THE DESEXUALIZATION OF THE AMERICAN MARRIAGE: EXTRAMARITAL SEX VS. SUPER MARITAL SEX
If it’s candles and music instead of tuna fish and potato chips on paper plates, it probably means there will be some sex that night. We like to keep up the national average, you know. Do our share for the sex revolution and the age of enlightenment. Two and one half times per week, rain or shine. Well, a little more often when it rains, because we can’t work outside.
HUSBAND
Super Marital Sex Rule: Super marital sex depends on sexualizing the entire marriage, not separating sex into a category of obligatory marital duty, afterthought, or a different “part” of the marriage. The “super” in super marital sex refers to “whole,” to making intimacy a way of living and being together, not something you do sometimes. There are more spouses having affairs within their marriage than outside of them, separating marital sex from marital love, resulting in a form of “extramarital” sex rather than an “intra-marital intimacy.”
Extramarital sex has traditionally been viewed as adultery, marriage partners having sex with a person other than their spouse. It has received good press and is statistically quite popular. More than 70 percent of husbands and 40 percent of women report sex outside their marriage. In my sample of 1,000, the number was 76 percent of the men and 47 percent of the women. Extramarital sex is variously described as forbidden, sinful, destructive, .dishonest, and dangerous by some persons and by others as constructive, evolu-tionarily natural, energizing, fun, and somehow, if done “right,” preventive of divorce and marital problems by providing “outside” stimulation.
In the thousand couples, the 760 men and 470 women who reported sex outside of their marriage were always in a marital relationship in which at least one of the partners was less than satisfied with the intimacy of the marriage. There was no evidence in my sample, and there is no evidence in anyone else’s data, that extramarital sex enhances marital sex. My work with couples indicates that at the very least, extramarital sex is distracting from the effort and time necessary to develop and enjoy super marital sex.
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