What’s the best way to give up sex? Get married. Seriously?
According to researchers in the UK, they found that couples can expect to have sex more than four times a week prior to marriage. However, after three years of marriage, most couples are lucky to have sex even once every week.
Alain de Botton, founder of The School of Life, based in London, a gradual decline in the intensity and frequency of sex between a married couple is an inevitable fact of biological life.
Alain shared with Psychology Today an interesting perspective about the issue that will make you rethink what you know. Read an excerpt of “12 Rude Revelations About Sex” below:
Sex, with its contrary emphases on expansiveness, imagination, playfulness, and a loss of control, must by its very nature interrupt this routine of regulation and self-restraint. We avoid sex not because it isn’t fun but because its pleasures erode our subsequent capacity to endure the strenuous demands that our domestic arrangements place on us.
Sex also has a way of altering and unbalancing our relationship with our household co-manager. Its initiation requires one partner or the other to become vulnerable by revealing what may feel like humiliating sexual needs. We must shift from debating what sort of household appliance to acquire to making the more challenging request, for example, that our spouse should turn over and take on the attitude of a submissive nurse or put on a pair of boots and start calling us names.
The satisfaction of our needs may force us to ask for things that are, from a distance, open to being judged both ridiculous and contemptible so that we may prefer, in the end, not to entrust them to someone on whom we must rely for so much else in the course of our ordinary upstanding life. We may in fact find it easier to put on a rubber mask or pretend to be a predatory, incestuous relative with someone we’re not also going to have to eat breakfast with for the next three decades.
Excerpted from HOW TO THINK MORE ABOUT SEX by Alain de Botton, founder of The School of Life, based in London. Published by Picador USA.