Is SEX ESSENTIAL for a HAPPY MARRIAGE?

Love him or hate him, daytime TV shrink Dr Phil is a master of pithy aphorisms regarding modern relationships.

- ROBYN MACLARTY

One of my favourites is, ‘If you have a good sexual connection, it’s about 10% of your relationship. If you have an unhealthy sexual connection, it’s 90%.’

Which is to say, in a long-term relationship, when you’re both on the same page about sex, it’s not something that occupies a lot of your relationship ‘bandwidth’.

Is it possible that having no sex can live in this category?

The sexless long-term relationship is almost always portrayed as a sad, neglected, even shameful state of affairs. The internet is awash with articles, YouTube videos and listicles on how to fix or survive this painful condition, how to ‘keep loneliness at bay’ and ‘save your marriage’ with strategies to inject heat back into your flatlining sex life. The media would often have us believe that, unless we’re blissfully bonking each other’s brains out several times a week, there’s trouble in paradise. One article posits: ‘Why do some couples sizzle while others fizzle? Social scientists are studying nosex marriages for clues about what can go wrong in relationships.’ The assumption being that, in the sex-free marriage, something has undoubtedly gone wrong.

Even now, the 1950s trope of the red-blooded husband starved of l’amour by his uninterested wife (who justifiably seeks to have his needs met elsewhere) is still with us, rattling around in our collective notions of what is and isn’t acceptable within marital bonds.