If you have ever wondered what happened to your active sex life or can’t even remember what it feels like to have a sex life, then the recent books “Just Do” and “365 Nights” will either inspire or depress you. Two couples took up the challenge to refresh their marriages with daily doses of sexual intimacy. Successfully combining an active and satisfying sex life with a married lifestyle is the subject of volumes of books and a frequent focus of my own writing. It is epic to achieve the same with kids in tow and worth noting that neither of these couples have any which makes their achievement noble but not quite heroic.
Kids or not, the author of the Study of American Sexual Behavior rightly states, “There’s a strong relationship between rating your marriage as happy and frequency of intercourse. What is harder to say is what the causal relationship between the two is. 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 the two.”
The truth is that intimacy begets intimacy. Sexual intimacy creates a singular connection that paves the way for better communication and emotional closeness and physical release that is unparalleled in any other activity that we share. This is no truer than the fact that couples who communicate well and show up for each other regularly are more apt to be drawn together physically. The experience of the couples in both the books both bear this out, their experiments did bring them closer together in every way and also gave them the space and frequency to develop a broader and more comfortable language for sex which not surprisingly improved their sex lives, even after their daily marathon ended.
Frequency of sex is not really the point of the story as even all the authors will attest, people’s needs and capacity for sexual intimacy is variable. Sustaining the emotional space that leaves you feeling interested and safe enough to be vulnerable and open to great sex is in and of itself a remarkable kind of intimacy to live in. This article was particularly interesting to me as I have been living in a pretty dry spell of physical intimacy of late, what with broken bones and poison oak frequenting my home life. The tension and stress between us wears more deeply and the lack of physical closeness turns the edges of all our encounters brittle. The longer it goes, the more challenging it is to open up in the ways that bring our physical intimacy into daily view.
So why not do your own experiment, this weekend. It is summer after all and we are celebrating love oil; see what happens with three days in a row. I know that I plan on falling deeply under the the spell of some serious love oil therapy this weekend, poison oak or not. Check out our love oil giveaway contest and share a story to inspire.
