One can gauge the heat of an issue by the level of discomfort it generates at a dinner party. Asking if there is sex after marriage is about as bad as asking if there is life after death.I mean sexy sex is the stuff of affairs, NOT marriage." His wife, bejewelled, beautifully dressed, intelligent, sat opposite him, unblinking. "Frilly black knickers!" he bellowed, "They're just not going to cut it after you've been ringside for the C-section." In Britain, 50% of couples within the first three years of marriage and in the first year of their child's life divorce. A lack of pleasure kills love."
The spectre of infidelity haunts most couples like the hairline crack in the Golden Bowl. The mistress system is what made middle-class marriage (possibly all marriage) work for centuries across different cultures .But, not wanting to live in a Fellini movie where some strumpet gets to wear all the high heels, I turned my mind to the 21st-century alternative: sex inside marriage, or what Americans call "hot monogamy. Not more gooey closeness but a little more distance. Space between husband and wife, space between mother and child and, most challenging of all, space between a kitchen table covered in bills and a steaming hot boudoir.
The spectre of infidelity haunts most couples like the hairline crack in the Golden Bowl. The mistress system is what made middle-class marriage (possibly all marriage) work for centuries across different cultures .But, not wanting to live in a Fellini movie where some strumpet gets to wear all the high heels, I turned my mind to the 21st-century alternative: sex inside marriage, or what Americans call "hot monogamy. Not more gooey closeness but a little more distance. Space between husband and wife, space between mother and child and, most challenging of all, space between a kitchen table covered in bills and a steaming hot boudoir.
There's a powerful tendency," Esther Perel writes in her introduction, "in long-term relationships to favour the predictable over the unpredictable. Yet without an element of uncertainty there is no longing, no anticipation, no frisson."As a New York sex therapist, the question she seems to prod her clients (and readers) with most is "Why not?" "Why not stop breast-feeding?" she asked me over tea. "The hormones pumping through your body are flat-lining your libido." I choked on my baguette. "Why not have a night away from your son, or several nights?".
Perel herself revs along on four hours a night, yet she does have empathy, tinged with impatience, for erotic sloths: "I understand exhaustion and (as a mother) I am the last one to trivialise this. I was tired too, but I also know that two lovers at the beginning of an affair are able to stay up all night. I think desire in marriage is about getting over the hump and knowing it will feel good, that it will be good for us."Perel refutes the now fashionable child-centred model of family life, arguing: "The happiness of the parents dictates the stability of the whole family."
In Perel's pursuit of the erotic she pushes women to explore what they want in bed, in their fantasies and in their lives. But most women I know are so busy treading water that any sex feels like a victory. Eroticism, to me, seems very much like the tattered risotto recipe in the bottom of my handbag. It requires time and special ingredients. I resolve to seize both.Spontaneity is a fabulous idea, but in an ongoing relationship whatever is going to 'just happen' already has. Now they have to make it happen. Committed sex is intentional sex."
This notion of planning, she says, is just what new lovers do: the mood, the motel, the bottle of Moët.
This notion of planning, she says, is just what new lovers do: the mood, the motel, the bottle of Moët.
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