That was one of the few things my mom told me directly about sex. My dad, on the other hand, openly referenced the joys of sex -- “like two star systems colliding in outer space,” he once told me -- but the message was the same: sex is an essential part of marriage. The sharing of this idea ran in the family: His mom, my grandmother, once announced that sex with my grandfather kept getting better, right into their eighties. Elderly people having sex? Elderly people having better sex than me? As a teenager, I found the idea mildly disgusting, not to mention insulting, and yet it was oddly reassuring. It countered the endless stream of sexless marriages and steamy affairs in pop culture ephemera. Marriage didn't necessarily mean the death of sex, but no sex certainly meant the death of marriage, I concluded.
I was reminded of this upon reading news that an octogenarian couple, married for 55 years, had spoken before the Pope and his prelates this week about what makes a marriage last. Their secret was, you guessed it, s-e-x. "The little things we did for each other, the telephone calls and love notes, the way we planned our day around each other and the things we shared were outward expressions of our longing to be intimate with each other," they said. "Gradually we came to see that the only feature that distinguishes our sacramental relationship from that of any other good Christ-centered relationship is sexual intimacy, and that marriage is a sexual sacrament with its fullest expression in sexual intercourse." As the Associated Press put it, "The audience of celibate men was a bit taken aback." But of course! Who likes to hear about the great things they'...
I may not agree about sacraments and Christ, but sex as the key to a happy marriage? Now that's a god I believe in. Granted, I was primed by my family to believe. But I’ve also found proof in my young marriage: sex is the single most important barometer of how we’re doing as a couple. When we’re getting busy frequently, we are more tender, loving, generous and appreciative of each other. We touch more. Our texts and Gchats throughout the day are littered with emoji hearts and animated smooches. It’s like we’ve never before been in love before or nursed a broken heart. We are obsessed and enamored. It feels magical and transcendent. I even find myself saying hippie shit (see: that last sentence), along the lines of my dad’s “star systems colliding in outer space.”
But when we let even a few sexless days pass because of work stress or exhaustion, we lose that direct line to each other. I start to feel the boundaries of myself shrinking -- which, I will note, isn’t without its own purpose. It might not have been explicitly about sex, but my mom was very fond of the concept of yin and yang; she placed a large illustration of a tightrope walker on the living room mantle. Indeed, many things are all about balance: We couldn’t exist perpetually in a state of post-coital bliss. Those brief moments of disconnection are also essential to the experience of connection. Sex is always there to bring us back together, to keep us together.
Of course, I would never expect you to put much trust in the word of someone who's only been married for a year -- and luxuriously childless to boot. So, science: earlier this year, a study in The Journals of Gerontology looking at older married adults found that sex is key to marital happiness. As the study's authors wrote, " [The] results suggest that to protect marital quality in later life, it may be important for older adults to find ways to stay engaged in sexual activity, even as health problems render familiar forms of sexual interaction difficult or impossible."
It's true for all ages, though: Previous studies have found that happiness is correlated with sexual frequency, and that sexual satisfaction and marital satisfaction change concurrently. Now, sexual satisfaction isn't necessarily tied to frequency -- that's a complicated topic for another article, another day. (Although more frequent sex is associated with greater marital happiness for neurotics, which explains why I feel so strongly about the topic -- ha-ha-HAH.) The key is sexual satisfaction, whatever form that takes for the couple in question -- and if this sex-writing gig has taught me anything, it's that sexual satisfaction can take infinite forms.
It turns out, though, that phrase I grew up on might not be exactly right. Sex therapist Ian Kerner doesn't see sex as the glue of marriage, so much as a key ingredient in the glue. "Sex has many positive effects on individuals and relationships," he said. "Sex can be a source of self-esteem, a way of working through and resolving conflict, a way to feel safe, secure, held, seen. It can be a source of adventure, a source of stress-relief, a way of countering negativity with positivity."
Sex can also be a deal-breaker: He recently worked with a woman who didn't feel sexually attracted to her male partner. They attempted all sorts of solutions, but ultimately she came to the conclusion that there was no replacement for sex. "You can have a relationship that largely works on many levels, but in the absence of sex, there's nothing that it can be replaced with," says Kerner. "So I don't know if it's the glue, but its absence can be deeply felt, and in the absence of sex it can leave a void that cannot be readily filled."
Shares