband and me to spend last Halloween
trick-or-treating in matching Tweedledum and Tweedledee costumes‹a pretty
far cry from Marabel Morgan's idea of a good costume.

For many couples child-rearing has become not merely one aspect of marriage
but its entire purpose and function. Spouses regard each other not as
principally lovers and companions but as sharers of the great, unending
burden of taking care of the children. And make no mistake about it:
American middle-class families have made child-rearing a dauntingly complex
enterprise. My children are still very small, but it has been made
abundantly clear to me by friends and acquaintances that I had better get in
the market for an SUV or a minivan, because I am soon enough going to be
shuttling the children and their friends to a bewildering series of soccer
games, soccer parties, soccer tournaments. Already I throw birthday parties
with guest lists and budgets that approximate those of a wedding-rehearsal
dinner. The curious thing about this labor-intensive variety of parenting is
that it has arisen now, when parents‹and specifically mothers‹have less time
to devote to their children than ever before. One can't help finding in
these developments a frantic attempt at compensation for the hours some
professional-class mothers spend away from their children. Mothering, which
used to be a rather private affair (requiring, principally, a playpen, a
back yard, a television set, and a coffeepot), has now adopted a very public
dimension. Why, of course Sarah So-and-So is a good mother: little Andrew is
at Gymboree, Music Rhapsody, Bright Child, and Fit for Kids every week! All
of domestic life now turns on the entertainment and happiness not of the
adults but of the children. At vacation time my husband and I don't drag our
little boys through the Louvre, as I was dragged at a tender age (because my
parents wanted to see it, and it would never have occurred to them to
consult their children about where to go on holiday). Rather, we check into
hotels with elaborate children's pools and nightly fireworks and huge duck
ponds. It's all very jolly, but it is entirely possible, I suppose, that
some parents will overidentify with the whole thing, will forget that they
are in fact the adults and not the children. And if your conception of
yourself is as a great big eight-year-old, you're not very likely to have
sex on your mind come the end of the day.

When I was a teenager, in the 1970s, I was always quite happy to accept a
baby-sitting job, because I knew that once I got the kids to sleep, I could
read The Joy of Sex for an hour or two; I don't think I baby-sat for a
single family that didn't have a copy. There was a sense that young parents
of that generation‹granted, I grew up in Berkeley, which may have skewed the
sample considerably‹were still getting it on. Similarly, the characters one
encounters in Cheever and Updike, with their cocktails and cigarettes and
affairs, seem at once infinitely more dissolute and more adult than most of
the young parents I know. Nowadays, American parents of a certain social
class seem squeaky clean, high-achieving, flush with cash, relatively
exhausted, obsessed with their children, and somehow‹how to pinpoint
this?‹undersexed.

If I Don't Know How She Does It, a book about a working woman who discovers
deep joy and great sex by quitting her job and devoting herself to family
life, had been written by a man, he would be the target of a lynch mob the
proportions and fury of which would make Salman Rushdie feel like a lucky,
lucky man. But of course it was written by a with-it female journalist, so
it's safe, even admired. Allison Pearson, we have been given to understand,
is telling it like it is. And what she's telling us, essentially, is that in
several crucial aspects the women's movement has been a bust, even for the
social class that most ardently championed it.

Given the curious alchemy of feminism, which transforms absolutely anything
women choose to do into a crucial element of liberation doctrine, confessing
that one has given up sex has become a very right-on and empowering act. A
hot new collection of essays (all of them interesting and one of them‹by
Ellen Gilchrist‹exquisite) titled The Bitch in the House is filled with such
gleefully tendered admissions, including that of the writer Jill Bialosky,
whose account of a long lunch with an old friend is featured on the book's
jacket: "My friend asked me about my marriage. 'Are you guys having sex?'
she asked bluntly ... I wanted to laugh." What's interesting about these
public confessions‹and, I suspect, what makes them so satisfying to women‹is
that they are utterly humiliating to husbands. Granted, Bialosky has
protected her husband's privacy by referring to him as "D." throughout the
essay‹but perhaps, if her heart had really been in it, she would have
written under a pseudonym. Clearly, sticking it to D. was part of her
intention when she wrote and published the piece. Every account I've ever
read in which a married woman admits she's not having sex anymore begins
with a red-hot account of the sex she used to have with her husband before
they had children. Before Jill Bialosky decided to cut off poor D., he was
having the time of his life.

He pressed up against me in dark alleys. I gave him blow jobs as he drove on
one of our weekend treks. We made out in taxicabs. There was a kind of
volatile tension wired through our relationship that set my body on fire
feeling his arm resting against mine in the dark cavern of a movie theater.

But now? "A little faucet had turned off inside my body. My veins were cold.
I didn't want to be touched." And here‹with that little faucet‹is the heart
of the matter. The Jill Bialoskys of the world may feel that they belong to
the most outrageously liberated group of women yet to stride the earth.
These women assume that in the very act of confession they are wearing the
mantle of freedom. They are not only free enough to perform oral sex in a
moving car‹a bit of cutting-edge eroticism that, I believe, dates back to
the Model T‹but also free enough to admit, in tones of outrage and
bewilderment, to the abrupt waning of their desire. What they don't
understand, and what women of an earlier era might have been able to tell
them, is that when the little faucet turns off, it is time not to rat out
your husband (is there anything more wounding to a man, and therefore more
cruel and vicious, than a wife's public admission that he is not satisfying
her in bed?) but rather to turn it back on. It is not complicated; it
requires putting the children to bed at a decent hour and adopting a good
attitude. The rare and enviable woman is not the one liberated enough to
tell hurtful secrets about her marriage to her girlfriends or the reading
public. Nor is she the one capable of attracting the sexual attentions of a
variety of worthy suitors. The rare woman‹the good wife, and the happy
one‹is the woman who maintains her husband's sexual interest and who returns
it in full measure.

Sex therapists concur that sexless marriages are not inherently problematic;
if both partners are satisfied with a passionless union, the marriage is
said to be in fine shape. But I'm not so sure. Marriage remains the most
efficient engine of disenchantment yet invented. There is nothing like
uninterrupted cohabitation and grinding responsibility to cast a clear,
unforgiving light on the object of desire. Once children come along, it's
easy for parents to regard each other as co-presidents of an industrious
little corporation. Certainly, all sound marriages benefit from sudden and
unexpected infusions of good will‹What luck! Here we are, so many years
later and still as happy as ever! But the element that regularly restores a
marriage to something with an aspect of romance rather than of collegiality
is sex.

What do you think? Discuss this article in the Books & Literature conference
of Post & Riposte.


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