365 days of "must-have" sex

Sex every day and time to write a book about it. Two couples have risen to the challenge, writes Ralph Gardner jnr.

Let's say you and your spouse haven't had sex for so long that you can't remember the last time you did. Not the day. Not the month. Maybe not even the season. Would you look for gratification elsewhere? Would you file for divorce? Or would you turn to your mate and say: "Honey, you know, I've been thinking. Why don't we do it for the next 365 days in a row?"

That's more or less what happened to Charla and Brad Muller. And in another example of an erotic adventure supplanting married ennui, a second couple, Annie and Douglas Brown, embarked on a similar, if abbreviated journey: 101 straight days of post-nuptial sex.

Both couples document their exploits in books published this month, the latest entries in what is almost a mini-genre of books offering advice about the "sex-starved marriage". The couples, though, are hardly similar. The Mullers are Bible-studying steak-eating Republicans from North Carolina. The Browns are backpacking multi-grain New Yorkers who moved to Boulder, Colorado. The Mullers' book, 365 Nights, is rather modest and circumspect in its details. The Browns's book, Just Do It, almost makes the reader feel part of a threesome, sharing everything they used to stimulate sexual desire (it's hard to visualise and even harder to explain).

To many spouses "married sex" may sound like an oxymoron. And "married-with-children sex" may sound like that elusive antimatter. Indeed, reigniting a couple's desire for each other has fuelled an entire therapeutic industry - from Kinsey to Dr Ruth. According to a 2004 study, American Sexual Behaviour by the National Opinion Research Centre at the University of Chicago, married couples have intercourse about 66 times a year. But that number is skewed by young marrieds, as young as 18, who manage it, on average, 109 times a year.

(The Australian Study of Health and Relationships taken years ago found a slightly higher rate locally. Those who had been in heterosexual relationships for at least a year had sex on average 1.84 times a week. It also found that 23.4 per cent of men and 8.3 per cent of women would like to have had sex daily, or more often.)

Either way, those statistics put the Mullers and Browns in Olympic-record territory. That they thought a sex marathon would reinvigorate their marriages might say as much about the American penchant for exercise and goal-setting as it does about the state of romance.

But the couples may also be on to something. "There's a strong relationship between rating your marriage as happy, and frequency of intercourse," said Tom Smith, who conducted the American Sexual Behaviour study. "What we can't tell you is what the causal relationship is between the two. We don't know whether people who are happy in their marriage have sex more, or whether people who have sex more become happy in their marriages, or a combination of those two."

Do these couples provide any answers? Did sex every night make them happier in their marriages and in life? Charla apparently had no intention of writing about "the gift", as she euphemistically refers to it.

She was simply a homemaker and marketing consultant, who, in 2006, wanted to give her husband a special 40th birthday present. "This is something no one else would give him," she said. "It didn't cost a lot of money. It was highly memorable. It met all the criteria for a really great gift."

Brad was less than fully enthusiastic, mostly because, he says, his wife often has big ideas and poor follow-through. After all, she hadn't been especially generous in that department since they'd had their two children. He paid closer attention when he realised she was serious.

The book idea came up serendipitously. Charla had lunch with a friend, Betsy Thorpe, a former book editor and her eventual collaborator. She saw the stuff of literature in the couple's nightly trysts (the women met three-quarters of the way through the Mullers' annus mirabilis).

While 365 Nights was written from the women's perspective, Just Do It was written by the man, Douglas Brown, a 42-year-old reporter at The Denver Post. Yet the change in gender doesn't seem to affect the point of view, perhaps because Doug comes across as a sensitive male, and because the sexual marathon in 2006 was his wife's idea, a way to banish suburban boredom after they moved to Boulder two years earlier from the East Coast.

"I thought we don't have anything else going on," Annie said. "It might kick-start our marriage."

They changed venues frequently - a cabin on an ashram, a yurt in the Colorado Rockies, and in a hotel room in Las Vegas. "That's why we scheduled all these little trips," Annie said. "We knew it had the potential of getting monotonous." And were it not for her competitive zeal, their streak might have died well short of 100 days. Annie even forced her husband to have sex during a bout of vertigo. "I'm not a quitter," she said. "The night he had vertigo, I said, 'I'm sorry, guy, but you've got to keep going."'

Doug said in an interview that on their 101st day, he felt "sort of like you had some long-forgotten appointment to hear some tax attorney talk about estate planning". After that, he said, "I think we didn't do it for a month."

The Mullers, or at least Charla, hit a wall somewhere around the 10th month. In her book, she describes the gift then as "my stupid idea" and "a hidden cross to bear". But they say they dropped out only a few days a month, mostly because of Brad's business travel. They averaged 26 to 28 times a month.

"The spirit of the gift was not to keep score," Charla said. "When he was travelling, we tried to make up for it, but it wasn't mandatory."

The women are regarded with admiration, if not always envy, by their girlfriends. "My first reaction was 'please don't tell my husband'," said Sydney Coffin, a friend of Charla's.

Annie Brown is now viewed as a de facto sex therapist by her peers. Her adventure even inspired her friend Diane Elliston to turn off the television in the bedroom. The Browns had draped tasteful fabric over theirs.

"We did it every day for three days in a row," Elliston said.

Approaching sex as a marathon, with its own version of Heartbreak Hill, may not be the solution for every stagnating marriage. Lois Braverman, the president of the Ackerman Institute for the Family, cautioned against couples trying to keep up with the Mullers and Browns. "Some couples are totally satisfied with being sexual one night a week, some twice, some twice a month," she said. "There's no number of times that's right."

Shoshana Bulow, a psychotherapist and sex therapist in Manhattan, pointed out that sex is a lot more complicated than frequency. "There's all sorts of reasons people lose interest in sex with their partner - disappointments, life cycles, financial issues," she said. "Just having it isn't going to resolve those."

Nonetheless, sex every day seems to have worked for the Mullers and Browns. Charla Muller and Annie Brown both talk about how mandated physical intimacy created more emotional intimacy. "It required a daily kindness and forgiveness, and not being cranky or snarky, that I don't think either of us had experienced before," Charla said.

Annie said that she and her husband reached a place in their relationship that they have seldom approached since. "It was just this intense closeness," she said. "We were so aware of wherever the other person was mentally and emotionally and physically."

Today, the Browns report they have sex approximately six times a month, or double their frequency before their adventure. The Mullers decline to discuss their habits, except to say that they fall well within the national average. And, Brad said, the sex is better. "It made it much easier to be open to the idea, more spontaneous," he said, "so you don't go back to that always gaming for it and always trying to get out of it."

Charla agrees: "It's a lot better than it used to be. I may be slow to the take, but it was a really meaningful lesson."

Douglas Brown suffers less stage fright than he once did. "There's much less of a sense of having to perform," he said. "After 100 days, that kind of melted away."

All the same, he doesn't recommend the experience to everyone. "I'm glad we did it. But as far as a practical message, nobody needs to do it 100 days. You don't have to climb Mount Everest to understand alpine sublime."
New York Times


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Sexy Walks "Keep men Off Scent"

www.news.bbc.com.uk

A sexy swing of the hips may attract admiring glances, but it is not a covert sign a woman is ready to breed, according to researchers.

A Queen's University, Ontario, team examined volunteers' walks and the levels of sex hormones in their saliva.

They found those with alluring walks were the furthest away from ovulation.

A British expert said the research, featured by New Scientist magazine, supported the idea women disguise their fertility to deter unsuitable partners.

'Surprising results'

Women give a wide variety of subtle signals to men to advertise the fact that they are ready to conceive and Meghan Provost, the lead researcher, had expected a "sexy", hip-swinging walk to be one of those.

She analysed the gait of female volunteers, showed video clips to 40 men, asking them to rate the attractiveness of the way the women walked, and then matched the results to the hormone tests.

She said the results, published in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior, were so surprising that she had repeated the experiment again with another group of male viewers.

The women who were most fertile at the time of the experiment walked with fewer hip movements and with their knees closer together.

She now thinks the findings tally with other research suggesting that women want to conceal their ovulation from males other than their chosen partner.

Monogamy

A sexy walk would be too obvious, so women are thought to use changes in smell and facial expressions that can be experienced only at close range.

Ms Provost said: "If women are trying to protect themselves from sexual assault at times of peak fertility, it would make sense for them to advertise attractiveness on a broad scale when they are not fertile."

Dr John Manning, from the University of Central Lancashire, agreed with this theory.

He said it was in a woman's best interests to form a closer attachment to one man to help raise children, rather than to advertise her fertile time and be approached by a larger number of competing males.

He said: "I think that the subtle signs of ovulation are used, in a sense, to promote monogamy.

"If you want to pick up on these, you have to be already living with, or close to, the woman, so this constrains the man into daily attendance on a woman."


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