For those going through a divorce; you didn’t ‘fail’ as a couple, you were set up to fail by society’s unrealistic expectations.
In a time, long before we began fetishising weddings and relationships on social media, marriage had nothing to do with having a ‘sex life’ in contemporary terms.
Married couples had sex, but mainly to create offspring to carry on the family name and property ownership line, not because they found each other desirably hot.
Somewhere during the last few decades however, we have taken marriage and turned it from a very practical arrangement, into a highly romantic one. In her book The Meaning of Wife writer Anne Kingston describes how an orator named Demosthene from the fourth century B.C, categorised the married wife’s one and only role.
“As he (Demosthene) put it, ‘We have mistresses for our enjoyment, concubines to serve our person and wives for the bearing of legitimate offspring.’ By the end of the twentieth century, the wife was expected to be omnisexual – to stimulate, to serve and to bear children.”
Modern marriage, as portrayed by newlywed celebrities or on aspirational Instagram profiles, might seem like a blissful happy state, where great sex and companionship combine forever in a perfect package. But trying to create this ‘happily ever after’ mirage with one person, now that we are living longer than ever, is incredibly difficult, if not impossible. For women in particular, being a ‘wife’ as Kingston writes, is a heavily loaded term that can impact on how we see ourselves as individual, sexual beings.
Statistics from the American Psychological Association show that around 50 percent of marriages end in divorce, with one of the most common reasons for separation cited as infidelity. Yet so many of us still insist on committing our minds and bodies to one person in marriage: why?
Top Comments
I've been married for 25 years and having sex with the same man for 30. The "honeymoon" phase at the beginning was not marked by great sex. We had to work at it. Even now it waxes and wanes. That's normal. But, we still enjoy it and have sex anywhere between 1 and 5 times a week even when our now adult kids were babies. Part of the trick is not spreading yourself too thin. Long work hours. High self expectations of domestic perfection. These are achieved by sacrificing your love life.