Married Men Get More Sex - Part One

The studies and statistics say they do (see here and here for just two examples), and this is one of the "selling points" of marriage. But statistics aren't guarantees of individual reality.

To again paraphrase what was said over at The Opine Editorials, which was about health correlating to marriage, and I paraphrased on this blog to look at wealth correlating to marriage, perhaps it is the men who have more sex or have the potential to have more sex who get married:

As a married man, I'd like to believe that marriage does [increase the frequency of sex], as many studies report. But I do have to wonder if the correlation is entirely one-directional, or if [sexual] people or people [more likely to have sex more often] are more likely to get married in the first place? I mean, all other things being equal, who is attracted to and wants to marry someone who is [asexual, unattractive, has a low sex drive, or is somehow incapable of having frequent sex]? While we can get averages, we can't compare me, a married father at my age, to me at the same age having never been married or a father. We can't compare John Doe #1, unmarried and childless at his age, to John Doe #1, same age, married and with children.

Maybe the healthier, wealthier people are more likely to get married and more likely to have sex?

I'm going to evaluate my own experiences with this topic. Once again for the record, yes, as an unmarried man I fornicated. No, I do not endorse fornication. I never really have, even though I did it myself. I do believe that sex is for marriage, and that I was wrong to fornicate. I also believe that overeating is wrong, yet I do that sometimes, too. I no longer fornicate and didn't for a while before I met my wife.

If you can't handle that I will be writing about my fornication or marital lovemaking, then skip the rest of this entry.

The fact is, though, that I did fornicate, and I know exactly what I did and didn't do, so I'm going to draw upon my own personal experiences. Note: At no time through all of this did I ever shack up. I didn't even live with my wife until we married.

I had three long-term girlfriends, including one who was significantly older than me. With the first one, I had about 17 months of regular sexual activity, as I did with the second one. With the third one, I had about 37 months. There were significant gaps in time between the three relationships – spells that that were almost entirely dry, and I'm including in those dry spells the time I wasn't having sex with the second and third girlfriends. From losing my virginity to when regular sex ended with the third girlfriend, a total of 100 months passed.

With each girlfriend, I almost always had sex about 3-4 times a week, usually involving sleeping over[1]. So I figure 14 times a month is an accurate enough, though conservative number, for a total of 994 times. Averaging that out over 100 months total, we get and average of 9.94 times per month.

I have been married for over six years. There may have been a time in our marriage, like the beginning, during which we were having sex 3-4 times per week[2]. Then certain things got in the way. My wife had workplace problems that brought on depression for many months. She had a bout with a recurring illness. We've been through two pregnancies[3], followed by two births, two breastfeeding regimens, and now we have two young kids. From what I've heard, some women get extra horny during pregnancy. No so with my wife. Pregnancy mostly reduced her drive to nothing, and breastfeeding kept it reduced, and mostly meant her breasts were off limits. Having two little kids around, as most parents can vouch, greatly reduces the energy and time windows for sex. I should note here that I thought my wife was especially beautiful and sexy while pregnant and nursing, and seeing my children emerge from her vagina in no way reduced my attraction to her – it probably increased it.

My wife doesn't work outside of the home anymore (which is good – she stopped before even getting pregnant the first time), but still keeps different sleeping hours than mine, and orgasms keep her awake. This further restricts our sex life. We're not at a place where the kids will both go to sleep (and fall asleep) the same time (or just before)I do, which would enable my wife to "put me to sleep" and enjoy the aftereffects of her own climax before she finally retires herself later on. I suppose I could set my alarm to wake up early and initiate, but I've never been good performing that way on a time limit, and the kids are more likely to interrupt, and it would deprive my wife of a considerable amount of sleep[4]. Is there a solution here that I'm not seeing???

The Bottom Line (no pun intended)...

We've been having quick, rather vanilla/repetitive/almost clinical, once-a-week, mostly one-sided sessions for quite a while now, usually involving her waking me up from a dead sleep (I don't get enough sleep as it is), though not as creatively as she could. That means we've been doing it 4-5 times a month (and usually not taking her to climax, which I really, really like doing). There's no way we've averaged 9.94 times a month when considering the whole marriage.
Verdict: I am currently one of the people who can say I got more sex while unmarried than married[5].

But wait a minute. There was a time when I had decided having a girlfriend wasn't a good idea, but I still dated, and I did get a lot less sex [6].

Counting all of the sexual encounters[7] during this post-girlfriend time period up until my wife and I started seeing each other[8], then the conservative rate is an average of 7 times per month from the time I became sexually active until my wife and I started seeing each other. That's still more than I'm getting now and could be more than my overall marriage - especially if you factor into my marriage the time we were together before we got married, when we weren't/I wasn't having sex.

Mind you my wife is someone who understands that husbands "need" sex and she does care... or at least she is really good at faking she does. I don't think she would reject me if I were to, say, change my work schedule so that I could be there every day when she wakes up. But we'd still have the kids to work around, and changing my work schedule would mean a major overhaul of our lives and other trade-offs.

This is all about the sex only, of course. There are other factors to consider, and marriage has definitely been good to me in some ways. But this entry is already long enough, so I will have to discuss those differences another time. There's a lot of related things I want to write.

It is also from a strictly amoral context – simply looking at the frequency of sex, not distinguishing between fornication and marital lovemaking. That is one of the things I will return to in a subsequent posting, in a way that is different than what I wrote before.

[Read Part 2, on why stats say that married men have more sex.]

[Read my comments on this series over six years later.]

Notes:
[1] I'm being conservative because I'm not including multiple goes in the same session/night. These sessions almost always involved intercourse, and even when they didn't, they still involved mutual climax.

[2] We waited until marriage for full sex, but were heavy on the kissing and crossed a few boundaries, especially close to the wedding.

[3] None of these things happened with any of my girlfriends.

[4] She has repeatedly insisted that she doesn't "need" to orgasm frequently, let alone with each session. In almost every sexual encounter outside of marriage, before I met my wife, bringing my date/girlfriend to climax was a regular part of it, and I enjoyed that. A lot. It is a turn on for me.

[5] Being someone who now believes in marriage, including saving sex for marriage, (though I do not think everyone should get married and would advise a lot people against it in their current conditions), I wish this wasn't so. I wish I could tell younger males that I consistently get more and better sex than I did when I was unmarried, but that would be a lie. Also note that most married people have children. I will not consider having sex with anyone other than my wife. Heck, even with my girlfriends, I was monogamous.

[6] To some extent, I used a few aspects of "game" or "Leykis 101" to get sex while not having a girlfriend, without: implying I was looking to get married or even be monogamous; lying; allowing a woman to treat me as a doormat, ATM, or servant; pretending to care about/enjoy things I didn't; or contracting an STI or creating a kid.

During that time period, I was working some crazy amount of hours between more than one job, and I didn't frequent bars or other hookup places. My prospects came mostly from online communications that weren't specifically pick-up sites, and were cultivated through conversations over months.

It is possible I would have continued to go without fornicating even if I had never met my wife (see note 8 below). It is also possible that I may instead have adopted more game, including going to hookup hangouts and using social networking for hookups, and thus increased my numbers. I could also have contracted some killer disease or been stabbed by a crazy date. There's no way of knowing for sure. What I do know is that the frequency was greater when I was unmarried than it is now that I'm married and a father.

[7] Encounters that usually involved mutual climax, even if not all involved intercourse.

[8] Again, I did not fornicate or even really make out with a date for a while before meeting my wife, as I was undergoing what I would describe as a spiritual healing and conditioning that, in retrospect, prepared me to find my wife and be a husband.