The sex-less marriage: The four 'real' reasons for marital celibacy

It’s official. The Supreme Court has declared marital celibacy an “undeniable epidemic.” The land of the Kamasutra is in the midst of a sexual famine that is destroying the hallowed institution of marriage. And it’s getting worse. A recent India Today sex survey that found only 20 percent of Indian couples had sex more than once a week, down from 37 percent in 2004. Half the women fake a headache in the bored-room, as do a third of the men.

Now, there are lies, damned lies, and Indian sex surveys. Sample sizes are suspect, as are their demographic profiles. But just a quick unscientific survey of the marriages I know confirms the dire findings. Say, after a decade of marriage, the modern Indian marriage looks surprisingly like the traditional kind. It’s all about work, kids, and the extended family.

So why, oh why, have we come to such a pass? Here are my top four reasons for our sex-deprived marital lives:

1) Affluence: Upwardly mobile, big city couples are the standard-bearers of The New Indian marriage: we have lots of stuff, and not much sex. Designer thongs and fancy porn, yes. Missionary position? Not tonight, darling. Enumerating the “new rules” of upmarket marriages, Vogue writer Divia Thani confirms that “more and more young married couples have decided that sex is no longer the mark of — or even crucial to — a good marriage. For today’s couples, physical relationships are becoming optional, like lipliner.”

Cue the handwringing over about selfish, materialistic kids these days, too busy moving up to be making out. But it is what it is. There is indeed an inverse relationship between affluence and marital sex. We’re all too busy working hard for that shiny new car, big promotion, or the hefty bonus to pay for our kids’ fancy school to get it on. You don’t have to feign a headache when you stumble home after 10 hours spent attending meetings, creating Powerpoint presentations, glad-handing the bosses, filing reports, responding to a 100 emails, all this followed by obligatory drinks with the team.

Soon enough, sex becomes one more item on that ever-growing to-do list, and your spouse the one you most likely forget to do.

There’s a reason why the small towns fared far higher in terms of sexual satisfaction in that India Today survey. Sexual satisfaction in Jaipur: 74 percent. Delhi: 12 percent. It’s also why our parents likely saw more action back in the dull Doordarshan era. When life is boring, there’s always sex.

2) Marriage: “Love and marriage, go together like horse and carriage,” sang the immortal Frank Sinatra. Sadly, the same cannot be said of sex and matrimony, either in India or in more liberated parts of the world.. A Daily Mail survey confirms every bored spouse’s secret belief: Marriage is indeed bad for your sex life.

“Researchers found that before marriage, couples can hope to have sex more than four times a week. But after three years of married life, there is a dramatic drop in their sex life and most couples have sex just once every seven days,” reports the Mail . And it gets worse: “Six out of ten couples think that marriage has completely ruined the excitement of having sex,” and “79 percent of the respondents were happier getting a good night’s sleep than making the effort to have spontaneous sex in the middle of the night.”

Yes, yes, our lives are more hectic blah, blah. But the reality is also that spending 24X7 with the same person — with no hope of a reprieve for the rest of your life — tends to blunt the old libido. Desire requires absence, obstacles, or in other words, the chase. There are no tales of grand passion set in the marital bed because availability is the ultimate anti-aphrodisiac. That cute manager in the next cube will always get you more excited than your always-there spouse.

3) Kids: If marriage dulls the libido, children will kill it entirely. By the time you’ve survived the first sleepless year – usually by inviting the squalling brat into your bed – the die is cast. Whatever little there is left of your sexual breathing space will be entirely eliminated when you foolishly have the second one – because it’s so unfair to have an only child!

Almost 90 percent of all the sex-less urban marriages I know can be traced directly to the arrival of spawn. They sap your energy, monopolise your time, annexe your privacy, and hijack all time and space for personal pleasure, including your weekends and vacation time. Parents are the modern-day eunuchs, tasked with tending not harems but nurseries – which is surely a lot less fun.

4) Fantasy: Once upon a time, we yearned after poorly dressed, portly movie stars in bad make-up. And the most they did was run around trees and hold hands. Now our beleaguered imaginations bombarded with images of Hrithik’s eight-pack and Katrina’s luscious curves, and porn – be it the soft core kind peddled by magazines or the true blue version available online. How can our poor mortal spouse ever measure up?

Our marital libido is just one more victim of the larger revolution of rising expectations. We want what we want – and what we increasingly want is mind-blowing sex with sexy sex pots. Our parents were mostly happy to just get some, or in the case of many women, just put out. In these liberated days, men no longer want their wives to just “lie back”, and women are unwilling to settle for being a slightly better alternative to the old right hand. We end up instead bearing the burden of our mutual sullen disappointment, each preferring to retreat into our individual erotic fantasies than settle for real, ordinary sex (jiggly bits, included) available at hand.

The moral of the story, dear reader, is this. Want to have more sex? Forget buying those sex toys, planning date nights or kid-free vacations. Just stop watching Bollywood movies and porn. Cancel all magazine and cable subscriptions. Certainly never have kids. Alternatively, have 10 and lock them in a room with a copy of The Lord of the Flies. Or better yet: get a government job in Jaipur.

And if all else fails: don’t get married. You still won’t have much sex, but no one expects you to.

Or just may be we’d all be a lot happier with our marital sex lives if  we take our cue from sex therapist Marty Klein who wisely observed , “Sometimes sex is great; sometimes sex is kind of so-so; sometimes you’d rather have ice cream and watch television.” And that’s all right.