A couple of days ago a friend started a conversation about Lori Gottlieb’s article in the NYT Magazine: does a more equal marriage mean less sex? The answer appears to be: yes.
According to the article it’s risky for a husband to do female chores: “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.”’

A few other quotes:

‘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.’

(…)

‘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.”’

(…)

‘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.’

(Read the complete article here.)

I assume that Lori Gottblies is right: our fantasies have not much in common with our moral intuitions and convictions, voila the neurotic disorder.

So there are a few solutions. We agree that we don’t deserve steamy sex all of our lives. In other words, we outsource sex. Or we keep on silently longing.

We try role-play. An honorable solution, but as the article points out role-play is a difficult task for many of us. It is one thing to do role-play with a woman you are never going to meet again probably; it is another thing to do role-play with the mother of your children. (“Get out of your costume, quick, Benjamin is crying.”)

There’s the swingers club, but I guess it’s a bridge too far for many couples. And I’ve been told that many of the visitors to these clubs are not very attractive. It’s no coincidence that Gottlieb doesn’t mention the swingers club. You can mention Internet porn at a dinner party, but you cannot say: “The other day Tracy and I went to the nicest swingers club in the world. It was so clean, and the people were fantastic, the artwork on the walls was magnificent, and from an intellectual point of view it was also extremely satisfying. So Tracy said: ‘Nick, let’s go less often to the opera and more often to a swingers club.”

Perhaps it’s just not very realistic to believe that your significant other is the perfect parent for your children, the perfect soul mate, the perfect intellectual companion, and the only person in the world with whom you can have steamy sex.

But as Gottlieb suggests, probably a more equal marriage is worth the loss of an intense sex life.

In fifty years quitting sex will be what’s quitting smoking now: we know it’s hard, but it’s about time that you did it.