Does Marriage Suck the Joy Out Of Sex
In our culture today, it’s easy to be persuaded that getting married is antithetical to sexual satisfaction or to any sex at all. Dead bedrooms are a frequent plot device in the books I read and the shows I watch. And as night follows day, a sexless marriage leads to an affair, usually with disastrous consequences.
The message seems to be that if you value your sexual satisfaction don’t get married. And if you are married and are sexually dissatisfied, you will be tempted into an affair that will ruin the rest of your life.
Cartoons Hate Her recently wrote a post disputing this message. She cites a survey of 4,000 of her readers demonstrating that married moms over 40 years of age are having the best sex of all demographics. 1
She defines “best sex” as orgasm, yes or no, a simple yet dispositive and rigorous measure. Here is her orgasm frequency chart for women in different heterosexual relationships.
Notwithstanding this evidence, there are a number of reasons we are intrigued by marital sexual dysfunction leading to sexual transgression.
Forbidden fruit is dangerous so therefore more alluring., It creates suspense. Who will find out about the affair? Will he/she leave their spouse?
As well, the problems of other couples in the bedroom feeds into our schadenfreude, our competitive sense that our relationships are relatively better off.
Although while we’re watching a show, my wife Debbie still yells at me for the wandering ways of fictional men. 2
Then there’s Tolstoy’s famous line about all happy families being alike and unhappy families being unhappy in their own way. I suspect Tolstoy was thinking at least in part about sex, since after that opening line in Anna Karenina, we immediately learn that a husband has been kicked out of the house for having an affair with the governess. And, of course, the centerpiece of the novel is Anna’s loveless, presumably sexless marriage that leads to her doomed affair.
The point is that happily married couples who remain happy and married throughout a book or show are just not that interesting. Married couples having satisfied sex at regular intervals is boring dramatic material to everyone but the couple themselves. It’s useless for gossip and it’s highly awkward, if not antagonistic and rude, to share with others. 3
For all the reasons above, I’m drawn to the dead bedroom/transgressive affair theme. But I wonder how many readers and watchers understand that it tends to be the exception not the rule.
Below are a few recent examples of the theme that I’ve enjoyed.
Lake Effect
This week, I did a rapid read of the new novel Lake Effect by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney. Two suburban couples, best friends and neighbors, each have sexless marriages. An affair between the sex-deprived husband and the sex-deprived wife is revealed in the first few pages. Their spouses have histories that make them sexually unenthusiastic.
It’s 1977 in a Catholic neighborhood in Rochester, NY, a highly repressed community. A minor character represents scandal because she’s divorced. She decides to buy copies of The Joy of Sex for her women’s group, a purchase that first scandalizes and then sparks curiosity in the young checkout lady who rings up the sale. 4
Within the first few pages, Sweeney made me care about the four adults and their combined four teenage children. She does a great job of characterization. I also liked the swift pace of the chapters and the shifts in points of view.
The book is at its steamiest and best when Sweeney writes from the adulterous wife’s and adulterous husband’s points of view. I was riveted by how their mutual attraction grows until, despite the extraordinary disruptions and difficulties that obviously lie ahead, they have no choice but to come together. It’s a great example of how effective it can be to put just enough sex on the page to allow the reader’s imagination to fill in the rest.
DTF St. Louis
The HBO series DTF St. Louis also features two dead bedroom suburban marriages, this time in current era St. Louis. The letters DTF stand for “down to fuck,” and DTF St. Louis is a hookup website that acts as a plot device.
At its heart the series is a buddy movie between the two male leads who develop an intense and intimate friendship. The Jason Bateman character starts an affair with his best friend’s wife, Linda Cardellini of Freaks and Geeks fame. And then Jason’s best friend, played by David Hopper from Stranger Things, ends up dead. All in the first episode.
This being HBO, the sex is explicit. But like the rest of the show, the sex is played with a lowkey, goofy sense of good cheer. The characters of both Jason Bateman and David Hopper are immensely likable. The Linda Cardellini character not so much.
Bateman does a great job playing a regular guy being haplessly bad at acting out kinks with his affair partner Linda, including impersonating a sex robot (picture below) or a (middle-aged) pool boy. Or asking in a halting, embarrassed manner for more anatomically explicit kinks.
The show’s message, however remains stark. Behind those suburban lawns, married couples are NOT having sex. And if you compensate by starting an affair, bad things will happen. Perhaps even murder.
In the novel Lake Effect, the reasons for the two dead bedrooms are tragic. In DTF St. Louis, the David Hopper character is dealing with multiple erectile dysfunction issues. As well, he’s stymied by a persistent image of his otherwise sexy wife Linda Cardellini in her enormously bulky baseball umpire gear. She “umps” as a side-gig.
The Dead
Perhaps the most famous dead bedroom in literature is the hotel room at the end of James Joyce’s great story The Dead.
Gabriel Conroy, the middle-aged main character is in the midst of a quiet crisis of self-esteem. He has presided over an annual Epiphany dinner party (January 6th). He’s dispirited by his performance and generally by the mediocrity of his life passing soon from middle to old age and then to death.
The one thing he’s looking forward to is hotel sex at the end of the evening with his pretty wife Gretta. In the warm hotel room with a fire as the snow falls outside.
But Gretta has heard a song performed at the dinner party that brings back memories of a boy Michael who loved her many years ago. A boy who was so desperate to see her after he heard that Gretta was going away that he went out in a snowy, freezing night. Gretta tells Michael to leave before he catches a death of a cold.
But Michael tells Gretta he doesn’t want to live without her and gives her a look from his eyes that Gretta will always remember. Michael dies from pneumonia a week later.
Remembering all this, Gretta sobs herself to sleep. No sex for Gabriel. Worse, he realizes that he can never compete with that adolescent passion between Gretta and her great love.
The last paragraph of The Dead is justly quoted often, with its killer last sentence:
“His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”
But the third to last paragraph below is also achingly haunting.
“The air of the room chilled [Gabriel’s] shoulders. He stretched himself cautiously along under the sheets and lay down beside his wife. One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover’s eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live.”
Finally, for the benefit of my children, here is the last sentence in the Cartoons Hate Her post about women over 40 having the best sex:
“Of course, I am obligated to remind you all that there is no way that any of this was true of your mother over 40. This applies to everyone except her.”
Question for the comments: Has modern popular culture become more fixated on dead bedrooms or has it always been that way, just less explicit?
Married Moms Over 40 Are Having The Best Sex. Paywalled I believe but if you can, subscribe. Cartoons Hate Her releases a ton of great content.
Debbie also yells at me when anyone cheats who’s even remotely in our social orbit.
See my 2024 post:
I discovered that book on my parents’ bookshelf when I was a young teen circa 1977. I read it with the same mix of avid curiosity, fear, and disgust felt by the teen character in Lake Effect when she discovers it in her mother’s closet by accident.
David, this is one of your best! I vividly remember perusing The Joy of Sex when it came out in the 70s. I was newly married… and those illustrations! Married now for 53 years and still very much in love with the guy I met in college.
We have a profound misunderstanding of where intimacy begins. for men the physical intimacy can lead to emotional intimacy. for women there is no physical intimacy truly without emotional intimacy, and trust. so by the time there’s a rift in the bedroom, and the man might notice, the woman has LONG left the space in order to survive because her imperative is to be soft enough to carry on the human race, to be able to create life and nurture it and when trust goes and respect goes that’s when sex ends. And men need to feel honored and respected and like a protector in order to be intimate and want to be in relationship. It’s not the lack of sex that breaks the marriage. It’s what led to the lack of sex, and when that is understood then all things are possible.