Noli Irritare Leones

Amanda Marcotte and Shakespeare’s Sister both point to this BBC article about women in long term relationships quickly losing interest in sex. Unfortunately, I can’t find the study, so all I have to go on are newspaper articles about it.

The researchers from Hamburg-Eppendorf University interviewed 530 men and women about their relationships.

They found 60% of 30-year-old women wanted sex “often” at the beginning of a relationship, but within four years of the relationship this figure fell to under 50%, and after 20 years it dropped to about 20%.

In contrast, they found the proportion of men wanting regular sex remained at between 60-80%, regardless of how long they had been in a relationship.

First thought that comes to mind – “often”? Are they measuring how often men and women want sex, or whether they think that the frequency with which they want sex is “often”? Because, if a husband and wife have even a moderate difference in sex drive, after 20 years of that difference, whichever one wants sex less frequently isn’t going to feel he or she wants sex “often.” After all, there’s a pretty steady reminder in the house that someone else wants it more often.

Second thought that comes to mind: for both men and women, only about 60% of them (OK, maybe as many as 80% for the men) want sex “often” at the beginning of the relationship. What’s the deal with that? Notice that, despite all we hear about men constantly being up for sex, that sizeable less sexual minority early in the relationship is found among men as well as women.

The study also revealed tenderness was important for women in a relationship.

Gee, you think? They lead with the sex, but it turns out that the men’s interest in “tenderness” drops as rapidly as the women’s interest in sex, so it’s possible the two declines are related.

Then there’s a lot of evo psych stuff about how women just naturally are going to want sex less than men, which I’m ignoring because I’m more interested in the things that couples might actually be able to change. I have to go to the Times Online for that, and sadly, all they suggest is living apart:

There are few things that appear able to keep a woman sexually interested, the study found, but living apart for extended periods can help.

Now, living apart does ensure that she doesn’t have to pick up after him every day, but it also ensures that, if they have kids, she’s doing all the childcare, so, unless the guy’s an overgrown kid himself, this seems like a losing proposition for improving a marriage.

UPDATE: First, it occurs to me that the above paragraph sounds as if I think a wife would only want to keep her husband around as an extra pair of hands for the kids; actually, it was more that I was thinking some of the women might be losing interest in sex over housework. Then again, who knows, since we don’t get much information. Second, someone in the Pandagon comments thread pointed to a Dr. Petra takedown of the study. Third, while looking through Medscape for information on depression, I came across this article on a “New View” approach to women’s sexual problems.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 15th, 2006 at 6:52 am and is filed under Marriage, Sexuality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.