48 DIVorCe wItH DeCenCY
It’s obviously a squishy, subjective, and imprecise exercise to
attempt to establish any sort of a standardized baseline as to what
constitutes a quote “normal level” of sexuality within a marriage.
No marriage counselor or therapist could possibly tell you exactly
how much sex you should be having, but most agree that you
should be having at least some. Sex may be only one component
of a good union, but most happy marriages usually include it. As
one particularly eloquent client of mine put it pretty graphically,
“If you’re not f---ing, you’re fighting.”
According to a 2002 study by the National Opinion Research
Center, married couples say they have sex about sixty-eight times
a year, or slightly more than once a week. This “sex once or twice
a week” (i.e., fifty to one hundred times a year) has thus become,
almost by default, something of the benchmark standard for a
healthy sex life for a married couple. At the other end of the spec-
trum, psychologists estimate that 15 to 20 percent of couples have
sex no more than ten times a year, which is how the experts basi-
cally define a “sexless marriage.”
As if these various yardsticks for what constitutes a “normal”
level of sex frequency weren’t confusing enough already, let’s
throw in one more. This one includes the rest of the world as
well as the United States and also counts in single folks as well
as marrieds. In a recent survey of twenty-eight nations world-
wide, Japan ranked dead last in sexual activity, with the average
Japanese having sex just thirty-six times per year. Conversely, we
red-blooded Americans (God bless ’em) ranked number one in
the world... coming in at 124 times a year.
Want still more stats on sex stuff to ponder? Playboy magazine
conducted a nationwide survey of 900 randomly selected adult
males and females between the ages of eighteen and sixty-four.
Their findings, as published in a February 2008 article entitled
“Sex in America,” were that (1) only 26 percent of all respondents
reported being “very satisfied” with their sex lives; (2) the aver-
age age at which folks lost their virginity was 17.7 years; (3) the
average numbers of sex partners whom respondents had been
with was 10.9; (4) on the issue of sexual frequency, 47 percent
indicated they had sex one or more times a week; (5) 22 per-
cent indicated they had been involved in, or would be willing to